Week 4 Seminar: Brushwork clinic

Building a shared vocabulary for describing a stroke, then using it against your own attribution-note painting.

15 March 2027

Before the seminar#

Choose the painting you’ll argue about in the attribution note, if you haven’t already, and bring the best reproduction you can find of it.

In the seminar#

The first half is a shared exercise: describing the same stroke, from the same securely attributed painting, in the vocabulary from lecture, until the room converges on similar descriptions. The second half turns that vocabulary on your own attribution-note painting, in pairs, with your partner pushing back on any description vague enough to mean nothing.

Afterwards#

Write up your brushwork observations in the vocabulary from this seminar, not before it. A description written before you had the vocabulary usually has to be redone anyway, and it’s cheaper to redo it now than in the note itself.