Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Paul Stopforth Discovering Drawing August 11 to August 16, 2019 Tuition: $650 Workshop: 9am-12pm Discipline: Drawing OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

Drawing has always been an essential component in the lives of working artists, and the significance of this fact has become increasingly apparent in contemporary art practice. Regardless of experience or levels of skill, drawing connects all of us to a sense of being present and engaged directly with the act of creation. Drawing reveals rich and complex avenues of thinking and feeling through its capacity to generate images from a seemingly infinite variety of sources through a wide range of graphic means. This course will involve an intensive process of discovering directions and concepts through very focused, explorative drawings that make use of objects found in and around the world that is Provincetown. In the studio these found source materials will be transformed through a process of imaginative drawing from the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Biography

Early in his career Paul Stopforth created several bodies of work that were startling in their courageous engagement with the repressive society in which he lived. His uncompromising refusal to turn away from a world of pain and injustice cost him dearly, but earned him enormous respect from his peers and from discerning art critics who saw his work in its first, youthful incarnations at The Market Theatre Gallery, where he was a director from 1977 to 1984. Invited to be Artist-in-Residence at Tufts University Stopforth left South Africa for the United States in the late 1980s, despairing that there would ever be change in his country. He took up a teaching position at Harvard University and taught drawing while on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He recently retired to paint on a full-time basis. Stopforth has exhibited his work since 1971 in galleries and museums in South Africa, the United States and Europe. He has served as curator and juror for a number of institutions and competitions, and in 2004 he delivered the Ruth First Memorial Lecture at Brandeis University. His work is held in many public and private collections in South Africa and abroad. He is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown.

Paul Stopforth's newest catalog: Bethesda, Breakwater, Bridgewater