Aesthetic Excursions

Develop a more personal style, voice and deeper meaning.

Over ten weeks, I'll be encouraging you to push a little way beyond the boundaries of your assumptions about what painting is - what your 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 guided explorations into technique and expression. It will be up to you to decide how 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 into new territory.

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 with a focus on:

• Light and shadow
• drawing accuracy
• values
• careful edge handling

Workshop Structure

The workshop will be ten weeks long, with one live session each week

We will alternate painting demonstration sessions with live group critique sessions on Zoom, so that you can continually get feedback and have discussions on your where you're going

There will also be additional recorded video demonstration of some techniques

Thjere will also be a provate, onl9ine community group where you can post your work as you go along, and discuss it with other workshop members.

And as always, I'll be providing high quality, beautiful reference photos to work from.

Subjects will be mostly still life, starting simple and getting more complex as we go through the workshop, with a final assignment for you to do on your own - with the support of the group, of course. And we'll follow this with a last critiue session

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.