Praeterita

I've been in Paris for nearly two weeks, teaching a class for the study abroad program of Columbia College Chicago. Instead of visiting the monuments and major tourist sites, I've picked up where I left off last year, wandering around without much of a plan, except to change direction as soon as I see a view down a side street that takes my interest. Last weekend, I meandered through the southern part of the fourteenth arrondissement towards the Parc Montsouris. On the way, you come across several buildings that were home to many artists and writers at seminal stages in their development. The first is the Villa Seurat, on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire: The site originally contained a house used by the great Post-impressionist painter Seurat, which is renown enough. But the current building, constructed in the 1920s in an art deco style, became a warren of studios that was home to an impressive hothouse of creative people: the great painter Chaim Soutine, writer Henry Mil...

Teacher and writer John Schultz has died at the age of 84. He had a long association with Columbia College Chicago, where he helped found a fiction writing program that used a unique pedagogy: the Story Workshop method, which he began using in the classroom starting in the 1960s. John probably taught thousands of students over the course of a long career, and he was mentor and friend to many who went on to become teachers themselves. Most of the people who knew him, including my wife Patricia Ann McNair, spoke about him with reverence and immense gratitude for how he taught them to become writers. Compared to her, and her colleagues at Columbia College Chicago, and his innumerable former students, I only had a passing acquaintance with John. Yet my first meetings with him came around the time that I first met Patty, during my first visits to Chicago, and for that reason this has claimed a special home in my memory. I remember a party that Patty held at her apartment at the end ...

For the past few months, I've been working on a project with a student from Columbia College Chicago, comprising images and text relating to a travel narrative (he's an Englishman visiting the USA for this academic year). After casting around for a suitable visual vehicle for his photos, I settled on cyanotype : This is one of the oldest of photographic techniques, dating back to the middle of the 1800s. In a nutshell: you brush a photosensitive emulsion onto paper (or fabric, etc), consisting of a mixture of ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide; place either thin objects or a negative against the paper and expose it to UV light for a while; wash off the emulsion and the image develops before your eyes; dip the print into a solution of water and hydrogen peroxide to turn the print that deep, dark blue cyan colour. As you can see from the above photo, when you get the balance of light and dark right on the negative, the result is a gorgeously rich print, with...

The Townhouse on Bristol Lane from Sulejman Karic on Vimeo . I teach several versions of the Journal and Sketchbook class: the weekend or one day workshop version, and the 15 week semester-long version at Columbia College Chicago . Part of the extra academic requirement of the latter is that the students must create a piece of visual art that is in conversation with their final piece of writing. The final presentations of those paired pieces, writing + visual art, ended last week. So many good things were submitted, and I'll post images of some of them soon. I'm going to start with this piece by student Sulejman Karic, because it combines a reading and a visual equivalent in the same video. He was born in the USA to parents who were refugees from the Bosnian war in the 1990s. The memoir he began working on is, I believe, the first time he has explored that material at such length. The video still needs some work, but it's so impressive already that I want to s...

So we gathered the students today in front of this: And we quickly got them doing quick drawings in their sketch-journals: Huddling against the steps of a bank on one edge of the Piazza del Duomo didn't prevent our group from getting lots of attention. It was also 90f today, though thankfully there was a cooling breeze in the afternoon. It looks like a good group of students, who were so absorbed by their surroundings and drawing that they didn't get distracted at all.

Last week in the Journal and Sketchbook class that I teach at Columbia College Chicago, I showed the students how to make four different kinds of artist's book: the accordion fold, the start fold, a folio from a single sheet of paper, and simple pamphlet stitch in a paper signature. Click to embiggen I also loaded the table with sheets of handmade paper from my studio -- Japanese papers, Indonesian papers, Thai papers -- plus glue sticks, cardboard, needle and thread, and lots of crayons and watercolours to add images to the books that they created. This is the third year that my co-teacher and I have devoted an afternoon to this activity, and it always gives the students new thoughts about their final written and visual projects, which are due in four weeks.

