Coursera.org, in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has done it again. They are currently offering another fabulous and totally free course (as long as you don’t care about credits) on a totally fascinating topic.

“In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting” is part history lesson, part practicum. Instructor Corey D’Augustine is indeed the right guy to teach such a course being both a technical art historian and an artist. Some videos capture D’Augustine in studio demonstrating the characteristic techniques of Newman, Pollock and their New York School contemporaries. Other videos show D’Augustine standing before such artists’ original works at MoMA, helping us to observe nuances, to engage more fully in the “push” and “pull” of color values, etc. I absolutely love the mix of both study and application.

As you may have noticed through my blog posts, the former is much easier for me to accomplish these days compared to the latter. But this course is great motivation to apply myself more, and I’m going to start by testing some of the masking methods and “zips” for which Barnett Newman is known (see Week 2). As I proceed through the course, I’m certain my to-do list will only grow.