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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, May 5, 2003

Atelier offers students a classical experience

By Paula Rath
Advertiser Staff Writer

Atelier

Six-week intensive art workshop

9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, May 21- July 3

$750 for noncredit, $950 for 6 credits

Noncredit students, phone office of continuing education: 235-7433

Students opting for credit, phone: 235-7413

Da Vinci would go.

He would appreciate the classical art training provided — not to mention the incredible setting under the Ko'olau Mountains.

It's the Windward Atelier, where Honolulu artist and teacher Snowden Hodges is offering a six-week intensive course in representational drawing and painting at Windward Community College.

An atelier is, after all, how masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt learned their technical skills. It was da Vinci who said, "The most praiseworthy form of painting is the one that most resembles what it imitates."

Hodges studied the time-honored atelier approach in Florence, Italy. It calls for a master to act as guide, demonstrate techniques and critique apprentices' work. It's a classical approach often ignored in current art curriculums.

Since the turn of the 20th century, when impressionism and abstract expressionism became popular, fundamental technical and manual skills have been downplayed in many art schools in favor of idea-based art. It was thought that the old-fashioned approach of drawing from life was tedious and inhibited creativity.

"Today you can graduate with a BFA and feel you have to go to other places for remedial work because you never learned to draw and paint," Hodges said. "My students want to learn to draw the things they're looking at."

Kai Kaulukukui, 21, of Kane'ohe, is typical. Although an art major, he had never taken a drawing class until last year's atelier. "It's the best class I've ever taken. It was awesome and intense," he said.

When Kaulukukui applied to the Art Institute of Chicago, most pieces in his portfolio were created at the atelier. He was accepted to the prestigious institution.

The atelier offers an intensive course in observational art, providing students with both plaster casts and live models from which to draw and paint. "We don't expect people to paint like the old masters, but to take their skills in many different directions. The abstract expressionists, such as Picasso and Matisse, were first trained classically," Hodges explained.

The focus of the program is portrait and figure drawing. Students learn to look closely at values, shapes and placement of features, light and shadow. They stretch their own canvases and prepare them with rabbit skin glue to protect them from oil and varnish. They even cook the medium to mix with pigments to create paints from a recipe Hodges learned at the Maryland Institute of Art.

"It's like basic training," Hodges said. "You work hard to increase your level of involvement. It generates collegiality because you have to like each other and get along in this environment."

Watercolor artist Rene Darrow of Kailua has taken art classes at Windward Community College for nine years, but she said the atelier offered her more. "I learned to see values from drawing and being able to focus and look at the negative space," she explained. "My paintings have come more to life" since her atelier training.

Drawing for three hours every morning and painting for three hours every afternoon is not for everyone. But this summer, 25 Island artists will follow in the steps of the masters.