So last night was my first fiction writing class proper. I've sat in on my wife's workshops and tried some of the activities that were used in this class, but this is the first time I have sat in the room for four hours and done all the activities and in-class writing with a roomfull of writing students. There will be fourteen more classes like this, and as I said near the beginning of the class, my goals for this class areas follows: "I have a lot of starts and slightly longer pieces of creative non-fiction based on memories of my childhood. Some of these have strayed into fiction after beginning with a real memory. I have used a lot of the shorter pieces in my visual art, too -- videos with voice over, audio recordings, even performance. But so far I feel that I haven't gone as deeply as I could with this material. So I want to use this class to explore what comes out when I try different forms, ways of telling, ways of seeing a story. I want to be completel...

I was clearing up piles of sketchbooks and papers over the weekend, when to my surprise I opened one of them and saw this bold drawing that I didn't recognize: It's drawn in black sharpie marker. After a few seconds, I remembered: it was left behind in the classroom by a Film and Video student when I taught a 4-hour journal and sketchbook workshop at Columbia College in April. The student didn't sign any of the pictures, so I don't know his or her name. But even if he/she didn't think them worthy of taking away, I thought they were pretty good, and held onto the sketchbook in case I ever get the chance to reunite it with its maker. There are eleven drawings in total. They start very spare, maybe because they were produced during the 10-second drawing phase. But they quickly become very strong, detailed, and Keith Haring-esque, and I think they read in a narrative sequence (click on any image to embiggen it):

Is it the case that an artist just creates in a vacuum, with no knowledge of the art that came before? Is it really true that it's better just to make your work, whether it be fiction, film, or painting, and not "spoil" or "taint" yourself by getting bogged down in the work of the past? Should you, when you go to college to study any of those arts, be prepared to consider the history of your chosen medium in an analytical way, or should you just learn how to hold a brush, focus a camera, and write a scene, and not bother with all that old stuff? Still from Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni," 1953 It's an argument that is pertinent to the Film and Video Department of Columbia College Chicago at the moment, which as part of its academic prioritization process is facing the elimination of its Cinema Studies from the curriculum. Department Chair Bruce Sheridan, who I mentioned in my last blog post about the superb film/live orchestra event la...

I went to a great event last night at Columbia College Chicago: excerpts from the films "The Piano" and "The Reader", plus three 5 minute student films, all accompanied by a live orchestra. It took place in the movie studio space (big, cavernous, but acoustically good, believe it or not) of Columbia's prize-winning new media arts building. There were three screens, the central one showing the movies, the other two showing the orchestra, via a live relay from two cameras positioned on either side of the auditorium. In front was the 25 piece orchestra -- FulcrumPoint , an ensemble dedicated to new music, and led by the charismatic Stephen Burns. For "The Reader", they played Nico Muhly's music, which was surprisingly conservative for him, though the fact that it sounded like a tasteful movie soundtrack is not to detract from the experience of hearing it live. The student films had scores composed by Columbia students (who have since graduated a...

The word 'film maker' is really a short-hand for the many artistic activities that Bruce Sheridan pursues. It's true that he makes films, and is the Chair of the Film and Video Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he was instrumental in bringing about the creation of the Media Production Center, an architecturally stunning building that opened its doors in the Loop in 2010. You can get an idea of the range of those activities (film, music, philosophy) at the website createbruis.com . After hearing Bruce's presentation for the Story and the Arts panel that we both participated in a few weeks ago, I was keen to get him to expand on his views on creativity, imagination, and the commonalities between different forms of art. Philip : Usually I'd start with a biographical question, but there are links for that , so I'll just jump straight in and ask: what sort of films do you like to make? Bruce : My first instinct is to say that I mainly want to NOT make t...

