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A LIVE Online 6-week course.

What is the deeper nature of painting? 

How can I develop as a painter in accordance with this deeper nature?

All form comes from non-form – arising from, and pervaded by, ever-present Being.

In PART TWO, we will work with color, in oils, exploring mindfulness through a sustained engagement with still life.  Working on one painting for the six weeks, we will use the formal aspects of shape, color-mixing, and mark, as ways of moving more deeply into our visual experience in the present moment.

The awakening to our true nature is perhaps the most significant occurrence in a person’s life.  There are many paths to this – as many as there are people.  There are devotional paths, accompanied by forms of prayer.  There are contemplative paths, accompanied by forms of meditation.  There are various paths of yoga – enlisting the body through hatha, the mind through jnana, the heart through bhakti.  There is also the possibility of enlisting our sense perceptions and creative energies, through what we often call art.

Painting carries within it the power to recognize and give expression to our true nature.  To help provide for this possibility, this course is designed to work with and develop the foundational skills of painting in the context of Being and mindfulness.

Throughout the whole course we will be exploring our experience of seeing, and of marking in relation to our seeing.  Our formal means, that is – how we will make marks and with what materials, will start out more simply and gradually add complexity as we become more familiar with the territory and the experience of seeing and marking.  Although images will develop through these exercises and explorations, our aim here is not an object or an image, but rather the deepening of our felt understanding of seeing and marking as a practice of experiencing our present-moment awareness and Being.

Working from observation, participants will explore and develop outer formal skills in tandem with inner skills and inward positioning.  We’ll be covering the following inner and outer skills:

• Locating the accurate geometry of the observed forms and the spaces in between the forms. This entails learning to measure, seeing “through a grid”, and shifting our attention from a discursive “thinking” mode to a more perceptually-based, spacious mode.
• Assessing the relative tonal relationships of the various observed forms and learning how to mix these tones in paint. The search for convincing tonal relationships in paint entails a working understanding of value, temperature and saturation.  As in the formal element of geometry, the development of tonal understanding and mixing calls for a shift from a hurried mind to a more settled, patient and present mind.
• Exploring the nature of edges – how one form ends and another begins within our visual perception, and how to translate that experience into paint. This exploration entails moving from our usual object-oriented attention to field-oriented experience.
• Structuring the shapes and various formal elements into meaningful composition and starting to explore the deeper significance of composition as a creative and mindful discipline.  What is the source of the experience of wholeness and “just right” form?

Who this course is for —

This course is for people who are interested in developing foundational skills in painting and would like to do so through a lens of awareness and mindfulness.

This course is for people who already have foundational skills and are looking to deepen their painting practice, both inwardly in terms of their experience, and outwardly in terms of the painting itself.

This course is for people who are interested in exploring their deeper self and the nature of Being through the lens of sense perception and aesthetic engagement.

Through an engagement with formal outward skills our inner sensibility will be engaged and clarified, further attuning our attention to our true nature.  Through an online platform, each session will include demonstrations and guided exercises to be practiced together.  After each guided exercise there will be time for sharing, feedback, questions and conversation. All of the exercises will be demonstrated, facilitated and guided by Jordan.

The course will be divided into two sections.  Participants are encouraged to take both parts, starting with Part One and building on it with Part Two.  Part One will cover the aspects of geometry and tonality.  Part Two will continue with tonality and move into edge quality and composition.

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