The act of painting helps you see and feel more connected to being in the present. It is a very practical, physical and tactile activity. Surpisingly, it can also evoke very sensitive, emotional and sometimes visceral responses from both the artist and viewer. How extraordinary that blobs of pigment, surface and placement can have this impact. On this course, we push into this and explore what paint, tools, gestures and our personal experience offer to help us develop a daring, rich and versatile approach to working with the visual language of paint.

If you love the stuff of paint, then this course will expand your repetoire of mark-making and love of the materials. It will also make you aware of many more beautiful physical qualities that are in every subject you engage with. Observation is one of the senses that we use to help gather information to paint from, but we also experience the world around us through sound, touch, taste and smell. You will explore using some of these other senses to help you generate a visual language.

This is a very practical course where you will experiment with either oil or acrylic paint (both together if you wish), with glazing, layering, inventing, celebrating what the paint can do, and embodying your experience using the paint’s texture, fluidity, colour, ability to layer, showing the history of previous explorations and discoveries.

The tutor will provide exercises, demonstrations, inspiration and subject matter for this course. The subject for the paintings will be inspired by a mixture of memory, words, objects and sensations. During the course, you will:

• Work by adding mediums to the paint to aid; polishing, glazing, pouring to explore the subtle delicacy and veils that paint can offer
• Work with thick, textured paint, sculptural impasto to explore a visceral physical surface
• Explore editing – inserting space back into a busy painting, excavating, redefining
• Learn how to improvise and invent using playful processes
• Explore compositions and working in series
• Write to use descriptive language as a focus and prompt to paint from

By the end of the course, you will have made many experimental studies and begun a series of paintings. You will feel more courageous and knowledgable about the materials and how to begin working in a series to explore a subject more fully.

What students need to bring

• Make sure you bring a big palette, perhaps a piece of Perspex or piece of Formica. You will need lots of space to mix colours.
• Plastic pots with lids are useful to keep paint from drying up and keep them clean.
• Your preferred drawing media
• Come armed with lots of paints (oils or acrylics, not watercolours), brushes, rags, mediums (no white spirit or turps are allowed in the studio. For oils, we use studio safe solvent such as Zest-it or Shellsol as a thinner.)
• A good selection of canvases (You will need three canvases or boards of the same dimensions as you will be working in series.)
• Brushes
• Perspex sheet palette (50cm x 50 cm)
• Studio safe solvent (such as Zest-it)
• Acrylic mediums/glazing agents (your tutor recommends that you do not thin the paint with water, but, instead, add acrylic medium, and also have a retarder to slow down the drying time. Glazing agents can be good too.)
• Drawing media (can include charcoal, rubber, oil sticks, felt tip pens)
• Masking tape
• Bulldog clips

Available to buy

Available from shop: A good variety of art materials, including drawing media such as charcoal, pencils, rubbers, pens, pastels, sketchbooks, paper, etc. A good selection of oil and acrylic paints in a wide range of colours, canvases and boards, brushes, palettes, studio safe solvent, acrylic mediums/glazing agents and retarder, masking tape and bulldog clips

Available from tutor: The tutor will bring lots of paper that can purchased on the course.

Additional information

Please wear appropriate clothing/aprons for the workshop or studio. This includes stout covered footwear, i.e. no open-toes or sandals.

Arrival day
Residential students can arrive from 4pm, non-residential students to arrive by 7.15pm for registration. Students arriving earlier are welcome to purchase dinner in the College Dining Room from 6pm.
Students meet their tutor in the Bar at 7.30pm prompt to go to studios.
First Teaching session: 7.30pm - 9pm (attendance is essential)

Daily timetable
Course teaching: 9.15am - 5pm
Morning session: 9.15am - 12.45pm including coffee/tea break
Lunch break: 12.45pm - 2pm*
Afternoon session: 2pm - 5pm including coffee/tea break
Teaching finishes: 5pm
Evening working: students may have access to workshops until 9pm, but only with permission from the tutor and provided any health and safety guidelines are observed.

Departure day
Course teaching: 9.15am - 3pm
Teaching finishes: 3pm

Residential students will need to check out of rooms by 10am. Please note, the tutor may make slight variations to the daily timetable as required.

*Lunch can be purchased on campus, view options

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