Painting and speculative fiction are unlikely but kindred spirits. Both routinely explore alternative temporalities and potential futures, peering into the unknown, the alien, and the monstrous while reflecting the pressures of developing technologies and envisioning new ones. This class attempts to forge a further dialogue between these two creative pursuits, using passages and ideas culled from speculative fiction, horror, and weird fiction as prompts for discrete painting projects. What can the writings of JG Ballard, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Meg Elison, China Miéville, Cixin Liu, H.P. Lovecraft, and other notable speculative fiction writers offer the contemporary painter? This class will explore how literary and speculative conceptions can be expressed visually while developing the student’s knowledge of the materials and techniques of painting. Throughout, it will consider the history of painting and its current debates, highlighting the key differences and bridges between art, illustration, and other fields exploring speculative motifs. A course for painters and interdisciplinary artists, this class will ask students to imagine painting as something that can model alternative histories and societies while keenly critiquing our own.

As new technologies and new social configurations erode long-established hierarchies, artists increasingly navigate a space between traditional categories of high and low culture, public broadcast and private vision, fine and popular art. But how do we define these distinctions and their residual effects, and more importantly, what opportunities does this new cross-stitched terrain offer the contemporary artist engaging painting? A class for committed and experienced painters and those interested in the discourse, materials, and techniques of the discipline, this course challenges students to chart a path through the many debates surrounding painting and contemporary art. What effect have photography, the Internet, social media, and alternative forms of distribution exerted on painting? How have artists in the past grappled with the seismic technological and social shifts that define Spectacle and mass society? What kinds of models for painting-centered practice can emerge from the new visual and conceptual spaces created today, and how can painting operate within new image economies as well as traditional exhibition structures? Through a series of discrete projects, theoretical and art historical readings, field trips, critiques, and discussions, this class will offer students rigorous material instruction while situating their projects within a context as riven with high-low polarities as opportunities to dismantle them.