PAINTING & DRAWING courses at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice foster the bridge between helping students to develop and enhance their technical skills with conceptual and critical thinking, in relationship to image making in the 21st Century. Students are encouraged to conduct explorations within traditional conventions of painting and drawing as well as exploring, examining and challenging those conventions, in order to create experimental and contemporary methodologies. Through critiques, discussions with peers, individualized time with instructors and rigorous studio exercises, students from various disciplines are encouraged to interrogate what painting and drawing is and can become, as tools of investigation in relationship to developing their art practices.

Painting & Drawing courses are integral offerings within the department in which it is the largest disciplinary area due to student enrollment and square footage in terms of studio facilities for instruction. The department considers drawing to be a basic skill for all artists to have and at least one drawing course is required of all Art Practice majors and minors. All courses are six hours and are taught in Krober Hall within four large, double-story rooms with ample floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows facing north. Each studio is specific to either dry or wet media. The two painting rooms have easels, usable wall space, storage racks, oil paint cleaning stations, flammable cabinets for all containers, sludge containers for oil and acrylic, water containers for acrylic waste, washout sinks, emergency clean up supplies and cleanable rag services. The drawing rooms have storage racks, sinks, large tables, usable wall space, and large drawing boards, as well as model stands. There is ample portfolio storage for works-in-progress as well as plentiful hallway wall space for students to share and critique work with their peers.

UC Berkeley has long been famous for its painting faculty, from luminaries such as Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, and Squeak Carnwath and visitors such as Monica Majoli and Leo Bersamina. Our most recent Professor Emerita include Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Katherine Sherwood.