Art Practice Studios
Drawing
Drawing is a critical foundation for all art practice, and we offer beginning and advanced classes that provide all students majoring and minoring in art with an opportunity to master this vital skill. Classes will frequently concentrate on working from the figure, still life, portraiture, perspective, and experimental drawing. Intensive workshops in anatomy are offered for students wishing to concentrate more deeply on these techniques.
Experimental Media Arts
Classes offered in Experimental Media Arts focus on audio, video, digital, electronic, and sound art. The studio facilities include a variety of high-end printers and scanners, as well as video and audio equipment. Our new Tinker Lab offers a variety of hand and power tools for student projects. These studio art spaces are complemented by a large and unique selection of equipment that can be checked out by students enrolled in EMS classes and graduate students of Art Practice. We are excited to help facilitate students in their exploration of new ways of making art, and new ways of combining emerging practices with more traditional mediums.
Painting
Our painting courses take place in two large studios adjacent to the roof garden of the McMurtry Building. Introductory courses address basic techniques, materials, and vocabulary of painting in oils. Subject matter may include still-life, landscape, and the figure, with an emphasis on painting from life. Advanced courses introduce a broader range of pictorial strategies, narratives, cultural, and personal implications. The studios are well equipped with large easels, tabourets, storage, and natural lighting. There are portable easels for painting outdoors.
Photography
The Photography program at Stanford asserts and explores the aesthetic potential of photography as the twenty-first century's foremost medium of cultural expression. Historical traditions and techniques are taught as the foundation for a research-based practice that is geared toward expansive vision, experimental orientation, and interdisciplinary sensibility. The focus of the program is on using our extensive new facilities and state-of-the-art equipment for digital development, large format printing, and black-and-white processing to cultivate an understanding of the photographic image.
Printmaking
A spacious, well-lit studio supports a full range of activity in lithography, book making, digital press printing, intaglio, monotype, woodcut, and screen printing. Classes each quarter typically concentrate on one or two processes, though students may concentrate on a single process in depth through independent study. The studio is known for its impressive collection of lithography stones.
Sculpture
The Sculpture area consists of approximately 8,000 sq. ft. of workspaces including a woodshop, mold room, metal shop, welding, spray booth, installation room, and outdoor sculpture yard. The Sculpture Lab welcomes a broad range of approaches with objects, installation, performance, collaborative, and public art. In sculpture, any material and idea can be realized.