Week 1: The single brushstroke
The opening lecture — why this course starts from one continuous gesture instead of a list of features
22 February 2027
Around 1700, the painter-monk Shitao wrote a short treatise arguing that every technique a painter might learn — brushwork, composition, ink tone — grows out of a single idea: 一画, the single stroke. Master the stroke and method follows; chase a checklist of techniques without it and nothing you make will hold together. This course borrows that claim directly and tests it on software: an instrument built from one honestly-understood gesture, deepened week by week, beats one assembled from a dozen half-understood features.
“Instrument, not artwork” is the distinction the whole semester runs on. An artwork is a fixed thing you show someone. An instrument is something you hand to someone and it does something different every time, because a different hand is now involved. Everything this course marks is instruments.
Outline#
- Shitao’s 一画 and why “instrument, not artwork” is the course’s actual thesis
- the shape every studio and crit will follow for the rest of the semester
- what to have running before next week: nothing more than a canvas and a line that follows the pointer
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor