News

July 7, 2016

Colors of Art Museum collection inspire freshmen in new course taught by Anya Klepikov

student color project

Freshman Victoria Gasparowicz’ copy after Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, Seagulls, 1903.

During the past spring semester, Lecturer in Theater Anya Klepikov brought her students to the Princeton University Art Museum to observe firsthand how color can be used to communicate an incredible range of ideas and feelings. Klepikov, a set and costume designer for theater and opera, fleshed out this important concept in the new freshman seminar course “Creative Exploration of Color in Life and Artistic Expressions.”

Throughout the seminar, students discussed color and its relationship to shape, texture, and light, as well as theories on color from Aristotle through Josef Albers. They also had the opportunity to interpret color in their own ways, as shown in projects recently published by the Art Museum.

For each project, the students studied a different painting from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and recreated it using pieces of colored paper from a “Color-aid®” pack.

“My goal was to have the students stand in front of an original canvas and go through a process of really close analysis of how the painter used color in terms of hue, value, saturation, quantity, and shape.”
— Anya Klepikov

To see the resulting student interpretations of works by Degas, Monet, Gustav Courbet, and others, read more in the story by Veronica White on the Museum’s website…

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