Aesthetic Excursions

Develop a more personal style, voice and deeper meaning.

In this course, 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 more finished pieces, 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

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.