with Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez
Stemming from conceptions grounded in abstraction, this course for beginning to intermediate painters will include extensive experimentation with techniques, materials, and mediums through individual painting dilemmas. Emphasis will be placed on improvisational decision-making to explore formal and material options as part of the painting process, focusing on form and meaning. We will explore painting-related texts such as Notes on the Diagram by Amy Sillman, Faith, Hope, and Impossibility by Philip Guston, Color by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and The Sexuality of Abstraction: Agnes Martin by Jonathan D. Katz in hopes of forming communal dialogue and inspiration around painting, color, and abstraction. Students will work primarily with oil or acrylic-based media, however, we will also explore collage and drawing techniques.
This class is designed to be repeated.
Friday, 4pm -6pm
Instructor: Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez
Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez (b. 1995) is an artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He earned a BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2018 and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University in 2024. Most recently, he attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Harkawik, SPURS Gallery, David Castillo, Yossi Milo, Goldfinch, Public Works, Co-Prosperity, LVL3, Patient Info, North Loop, New Collectors, and Coco Hunday. He is slated to have his third solo show in 2025 with Turley Gallery. Residencies include the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Wassaic Project, and BOLT at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
"A rumination on the pleasures and aversions of knowing and being known, my work considers questions of desire. As Lin Hejinian delineates in The Language of Inquiry, “a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world,” I take on questions of form and abstraction as questions of (mis)understanding—how we attempt to understand ourselves or others, especially regarding topics of race, gender, and personhood. By constructing the spatial through improvisational abstraction, I attempt to occupy the often unpredictable realities of relationality. What could occur if we give up our illusions of understanding and control and give in to our ineffable feelings and desires? By succumbing to the unknown, or working improvisationally, I wonder if we can begin to think in ways that reorder our supposed ontological determinations, or perhaps as Nahum Dimitri Chandler puts it, to think with paraontology. If so, maybe conceptions such as love don’t always have to feel like the universe erupting but like a star fading away, a faint impression... I hope my work sustains a similar space to what Lauren Berlant conjures in her question: “Why is love, the encounter with relationality, not always traumatic, while always overwhelming?” A space that embraces the sensual pleasures of a subject's unbearable, yet unattainable, access—the gaps between our intentions and the things that don’t always work out."
Registration and Fees
Become a member of the Oak Park Art League and save on class registration.
This price reflects the four week session
Members: $175.00; after 1/8/2024: $190.00
Non-Members: $195.00; after 1/8/2024: $215.00
Advance registration required.
Registration Code of Conduct Policy
MATERIAL LIST
Ampersand Gessobord (recommended for oil paint)
graphite pencils
either acrylic or oil paints (whatever colors you want)
any drawing mediums: chalk and/or oil pastels, charcoal sticks, colored pencil
used or old magazines for collaging
glue (preferably the liquid type)