Workshop Practice

Course requirements: according to individual specialist program.
Method of evaluation of coursework: in the given workshop the professor (tutor) by being present and giving consultations provides supervision of the student's practical work (studies, material collection, creative work).
Role of the course within the specialist training scheme:
Workshop practice has a special function in developing the student's individual creative attitude (partly with taking workshop traditions into consideration). Outdoor observations are made in light, colour and spatial conditions different from those in the studio. There is opportunity to record and process continuously changing phenomena and observe and compare the characteristics of the landscape and the natural environment on the one hand, and those of the constructed and artificial environment on the other. (From landscape to land art.) At the workshop students from different years and programs, holding different views, work side by side and discuss the problems of contemporary art. By making their critical observations, placing each other's work into context students lay the foundations for their professional work and demeanour. They create a model situation for later intellectual co-operation in the public art arena.
Course description, major areas of study (per semester):
Within professional work, workshop practice means special "fieldwork." During the course of the year, students learn to elaborate issues and problems, which are, in the absence of time, space, special tools and materials, difficult or impossible to solve. Major topics: interactive relationship with the environment; examining visual (optical) and painting phenomena (with traditional and new image recording techniques); painting techniques and experiments related to the study of materials.

Description of the Workshop Program Entitled
MOVEMENT AND FLOW

Faculty: József Gaál
The primary objective of the course is to free creative energy by experimenting with the various methods of emotion- and impulse-based gesture painting (informel, tachisme, calligraphy, automatism). In the interest of success, within painting, the water-based technique is recommended (ink, water-colour, tempera). With the elimination of figural and abstract categories, the purpose of the improvisations, which have formed from the combined effects of spectacle, inner impression and open-ended art, is to free the student from conditioning. A world which has been reduced to a symbol is both abstract and poetic. The objective is to create a sort of simultaneism through movement, to process the evanescence of the external world in an intuitive manner and to summarise the series of changing conditions and moments in condensed, abstract symbols. (Movements, combined effects, forms and colours which overlap and penetrate each other.) While surrealistic automatism created a background for a seemingly control-free artistic method, by using the disruptive and catalysing effects of chance and errors, a schematism-free artistic method can be formulated. In this way, the main objective of the course is to provide a stimulating effect towards self-exploration and for increasing self-awareness.

"painter in the landscape"
Workshop summer course taught by Zsigmond Károlyi

At the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, art colony practice runs as a program-specific summer course based on an announced program, and is part of the 10-month long legally prescribed term time. (Since the course also stands on its own as a contained, didactic unit, it can also serve as a good learning experience for students studying in the other programs - such as sculpture, printmaking, intermedia, etc.) The course represents an academic tradition, it is meant to complement a full-academic year?s studio work with plein air nature studies. (Classical Hungarian example would be Simon Hollósy took the students of his Academy in München landscape painting to Baia Mare/Nagybánya each summer.) Experience seems to suggest that attempts at diverging from this tradition and change the well-trodden path for roads less travelled, turn out to be a wasted effort. While it may be considered a commendable and creative undertaking, the results (in most cases, unfortunately) tend to be quite meagre.
Open-air alla prima painting is the great invention of the impressionists. Every future artist can be expected to have lived experience (both pleasant and useful) to this effect.
Usually the problem is that the student enters the landscape without any clear concepts (or any serious preconception), without any previous art historical knowledge or consideration. The work which results from the machine-like technique of such a student ends up being but a mix of style-clichés, scarcely understood style-categories and depictive automatisms.
The objectives, therefore, include raising the student's awareness about the conventions of representation and form, which arise during the process of painting, gaining the skills and knowledge necessary for thorough analytical work, and creating the condition of intellectual vivacity while practising a discipline by creating plain air art, which is a ?well-known? field.
Following the reading of Jean Le Gac's short poetic text entitled "The Painter" (in which he offers the conceptualistic analysis of "the painter in the landscape") and the introduction to Heinrich Wölfflin's book Principles of Art History, the course begins with a discussion of the problems that these texts bring to the foreground.
We then proceed by analysing the students? own works. We illustrate our views with classic works, if the need arises and if resources permit.
Individual corrections and group evaluations alternate, complement and build on each other, providing continuous impetus towards enriching the painting repertoire of students.