Perceptions and Senses - A two day workshop

A three day workshop for beginners and experienced artists exploring how perception is used to inform and energise painting.

The workshop consists of two sessions:
Sunday 24th and Monday 25th of August
10.00am- 4.00pm (on-site)

Painting life? Painting reality? Sounds like a beautiful yet impossible quest – how could one ever grasp on a flat surface, through fixed colours and shapes, an experience that is of multiple dimensions, woven through the senses, referencing outer worlds as much as inner consciousness? And yet, astounding paintings have been created – some that feel just right. What is it then? What informs those paintings that manage to go beyond representation, visual poems which move away from what we see and believe to know, connecting us instead with the mystery of our felt experience.

Throughout history, artists have tried to depict reality and made it more and more convincing thanks to break-through in techniques and modality of observation. Advances in technology regularly threaten to make art redundant and yet push artists to go beyond. We’re now finding ourselves in a time where our phone camera can take incredibly sharp pictures and AI has too started to emulate images. If these tools are now feeding us with an abundance of images, “capturing” what we see; maybe it’s time to move away from studious realism and to look into How we see and What we feel? It’s our chance to get curious about those fleeting and singular experiences, always with us yet most of the time over-looked and replaced by projections.

If you too feel curious, let’s get together on this 2-day workshop, dive into the here and now…and see if we can paint it! Through a range of playful and ambitious exercises, we’ll put our habits to the side for a moment (or forever!), observing anew, getting intrigued by how our vision works, how our inner mental world works, and explore ways to challenge our senses.

Expect to paint a lot, and above all to feel a lot. Working in a group will offer us the chance to discuss our varied experiences and get inspired by one another. The exercises we will have explored together will be in our artist tool box for life, whether with a brush in hand or just sitting on a bench, observing the world anew.

Sunday
What we observe, what we retain
Exercises on memory, painting with delay and repetition
Getting aware of what we remember gives us direct feedback into what we observe. Memory is a room beautifully filled with who we are, what moved us – tuning into that and learning how to strengthen this muscle.

Monday
Where do we observe from?
Thinking about viewpoint, movement and field of view.
If our experience goes beyond the visual movie going on in front of our eyes, how can we paint the source of this observation? What is this vision like anyway? What is blurry, what is sharp, what moves and gets distorted, what happens when we blink our eyes or relax our vision?

Info and bookings on our website