2023 Summer Workshops
The art of memory is not documentary. Rather, it’s a process of allowing experience to filter through our bodies and manifest in stories and images. The truth of memoir is always a personal truth. It’s the honesty of memory, not veracity of detail, that provides the hook for others to connect with us. We think about memoir as a literary process, but the archive of a painter’s images, a commitment to relating feeling and perspective in a painting creates the fragments that build a memoir over time. This workshop is about remembering, relating, and developing fragments of memory in visual form. Focusing on place and relationship, drawing from photo albums and experience, and thinking about the way that objects and material culture hold our history, we’ll build a body of paintings or drawings that are facets of a larger narrative. We’ll look at the work of contemporary painters, like Elizabeth Peyton, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Castle, Hernan Bas, and Doron Langberg, and consider the ways they are painting their worlds and their lives. We’ll also consider and discuss memoir in literature and film. This workshop will be conducted on Zoom. We will meet in the morning for two hours, 10-noon ET, and in the afternoon, 4-5 PM ET, for an hour to discuss the day’s work.The workshop is designed for painters of any level, with the focus being on supporting participants individually to develop their voice and idiom as painters. The material list is for oil paint. but participants may use the painting media of their preference.
Biography
Pete Hocking is a visual artist and writer based on Cape Cod. In addition to being represented by Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown, he’s recently shown with the Chazan Gallery in Providence RI, The Dorado Project in Jersey City NJ, the Plough Gallery in Tifton GA, and at VeeVee in Boston MA. In May 2019 he was Artist in Residence at the Hawthorne Barn with Twenty Summers. He teaches at Rhode Island School of Design. From 2003-2021 he was full-time faculty in Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts. He is a founding board member of The Provincetown Commons, a center for the arts and creative economy.