Blue Rider Art Club
A Virtual Art Journey for Horse-Crazy Kids & Adults
The Blue Rider Art Club is a personalized, weekly course (maximum 6 students per teacher) that focuses on the exploration of art history and studio practice centered around the horse.
Online meetings with the teacher will take place virtually every week via Zoom. Between meetings, students have the opportunity to keep building on their work, using supportive materials provided by the club, and ask questions/receive feedback during the next meeting.
Students will learn fundamental visual art techniques from a professional artist, art educator & museum anthropologist, and how to express their personal vision of what the horse means to them. Every class includes a learning session for the weekly theme. Students will then explore different art materials and develop artwork based on their personal reflection.
Why do it? This course is a unique opportunity for students to receive real-time feedback from a professional artist as well as their peers. Unlike pre-recorded online video classes, this will be a fully engaging experience with live instruction and conversation.
This course is a unique opportunity for students to receive real-time feedback from a professional artist and art historian as well as their peers. Unlike pre-recorded online video classes, this will be a fully engaging experience with live instruction and conversation.
Pricing:
- The option to enroll for the first five weeks only, at $100 per week. Students retain flexibility to enroll in the second half of the class at the conclusion of the first five weeks.
- 15% discount on upfront enrollment for all ten weeks, for a total of $850.
- Successful referrals of other students also entitle you to a discount of $50 on the Blue Rider Art Club or $50 towards tutoring credit in a subject of your choice from Blue Ribbon Scholars.
What’s included?
- Two hours of live, personalized coaching from a highly qualified teacher (maximum 6 students per class, to keep a very favorable student-teacher ratio). Every class is interactive.
- Opportunity to make friends and exchange ideas with other club members who are also passionate about horses and art.
- Learning materials that are yours to keep, including short readings for reference and slide presentations to complement topics discussed in class.
- Personal reflection on the millennia of human-horse relationships, instilling a sense of historic place as it relates to each student’s own passion for the horse.
- A horse-related artistic portfolio that can be used for applying to academic programs and resume-building.
- Introduction to a wide variety of 2-D mediums practice, including graphite, pastel and charcoal drawing, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic painting, an introduction to 3-D sculpture, and introduction to essential artistic notions and tools such as perspective, scale, volume, movement, negative space, implied lines, abstraction, and more.
Valérie Chaussonnet, your teacher, is an international visual artist and anthropologist based in Austin, Texas.
Valérie has been a painter and sculptor for more than 30 years. Her work has been exhibited in prestigious museums and galleries, and is in private collections in the US and in France, where she maintains a second studio. Valérie is an experienced educator. She has been teaching art and French language through her school, La Petite Provence Austin, since 1999. She especially enjoys teaching teenagers, for whom she has conducted a series of art-making, cooking, and French camps in the past. Prior to moving to Texas, Valérie worked on a curatorial team at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC as a museum anthropologist. As an artist and an anthropologist, she is passionate about our relationship with landscape and animals, our ancestral, prehistoric and biological origins, and our relationships to one another as humans. She has lectured and published works on symbolism in art. You can learn more on her artist website: www.valeriechaussonnet.com.
Blue Rider Art Club Themes:
- The Personal Horse: How do you draw a horse?
- The Early Horse and Cave Paintings.
- The Mythical Horse: Pegasus, Greek and Roman Sea Horses and Centaurs.
- The Blue Rider Movement, Franz Marc and Kandinsky.
- The Horse in Global Conquest: Genghis Khan, Mongolian Art, China’s TerraCotta Army.
- The Knight in Shining Armor and Horses of the Middle Ages, Unicorns and Dragons.
- The Renaissance Horse: Uccello, Da Vinci and Durer.
- The Romance of the American Horse and the West.
- The Modern(ist) Horse, Abstract or Not. Degas, Picasso, Marino Marini.
- Horses and Women: What’s the Connection?