Breaking the Surface Part I: Exploring the History of Pictorial Space

How we create three dimensional space on a flat surface is one of the central problems of painting. This four-session course is designed to support your studio practice by introducing you to a wide variety of ways to approach space in your work. We will work through William Dunning’s Changing Images of Pictorial Space, to explore the surprising relevance of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance painting for making contemporary art. The course sets up provocative juxtapositions between the ways traditional and modernist painters approach flatness and depth.

Recorded November 2022

Breaking the Surface Part II: Exploring the History of Pictorial Space

How we create three dimensional space on a flat surface is one of the central problems of painting. This course is designed to support your studio practice by introducing you to a wide variety of ways to approach space in your work. In Part II of the course we will continue our way through William Dunning’s Changing Images of Pictorial Space, bringing us from the Baroque to the modern era. The course sets up provocative juxtapositions between the ways traditional and modernist painters approach flatness and depth in their work.

Recorded January 2023

The Self-Portrait from Observation

This four-session online course guides students through the process of painting a self-portrait from observation. Each pre-recorded session begins with a slide lecture in which we discuss examples of self-portraits throughout history and in contemporary painting. During the second half of each session I do a live painting demonstration, building week by week from a color study to a finished portrait along with the class. Instruction will include composition, drawing with paint, making use of a limited palette, and the structure of the head.

Recorded February 2021

Painting Change: Still Life in Motion

Painting a subject that is in flux –– a lemon tree as its fruit ripens, a person in motion, or a kitchen countertop crowded with objects that are moved around as they are used each day –– can open up our painting practice and our perceptions. Painting becomes a responsive, investigative process.

In this online course, each two and a half hour session will include a slide lecture, demonstration and Q and A. The lecture series will focus on different ways that time has been depicted in historical and contemporary painting. For the demo, I walk through my entire process of creating a painting in this mode, working from an eggplant on my back patio as it grew and bore fruit. My forty-hour painting process has been edited down into four, hour-long videos during which we discuss different strategies for representing change, as well as nuts-and-bolts painting issues like color mixing, measuring, and value control.

Multiple Figure Composition Part I: Studies of Historical Paintings

In this online, four-session course we will analyze paintings from art history and make small master copies in our sketchbooks. Each pre-recorded session (2 hours) includes a slide lecture focusing on how the formal elements of a painting such as space, value, and color can be used to convey meaning and narrative, and a sketchbook demonstration that shows a more in-depth analyzes of a single painting. We will look at the story that each historical painting is based on as the starting point to investigate how the painting was built—how each element of the painting inextricably contributes to the strength of the whole.

Recorded April 2020

Multiple Figure Composition Part II: After Modernism, Building Your Own Composition

In this four-session online course we will use art history as the foundation to build our own multiple figure compositions. We will study compositions from modernism (Manet, Picasso, Cézanne etc.) and look at the work of contemporary artists as we walk through the ideation process of creating a painting together. Working in our sketchbooks we will build from a rough concept to sketches, value, and color studies. By the end we will have produced all the preparatory material needed to start a complex, multifigure painting. I will develop my own composition along with the class. Each pre-recorded session is 2 hours.

Recorded May 2020