The Art Museum is partnering with the Arts Council of Princeton to provide free online pastel drawing classes. Weekly classes are taught by artist-instructor Barbara DiLorenzo over Zoom. With an emphasis on using soft pastels to blend and create rich colors, each week’s lesson will be inspired by works in the Museum’s collections.

This live art-making class is inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1134, Whirls and Twirls (Princeton). As you pass through the Bloomberg Arch of Bloomberg Hall, be sure to look up: there you’ll find Sol LeWitt’s vivid painting. In the late 1960s, LeWitt pioneered a new way of working: inspired by the tradition of mural painting, he began to create drawings and paintings for walls, all of them abstract. They combine a variety of relatively simple marks and geometric motifs to create aesthetic effects that are both dynamic and beautiful. Whirls and Twirls is especially playful for LeWitt, and its interlocking bands of color, which form a larger series of interconnected shapes, suggest exchange, movement, traffic, and the transmission of energy. In this class we will focus on color harmony using an abstract structure of crisscrossing and swirling lines on a page—filling each shape with specific hues.