How can you use the work of the Masters to inform your own painting? This 5 week course will address still life composition by studying paintings from other genres – figurative painting and landscape – to increase creative visual problem solving with the help of painters from art history. By removing the literalness of subject matter and focusing instead on abstract design principles, painters start to internalize ways of relating parts to the whole and to create aggregate shapes which help us all expand beyond our predictable default choices. Most of the greatest painters learned this way – by visiting museums and digesting what they saw. Each participant will choose one figurative image (then one landscape), study its underlying geometry and divisions, draw from it, then set up parallel still life in response to it, finally painting that set up with the image nearby. The goal is to practice dissecting and translating a painting, so as to use this process in your own studio practice.
