Aesthetic Excursions

I'm going to encourage you to stretch yourself a little.

We'll be deliberately challenging and pushing against the boundaries of our unconscious assumptions about what painting is - what our own painting is, specifically.

Through a series of exploratory exercises and a more finished piece, I'll be encouraging you to search beyond your normal boundaries a little, and see what might lie just out your normal reach.

We'll be experimenting with texture, technique, paint application, value and colour.

I'll be presenting you with a series of options. It will be up to you to decide how many of them you want to try, and how far you want to push them.

We won't be departing from representational painting, though; Rather, we'll be seeing what we find if take the image we're working with a little beyond the point where we would usually stop.

As well as this push beyond our habitual boundaries, there will also be pull: Through it all, I'll be emphasising the fundamentals that pull more searching work together and keep it from going off the rails and becoming simply a mess: Light and shadow, drawing accuracy, values and edges.

As always, I'll be emphasising the technical aspects of light and shadow. But we'll also be considering the metaphorical ones, and seeing what happens when we extend the language we use to describe them.

I'm putting together a slightly more open materials list than is usual for one of my workshops. You might not need all of the materials I mention, you might want to experiment with more. I'll given a base list that you will need, and then include suggestions for things you might want to add that will help you move into what for you will be relatively uncharted territory.

What I hope you'll gain more than anything else from this workshop is a tool box of options that you can use to help you move beyond your boundaries and hopefully, find something of your personal voice on the other side of them.