Clyde Downs
Contact Info
|
Clyde Downs
Professor of Painting & Printmaking
Office: 318-357-4479
Email: R2nN5_f@W8ypA.edu
|
 |
Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher of art I believe that all students must learn the fundamentals of design and drawing. I also believe that merely teaching the basics is not enough. Students must be made aware that art isn’t just rendering, that being able to draw well and design well are not guarantees of being able to make meaningful art. In order to make significant art the student must draw from deep within and must quest for those visual images they find compelling as an artist and person. The best artists are those who defy the collective vision and find a pathway that leads them to produce art that is personal, imaginative and passionate. I believe that by challenging students to understand what is meaningful to them and the options they have for dealing with those concerns within a visual framework that they will come to produce works of power and meaning.
Artist Statement
"Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul"
Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinksy
"The significance of a work of art is determined by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless depend on a physical carrier. The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist's technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit."
Search for the Real, Hans Hofmann
Art arises from a need to express the inexpressible. It arises from an encounter with the world, from experience filtered through thought, imagination and spirit and results in images, if they are successful, that connect with other people and imparts something more than just a representation of an object. For me there is little difference between abstraction and representation and I often move back and forth between the two. It is in that space between them , in the simplification of form that the amplification of meaning is often found.
The inspiration for my work is the landscape. Landscape can vary from photographic representation to nearly non-objective imagery and still read as landscape. It allows for all levels of abstraction and provides a fertile ground within which one may experiment, yet provides a frame of reference within which most all viewers feel comfortable.