A New PWYC Workshop, Painting Ben Shahn, and What I'm Reading
Notes from the Studio of Kelly Kilmer 20 February 2025
Greetings from Los Angeles,
Because we need art and community as this time, I’m continuing to offer my pay what you can workshops for as long as possible. I’ll be teaching Juicy Living: a NEW Art Journaling PWYCW Workshop Series on Saturday 1 March 2025.
I am also continuing my workshop community, The Art Life: Building a Visual Vocabulary. We’re painting faces (the above) tomorrow (Friday.) This weekend, I’m trying something new and having a mini retreat weekend (one hour painting session on Friday, a two hour art journaling workshop on Saturday, and an art talk/salon on Sunday. Everything starts at 11 am PST and will be recorded (except the salon.) A weekend of art and creative thinking is what many of us need at the moment.
I just finished this book about artist Ben Shahn. I think that it’s important to remember that history repeats itself. Finding mentors (dead or alive) in others who’ve lived through similar times can be extremely helpful in making us feel less alone.
I’ve been looking at the work of the social realists (including Ben Shahn as well as the Ashcan School.) I plan on sharing some work as well as recommended reading/viewing from those artists, if you’re interested.
READ: The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn, Hunger, 1946
“Attend a university if you possibly can. There is no content of knowledge that is not pertinent to the work you will want to do. But before you attend a university work at something for a while. Do anything. Get a job in a potato field; or work as a grease-monkey in an auto repair shop. But if you do work in a field do not fail to observe the look and the feel of earth and of all things that you handle — yes, even potatoes! Or, in the auto shop, the smell of oil and grease and burning rubber. Paint of course, but if you have to lay aside painting for a time, continue to draw. Listen well to all conversations and be instructed by them and take all seriousness seriously. Never look down upon anything or anyone as not worthy of notice. In college or out of college, read. And form opinions! Read Sophocles and Euripides and Dante and Proust. Read everything that you can find about art except the reviews. Read the Bible; read Hume; read Pogo. Read all kinds of poetry and know many poets and many artists. Go to and art school, or two, or three, or take art courses at night if necessary. And paint and paint and draw and draw. Know all that you can, both curricular and noncurricular — mathematics and physics and economics, logic and particularly history. Know at least two languages besides your own, but anyway, know French. Look at pictures and more pictures. Look at every kind of visual symbol, every kind of emblem; do not spurn signboards of furniture drawings of this style of art or that style of art. Do not be afraid to like paintings honestly or to dislike them honestly, but if you do dislike them retain an open mind. Do not dismiss any school of art, not the Pre-Raphaelites nor the Hudson River School nor the German Genre painters. Talk and talk and sit at cafés, and listen to everything, to Brahms, to Brubeck, to the Italian hour on the radio. Listen to preachers in small town churches and in big city churches. Listen to politicians in New England town meetings and to rabble-rousers in Alabama. Even draw them. And remember that you are trying to learn to think what you want to think, that you are trying to co-ordinate mind and hand and eye. Go to all sorts of museums and galleries and to the studios of artists. Go to Paris and Madrid and Rome and Ravenna and Padua. Stand alone in Sainte Chapelle, in the Sistine Chapel, in the Church of the Carmine in Florence. Draw and draw and paint and learn to work in many media; try lithography and aquatint and silk-screen. Know all that you can about art, and by all means have opinions. Never be afraid to become embroiled in art of life or politics; never be afraid to learn to draw or paint better than you already do; and never be afraid to undertake any kind of art at all, however exalted or however common, but do it with distinction.”
-Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1956-1957)
WATCH: Ben Shahn: Passion for Justice documentary via pbs
“It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.” -Ben Shahn
Thank you,
Kelly 🎨