Painting and Drawing
The WKU Painting Practices program welcomes students from across the Department of Art & Design – as a dedicated track within our professional studio arts degree, the BFA; as a choice within our liberal arts studio degree, the BA; and in the electives offered to all visual arts majors.
Emphasizing exploration and development, students investigate the material and the conceptual as they move through the program – through a range of both historical and contemporary painting and drawing practices.
Begining Painting
Beginning Painting serves majors from across the department and introduces a series of varied painting approaches, intended to arm and enable students with the skills and methods to know how to continue, even after just one semester – to know how to begin their next piece, whether they will continue painting as their full practice or as an expressive addition to their creative lives.
Level 2 Painting
Still serving all majors across the department, Level 2 Painting Practices takes each student through a series of explorations and expansions, bridging the more directed work from the first level to open up what painting can be or include. The intention here is for each student to test out possibilities and begin to get to know what might be included in what will become their individual process and content.
Level 3 Painting
In Level 3 Painting Practices, that content, and the material and processes used,
are now up to each student. These are intensified and challenged through a series of frameworks designed to push the intensity, grounding, and sophistication of those choices. Frameworks
include physical structures, such as Marathon Paintings (ten pieces completed over a short time), conceptual goals, such as working from the idea of Ritual or Absence and Presence, and process-based concepts, such as a diptych assignment titled Point/Counterpoint (based on improvisational jazz music and improvisational dance).
Level 4 Painting
Level 4 Painting Practices is the senior year practicum for the BFA degree. Each student designs and carries out their own frameworks at this level, intensively pushing their work and its thesis while creating a probing, evolving, and sustainable studio practice (meaning one that is self-perpetuating instead of set-up externally). This experience is intended to inform what each student will do post-university, including acting as the basis through which to pursue graduate studies, set up an individual, professional studio practice, and continue to exhibit after graduating.
The Painting Practices area is a welcoming community, both informally and through our student-led club called PCaD (Painter's Critique and Discussion Group). Using prompts generated by the group itself to spark conversation, the structure is intended to be in line with how most painters do things – often through a combination of working independently followed by the need to come together for discussion. PCaD comes out of the Painting Practices program but welcomes all students (and alumni). Past prompts have included Symbolism, Struggle Pieces, Art Crushes, Discussion Topic: 2020, It's Not Easy Being Green, and many more.
The painting studio itself includes two rooms in the center of the fourth floor of the Fine Arts Center, marked by a large bank of windows overlooking the colonnade. Painters primarily need space in order to make their work and we have structured the rooms in order to maximize that idea. The main studio includes a large, central workspace for first and second level painting students and drawing courses, plenty of storage, easels and wheeled painting tables, ventilation for safety, and a 36-foot "working wall" that we use for larger works, installations, and critiques. A series of semi-private studios for intermediate and advanced students line the edges of the main room, assigned by level and major each semester. The Annex, our attached wood and work room, is equipped to build stretchers and other surfaces, and is where we hold lectures, smaller critiques, and discussions.
Your contact for the WKU Painting Practices program is Professor Yvonne Petkus at yvonne.petkus@wku.edu.
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