Gage Opdenbrouw – Plow it Under: Aggressively Revising your Paintings (Online); Tuesdays, January 17-February 14, 2023

Date: Tuesdays, January 17-February 14, 2022
Time: 10:30 AM-1:30PM Pacific Time (1:30-4:30 PM Eastern Time/6:30-9:30PM London Time)
Level: All
Medium: All paint mediums

By subjecting our paintings to editing and revision, even deep into the process of a long term painting, we maintain an ability to keep our work fresh and exciting—a form is more meaningful the 3rd time you have scraped out or repainted it, more essential, more pared down.  Are you willing to move structural beams after the walls are up and the roof is on?  Editing by removal and change, restatement,  is critical to the qualities we describe as freshness, or depth…How does one stay IN THE PAINT, and awake to what evolves through abstraction and impulsive changes driven by the painting process and the evolution of the paint itself?  The challenge is to make paint carry feeling, and we will take a deep look at the risks that search entails.  They can’t be faked.

We will ask these questions through a series of exercises in looking via drawing and painting, , and of course, by looking at the greats:  Auerbach, DeKooning, Giacometti, Deibenkorn and more modern painters, as well as contemporary painters working in a similar or related way…class will include live demonstrations each session, and will be recorded.

“A deep thematic thread runs through all of my work, it’s a ‘vanitas’ sort of message, to take the time to be present, to notice the magic of noticing, the richness of what’s right in front of us. I think that there is something radical in making work that is intimate in scale and quiet in its content and its aims–it strikes me as a tonic, an antidote, for our times, which are increasingly dehumanized, and in which people are living lives that are increasingly disembodied, mediated by a screen, and constantly stimulated. My art is about connecting with this world, this moment, as it is, as deeply as possible.” www.gageopdenbrouw.com