Details

An 8-Week LIVE in-studio course.

For All Levels.  Limited to 8 participants.

How do we Explore Painting as an Expansive, Creative & Playful Engagement?

How do we court and dance with Spontaneity, Risk & Courage in the studio?

For those new to Abstraction — we’ll be exploring and playing with formal elements such as line, shape, form, color, edge, texture, paint handling, and composition, without concern for objective depiction.  We’ll be using a wide range of materials, mediums and tools.  What can we DO with all of this stuff?

For those already familiar with Abstraction — how do we take our painting further?  How do we get lost and find our way back?  How do we strengthen our intuition and genuinely discover MORE of who we are as painters?

The painting goes through many transformations during the course, and students become familiar with painting as a flexible and ceaselessly changeable medium.

I’ll be giving weekly demonstrations of various aspects of the journey into non-representational abstraction, looking at examples from Modern Abstract masters such as de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, and discussing writings from my teacher, Patrick Ahearne, related to our shared exploration.

“A gesture in paint
is not simply a gesture in painting –
it is an event in the world.”
— Paul Goodman

A familiarity with the process of painting in its more physically dense and muscular aspects gives the student a context and experience to draw upon no matter what their future direction, abstract or representational, from observation or imagination or memory.

The Weekly Syllabus:

• Week One: Introduction to the Painting Journey. Reviewing Patrick Ahearne’s text.  Jumping in and beginning.
• Week Two: Exploring Paint Handling and Making a Mess. Now what?  Looking at Mondrian and Joan Mitchell: Figure and Ground and the Activation of Space.
• Week Three: Composition as a Creative Discipline. Understanding Composition through the lens of Cezanne, Analytic Cubism and de Kooning.
• Week Four: Bringing our Lived Experience to Bear even Amidst the Morphing. Exploring Aspects of Mass, Weight, Space, Light, Movement.  Looking at Late Monet, Philip Guston and Arshile Gorky.
• Week Five: After the Catharsis. What does Fine Tuning look like? What does it mean to nurture the image?  Looking at Matisse and Diebenkorn.
• Week Six: The Possibilities of Narrative and Systemic Thinking. Looking at Joan Snyder, Terry Winters and Brice Marden.
• Week Seven: Ways of Being
  
• Week Eight: The Ineffable Power of Painting.  How to Navigate by the Heart.  Reading the words and looking at the work of Milton Resnick.

Painting, as an open-ended form of discovery, becomes a vehicle for inner exploration.