WALLA WALLA – It doesn’t take long for Alan Ayers to spot what’s wrong with the canvas on the floor in front of him.
Standing at one edge of an 8- by 10-foot piece covered in black lines, one important detail is missing.
Charcoal stick in hand, he glances up at a poster of Picasso’s painting “Guernica,” then down at the canvas, where a painting is slowly taking shape. In a swift motion, Ayers lays down a broad vertical charcoal line, a border between light and dark in Picasso’s work that was missing on the canvas.
Ayers tweaks a few other spots on the canvas, his fingers quickly blackening as he works with the soft charcoal. Satisfied with the modifications, he picks up a brush and small bowl of black paint and joins several other students working on different parts of the canvas.
The students are members of Lisa Rasmussen and Elizabeth Harris’ art design classes at Walla Walla Community College. Their reproduction of one of Picasso’s most famous paintings will be only slightly smaller than the original, which is about 12 feet high and 26 feet long. The size constraint, Rasmussen said, is a limitation of the size of the walls in the gallery where the finished painting will hang.
“From a design perspective, it’s a wonderful project, but also because of the war in Iraq” this is a relevant piece, Rasmussen said.
Both women hope putting the painting in a meaningful context would make the experience more than just an exercise in drawing lines and painting shapes.
“Giving them a subject matter that has some content should help them bring emotion into it,” Harris said.
Picasso painted “Guernica” over six weeks in 1937. Commissioned to create a painting for the Paris Exhibition that year, “Guernica” was a response to the German bombing and subsequent occupation of the small town in northern Spain between April 26 and April 29, 1937. Less than two weeks after the bombing, Picasso started work on the canvas, making a multitude of changes as he worked.
As the deadline for completing the painting approached, “he did nothing but eat, sleep and paint,” Rasmussen said. Her 30 students are working at a similar pace, with each is working on the project about an hour a day.
“In design classes, the tendency is to feel a little detached from the world,” Harris said. More often than not, students focus more on the mechanics of painting than its significance and the context behind it, she said.
“It’s a typical project for an art class to scale up a painting, but never on this large of a scale,” Rasmussen said.
It is much more common for students to enlarge small works to get a feel for the design elements involved in creating the painting, she added.
Rasmussen and Harris had several goals in mind when they came up with the plan last spring to reproduce “Guernica.”
The project started by breaking up the painting into a grid and giving each member of the class a square to focus on. The students drew smaller versions of their squares first so they could get a sense of the shapes within the squares and the variations in shading.
The grid, first drawn on a scaled-down photocopy of the painting, was then carefully measured and transferred onto the three blank pieces of canvas that would form the painting.
With the grid in place, groups of students worked to outline the entire painting using charcoal on canvas. Painting started with the easiest parts first, regions that were either black or white. Working off of several different posters of “Guernica,” students and teachers struggled to find the right shades of gray for other regions, a task made challenging by the fact that each poster looks slightly different.
“This is where you have to use your own artistic judgment,” Harris told her students as they looked for places to start painting.
The center of Picasso’s painting, where subtle rays of light radiate from a white bulb, proved particularly enigmatic. The more time students spent comparing their outlines to Picasso’s work, the less sense they could make of the details of the painting.
The teachers encouraged the students to take risks as they worked, reminding them that Picasso made many changes to “Guernica” as he painted it, including moving entire subjects within the painting to a different part of the canvas.
“The worst thing that can happen is we look at it tomorrow and decide we want to change it a little bit,” Harris said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
