IN PERSON, at the Concord Art Center, Concord, MA
OCT 14,15,16, 2022 - opening talk oct 13
The Interiority of Observation and the Cultivation of Being Lost
a three day outdoor painting seminar addressing working outside of your comfort zone: examining the saturation of the visual moment without rules and recipes
a ‘live’ outdoor 3 day guided intensive for medium to advanced painters exploring how we can swim within the processes of observation, without ‘knowing what we are doing’. 3 days devoted to encouraging you to let go of reliance on recipes, inherited expectations, and other people’s rules.
an elemental question we ask when looking out onto the world with brush, crayon or pencil in hand:
how is this moment different from all other moments? becomes our guide into the unknown, requiring us to pay attention with a playful imagination, able to stretch beyond branding (corporately predetermined ideas of self definition) and forget what we think we ‘know’.
each day, time will be spent interrogating ways of seeing with fresher eyes.
a few questions:
do you ever forget who you are?
how do you see what you don’t know is there?
are you able to find your way without knowing the way?
are you making it up as you go or sticking to formulas someone taught?
where is the source of your decision making?
do you recognize ‘accidents’ as full of possibility or do you marginalize them playing it safe with recipes and rules?
how many questions can go unanswered and which ones do you pay attention to?
this will not be a class devoted to making pretty pictures that galleries might want. the world is already filled with too many terrible ‘landscape’ paintings, so instead we are addressing painting out of doors as a path of tough interrogation, looking at what makes painting, and who are you in relation to that. the take away is greater strength, more confidence, and the eyes that much more opened.
on the first day, before painting, some foundational emphasis will be placed on drawing as the critical choreographic fuel for the visual thought engine.
a participants response to a recent class:
Stuart’s workshop takes you on a path of discovery of your own resources as a painter. With the focus on a few paramount concepts and by means of powerful tools, one learns that the key to painting lies in asking the right questions. From the technical (where is the light, what shape is the light, what temperature is the shadow…), to the gestalt (what can I do without, what is missing, how does it feel), to the philosophical (what should I paint and why should i), to the existential (what is the meaning). I feel like I went hoping for a fish and I came back with a fishing rod.’
—IM