'How do you make 100 different greens?' Sandburg Students Recreate Galesburg Landscapes in Summer Painting Class
Aaron Frey
Wednesday, June 30, 2021 1:59 PM
Campus News
Galesburg, IL
As a handful of students painted nearby, Lisa Walker looked around the Lincoln Park lagoon on a comfortable, sun-drenched June morning.
“This,” the Carl Sandburg College assistant professor of art said, “is my idea of a great way to spend a summer.”
Walker’s eight-week painting course (ART 141) during Sandburg’s summer session is an annual favorite both for her to teach and for students to take part in. Taking advantage of the season, Walker and her class spend much of their time outside painting landscapes of different spots throughout Galesburg. Their first stop is typically Lake Storey, and then they move to Lincoln Park, the Seminary Street Historic District, Hope Cemetery, Standish Park Arboretum, Public Square and the Lincoln Park gazebo.
“I've done it for years and years, and there's never been a year that I haven't loved it,” Walker said. “I think my students would say the same thing.”
The objective for students is to paint scenes of each location, but much of their concentration throughout the course is on color theory.
“If you can see it, you can learn to represent it,” Walker said. “How do you make 100 different greens? There are colors that people don’t anticipate actually seeing in nature, but they’re there.”
Student Amber Bennett of Oregon quickly learned that in this class the sky is not simply blue and that grass goes well beyond just being green. Walker challenges her students to closely observe their surroundings, carefully diagnose every shade and hue, then get to putting those colors on canvas.
“She made it very clear to us that trees are not brown, and that would have been a brown tree before,” Bennett said, pointing to a maple tree along the lagoon. “That’s a red tree, and there’s browned edging around it. It just makes it pop more by using more vibrant colors.”
Students also are tasked with paying close attention to how shadows and reflections can fluctuate during their time outside. How does a cloud passing overhead affect the shadow of a certain area? What does a gust of wind do to the ripples and reflections in the water? Working with water-soluble oil paint, students also hone their techniques on application, knifework and brushwork.
“There's an atmosphere to doing it outside that's better to capture than just looking at a photo,” said student Riley Tuthill of Galesburg. “You can rely on the entirety of the landscape.”
Walker’s class typically spends about a week at each location, and the group has a critique session at the end of the week where they can discuss their creations. As the end of the course approaches, Walker will have each student reproduce in the studio one of the paintings they created outside — only this time they do it in an expressionist style.
“They're going to be changing up what they've learned to do by painting in a completely different way,” Walker said. “Different colors, different types of brushstrokes, simplifying where they were complicated, complicating where they were simplified. I'm always blown away because they learn so much during the course of the semester.”