I've just started co-teaching a class at Columbia College Chicago called Story in Fiction and Film International. For 14 weeks, we'll be screening a film during the class, then discussing the film and some pieces of fiction that use similar story elements (voice, scene, character, dialogue, etc). We started with the British film "Dirty Pretty Things" (which from the US point of view is a foreign film), so as not to scare the students too early by subtitles. If you haven't seen it, here is the preview (with the voice-over by that guy who was parodied for making everything sound heavy and portentous):   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Click on any image to see larger version The last class in the Journal+Sketchbook class at Columbia College Chicago took place ten days ago. Each of the 12 students was required to read three pages from their final written piece, and present and talk about a final visual piece. Patty and I have been teaching this class since 2005, and nearly all of the visual pieces were the best ever presented for final projects. I'm starting with this star book (above), by Katy, who had no art-making experience at all before this class. I demonstrated how to make smaller versions of these, but Katy took pieces of paper about 16 inches square, and made this superb star-book that unfolded to about three feet in length. Inside she had collaged all kinds of drawings and images relating to her final story. Next, a student called Jamie did the following: As he explained it, he called up images on the internet relating to water and sky, shone different coloured lights at the screen, then took ph...

One of my colleagues at Columbia College Chicago, writer and adjunct faculty member Bobby Biedrzycki, has an eye-catching tattoo on his arm (shown above). It's such a work of art that I wanted immediately to find out who it depicted. Then I thought I would interview him about it. Q: Let's start with a question that I bet you've never heard before. Did the tattoo hurt? A: Haha. The shading made the skin a bit more tender than other tats I've had, but pain is a subjective thing, right? What hurts me might feel like a massage to someone else. Q: Describe the tattoo for us. A: It's a black and gray portrait of the writer Hubert Selby Jr, my idol. It's based on a photograph I found of him that I liked very much (and heard that he liked also). He is smiling, and has a small parakeet on his shoulder. Q: Why did you choose this particular image? A: Well, I knew I wanted something of him in his later years. He wasn't a very happy person early in his life, but...

This week is the 2010 Story Week Festival of Writers at Columbia College Chicago (and other venues around the city). My wife Patty is hosting the event at the Harold Washington Library on Tuesday March 16th - that is, she'll be introducing writers Achy Obejas ( Ruins ), Aleksandar Hemon ( Love and Obstacles ), and John Dale ( Leaving Suzie Pyle ) and then leading the Q & A afterwards. The library has a huge auditorium and there are usually several hundred people there. If anyone in Chicago is reading this and hasn't been to Story Week before, it's very simple: if you've ever read a book in your life, then you'll like Story Week. Here is the link to the Story Week website .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

As I said in my first post on the subject, Patty and I started this class after seeing how certain artists and writers used another medium – a writer who drew, or an artist who wrote. There are some writers whose drawings and paintings are well known – the nineteenth century English writer of nonsense verse, Edward Lear; Winston Churchill; D. H. Lawrence. After doing further research, we turned up some names that really surprised us. A lot of authors from the nineteenth century left behind paintings and drawings in their notebooks and archives. Some of them, like a competent watercolour by Charlotte Bronte, probably came about because middle class women of the time were expected to be able to paint a little, play music a little, sew a little, instead of getting a formal education. Now that time has raised Bronte far beyond the intellectual level of her male peers, we can look at the painting not as a genteel diversion for a Sunday afternoon, but as a form of expression that was relat...

I   am currently in week 4 of teaching a 15-week class called Journal + Sketchbook: Ways of Seeing. It’s a specialty class offered to students in the Fiction Writing program of Columbia College Chicago, where my wife and co-teacher Patty is an Associate Professor. They are encouraged to use their journals in all fiction writing classes; in this class, I offer the students ways to use drawing to further their writing process.   Patty had the initial idea for this class in 2005. She’s a writer, I’m an artist. A lot of our friends fall into these categories. We then started to notice how closely the two arts were linked in the work of many past artists and writers. Our initial digging around turned up about ten writer/artists and artist/writers who had dipped a toe into, or fully immersed themselves in the other medium as a means of taking a break from their usual practice, and also as a means of expressing similar things in that other medium.   Writer Number 1: Franz Kaf...