On and Beyond the Chair continues while students draw remotely in this new virtual learning version of the chair class.
Today the students begin a new fun and relaxing daily exercise “taking a line for a walk around their chair.” For the next two weeks students will spend only ten minutes each day drawing with a pen on a 8″ x 11″ sheet of paper.
Aline is a dot that went for a walk. – Paul Klee
The assignment encourages students to make quick decisions while continuously drawing a line. They must keep as small an interval as possible between drawing and looking at the chair. These drawings will also become a diary of reflections during this emotional time of social distancing.
Each week we celebrate one ingredient from the Rural Studio Farm during a special lunch and discussion (led by Elena Barthel). The ultimate goal of the these Thursday lunches together is to learn about healthier eating habits. We suggest using fewer ingredients and higher quality, organic produce in our meals. Our own farm salad is always part of our celebration with a good dose of Tuscan olive oil.
The first ingredient we celebrated this year is tomato. Tomatoes can be grown in our greenhouse in early March and in the field garden in May. They can be eaten fresh in the hot summer months and easily preserved to be consumed during both the fall and the spring semester as tomato sauce.
Ode To Tomatoesby Pablo Neruda
The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it’s time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.
Negative space is the space behind, around, and between an object. It represents the context of an object. It is important because it greatly influences our perception of the object itself.
You can compare the negative space with the silences between the sounds. As Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the sounds.”
Learning to draw the negative space is particularly important to switch our brain from the language mode to the visual mode. It forces our brain to visualize the invisible, implicit forms.
While we waited for the walls to dry, and the insulation to be installed, we filled the seed house cavity floor with gravel.
We selected some leftover angles at the steel scrap pile to build tables for the greenhouse. Also, we completed the full-scale drawings for the fabrication process.
