Five Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Thursdays, September 24 - October 22, 2026
7:00 - 9:00pm ET (NYC Time)
$180 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Join us for a five-week online drawing course devoted to the strange and persistent life of the skull in art. At once sacred relic, ancestor image, anatomical puzzle, and totem of mortality, the skull has stared out of images across centuries.
Moving between symbolic meaning and exacting observation, this course considers how artists have used the skull to meditate on death, the body, memory, and the fragile boundary between the visible and the unseen. Through lectures, discussion, and in-class drawing activities, students will encounter the skull not only as an object of study, but as one of the great enduring motifs of the imagination.
Far more than a series of lectures, students will be invited each week to make their own historically inflected versions of skulls using different techniques and meanings. We will move through five distinct worlds of seeing:
Ancient and prehistoric decorated skulls and skull symbols from Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Pacific
Medieval European and African images of death, relics, and remembrance
The Renaissance atelier, where anatomy and ‘ideal’ proportion meet (and Hamlet contemplates his mortality with the skull of Yorick)
The nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts and its disciplined, academic method (And Samuel George Morton measured skulls from around the world to prove his own apparent superiority)
The contemporary imaging lab, where scans, reconstructions, and new technologies continue to transform how we picture the skull, the body, and the future of looking.
Essentially, each week we get to attend art school in a different century, with different conceptions of the body, training, and materials.
Each class will consist of roughly one hour of lecture and discussion, followed by an hour of discussion and demonstration of a mode of artmaking, usually followed by an in-class project. It will always be up to the students if they want to share anything they create but trying one’s hand in different techniques is all a part of the discovery process.
Open to artists, designers, illustrators, and the morbidly curious, the course welcomes both experienced drafts-people and adventurous beginners.
Chris Muller is an artist and designer who divides his time between Brooklyn, N.Y. and the Catskill Mountains. Chris has been a set designer for theater and film, a storyboard artist and illustrator, and an exhibit designer for a wide range of museums and institutions, including the Museum of African Art. the Jewish Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National World War II Museum, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and many others.
Chris is an Adjunct Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, in the Graduate Department of Design for Stage and Film, where he teaches drawing, digital painting, and the cultural history of design. He is also a guest lecturer at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, teaching computer illustration. As an artist, Chris’s work mixes portraiture and anatomical subjects, to humorous or vexing effect.
Images:
Five Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Thursdays, September 24 - October 22, 2026
7:00 - 9:00pm ET (NYC Time)
$180 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Join us for a five-week online drawing course devoted to the strange and persistent life of the skull in art. At once sacred relic, ancestor image, anatomical puzzle, and totem of mortality, the skull has stared out of images across centuries.
Moving between symbolic meaning and exacting observation, this course considers how artists have used the skull to meditate on death, the body, memory, and the fragile boundary between the visible and the unseen. Through lectures, discussion, and in-class drawing activities, students will encounter the skull not only as an object of study, but as one of the great enduring motifs of the imagination.
Far more than a series of lectures, students will be invited each week to make their own historically inflected versions of skulls using different techniques and meanings. We will move through five distinct worlds of seeing:
Ancient and prehistoric decorated skulls and skull symbols from Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Pacific
Medieval European and African images of death, relics, and remembrance
The Renaissance atelier, where anatomy and ‘ideal’ proportion meet (and Hamlet contemplates his mortality with the skull of Yorick)
The nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts and its disciplined, academic method (And Samuel George Morton measured skulls from around the world to prove his own apparent superiority)
The contemporary imaging lab, where scans, reconstructions, and new technologies continue to transform how we picture the skull, the body, and the future of looking.
Essentially, each week we get to attend art school in a different century, with different conceptions of the body, training, and materials.
Each class will consist of roughly one hour of lecture and discussion, followed by an hour of discussion and demonstration of a mode of artmaking, usually followed by an in-class project. It will always be up to the students if they want to share anything they create but trying one’s hand in different techniques is all a part of the discovery process.
Open to artists, designers, illustrators, and the morbidly curious, the course welcomes both experienced drafts-people and adventurous beginners.
Chris Muller is an artist and designer who divides his time between Brooklyn, N.Y. and the Catskill Mountains. Chris has been a set designer for theater and film, a storyboard artist and illustrator, and an exhibit designer for a wide range of museums and institutions, including the Museum of African Art. the Jewish Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National World War II Museum, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and many others.
Chris is an Adjunct Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, in the Graduate Department of Design for Stage and Film, where he teaches drawing, digital painting, and the cultural history of design. He is also a guest lecturer at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, teaching computer illustration. As an artist, Chris’s work mixes portraiture and anatomical subjects, to humorous or vexing effect.
Images:
