4 minute read
Visual Narrative: Many Ways to Tell a Story with Elise Engler
By Nivia Hernandez
Elise Engler is a fine artist and educator whose artistic practice involves a narrative investigation of the world as seen through its innumerable, but countable, individual components, assembled in suites and series of works. Her most recent book, A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 was published in 2022 by Metropolitan Books, an imprint publisher of Macmillan. Here, Elise shares how to get started in telling a visual story and how she encourages her students to find their own voices.
How would you describe your course?
The structure for my course Visual Narrative: Many Ways to Tell a Story revolves around a weekly theme. These themes are explored through a series of prompts, including getting started (storyboarding), using color, thinking about scale, creating characters, suggesting mood, drawing and incorporating the figure, space, time and movement, incorporating text, and some bookmaking and printmaking (without a press). Because we are online, all materials are possible and welcome. I do tutorials demonstrating particular materials, such as gouache, different kinds of inks and watercolors, as well as a range of drawing materials. Some weeks are materials-based; others have more of a conceptual orientation. There is flexibility in the syllabus—this allows for students to make requests and for me to be most helpful to the class as a whole. Some students arrive with a project in mind, others respond to the weekly prompts. My goal is to understand where my students want to go and then to help them get there.
What would you tell a student who would like to tell a story visually but does not know where to start?
The class begins with viewing art related to a theme. I show images of drawings, paintings, sculpture, prints and collages from the prehistoric to the contemporary. After, there is one prompt, or a series of prompts, and a materials demo. The combination of the prompts and the displayed images motivates the students. If this is not enough, a conversation with the class or a one-on-one discussion provides impetus to get started.
What are two memorable moments in teaching this course? Why?
Students work at their own pace in my classes. Some people create many images, tell many stories. Others are more singular in their focus. One person worked for an entire 10 weeks on a very complicated, autobiographical, large drawing. It had layers, including maps, a delicately drawn self-portrait–like image and ephemeral landscapes. She would participate in working on the weekly prompt, and then she would integrate the new ideas into this drawing. The last week it all came together. She revealed its story, and the class and I were deeply moved. Another student hadn’t done collage since childhood. She decided that that was her medium. She could tell her story simply with cut, painted paper.
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