ONLINE ART-MAKING: The Arts Council of Princeton has partnered with the Princeton University Art Museum for “Drawing from the Collections” — free, virtual art-making lessons offered weekly through March 4.

The Arts Council of Princeton is partnering with the Princeton University Art Museum to provide free, online art-making experiences. “Drawing from the Collections” features weekly classes taught by Arts Council artist-instructor Barbara DiLorenzo over Zoom, so participants can join live from home. Each week’s lesson features works from the Museum’s collections and is introduced by an Art Museum student tour guide. All classes, which include closed captions in both English and Spanish, are held on Thursday nights beginning February 4 through March 4, and begin at 8 p.m. 

Learn more and register at artscouncilofprinceton.org. Each live-streamed class is available online weekly and participants can take part using materials they already have at home. 

February 4 — Capturing a Winter Scene: This live art-making class is inspired by Charles Ephraim Burchfield’s Winter Rain from the East. Broadly painted in ghostly tones of gray and brown, Burchfield’s watercolors of obsolete farms and forgotten towns on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York — where the artist lived and worked — capture a poignant sense of loneliness. This class will focus on techniques of drawing a winter scene, including line, shadow, perspective, and tone. 

February 11 — Illustrating Horses: This live art-making class is inspired by Frederic Remington’s Coming through the Rye. Remington’s ambitious bronze sculpture is based on a drawing from the 1880s and features four animated horses and riders in a composition remarkable for being largely elevated off the work’s base, with the leftmost horse completely suspended. This class will focus on drawing horses, with instruction on anatomy, movement, texture, and expression

February 18 — Unique Cropping: This live art-making class is inspired by Edward Hopper’s Universalist Church. In this partial view of an 18th-century Universalist church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Hopper shows only the elegant white spire, obscuring the rest of the building with intervening houses. The lines of the roofs adjacent to the church lead the eye across both axes of the image to the steeple. This class will focus on creating a unique architectural composition by cropping the image and closely focusing on one aspect of a scene.

February 25 — Storytelling with Collage: This live art-making class is inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s The 1920s  . . . The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots. This screenprint is alive with energy and activity. Lawrence’s characteristically expressive style conveys the scene with exaggerated geometries, angular figures, and blocks of color. Lawrence is known for his narrative pictorial compositions that depict significant historical events, such as the Great Migration or the life of Frederick Douglass, as well as scenes of the everyday life of African Americans. This class will focus on visual storytelling and creating collage compositions using basic shapes and blocks of color.

March 4 — Rendering Clothing and Drapery: This live art-making class is inspired by a Greek statuette of Nike from the Hellenistic period. In this sculpture, the goddess of victory wears a clinging chiton with a long overfold that reveals the lines of her voluptuous body. A belt cinches the garment high under her breasts. This class will focus on the basic shapes of clothing and the anatomy of folds to better understand the mechanics of drapery.

“Sharing my love of drawing with a wider group of people is exciting. I love getting notes from families that tell me they draw together – or even families that watched together from different geographical locations,” says DiLorenzo. “Sometime folks write to tell me they haven’t picked up a pencil to draw in decades — but now make time to do so regularly as part of this program. And some are surprisingly young. There are so many ways for people to be creative, regardless of age, familiarity with material, or experience. If students learn one thing from me, it’s that art belongs to everyone.”