Charles Hawthorne: Classes at Provincetown

"Mudhead Figure Study"
by Charles Hawthorne

"Perhaps something should be said about the actual conduct of Charles Hawthorne's classes in Provincetown. The students were forced to concentrate on (to quote my father):

'the mechanics of putting one spot of color next to another - the fundamental thing."

The problems were presented in an inescapably direct way. For example, a model would be posed on the beach, and the students would work with putty knives so that they could not be tempted to indicate the details of the model's face that they could not actually see under the hat in the blazing sunlight.

Also, as a means of making the students concentrate on the fundamental relationships of the main spots of color, they were urged not to finish, but to do as many studies as possible - a dozen or more - for the Saturday morning criticism, the high point of the week. In these four-hour marathons, my father used to pass judgment on as many as eight hundred to a thousand studies submitted by the hundred or more students, and cause amazement and consternation in the ranks when he would spot an occasional study that was turned on the wrong side, so that it showed one of the previous week's efforts."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hawthorne on Painting" by Charles Webster Hawthorne.)