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Maggie Siner – Fabric as a Vehicle for Gesture: How the Forms of Drapery Create Shape, Gesture, Drama and Unity (Online); Saturdays, December 3-17, 2022

This class was held in the past and is no longer available for registration. Please view our Online Course Catalog for current class listings.

Date: Saturdays, December 3-17, 2022
Time: 10:00-11:30 AM Pacific Time, 1:00-2:30 PM Eastern Time, 6:00-7:30 PM London Time
Level: All
Medium: Oil or acrylic

If you look over the past 600 years of Western Painting you’ll see drapery everywhere – on classical and religious figures, elegant portraits, genre paintings, still-lives and interiors. Drapery captures gravity, weight and action, it gives life to static forms, it leads our eyes through the painting and is a primary source dynamic composition. Understanding the abstract nature of drapery, its planes of light and dark, its structure and relationship to space and gesture will be the focus of these demo’s.

During these three 1-1/2 hour live painting sessions, Maggie Siner will demonstrate different ways to approach painting drapery. Working from her studio in Virginia, Maggie will talk her way through the demos, discussing the implications of each approach, while making a new painting each week. Informative and full of learning, there will also be a Q&A at the end of each live session. All three sessions will be recorded and will be available for 60 days.

Maggie Siner is an American artist whose paintings are shown in Paris, Venice, London, New York, Washington DC, and in hundreds of collections around the world. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, she began her studies at the Art Students League of New York, graduated from Boston University (BFA) and American University (MFA) where she studied with Robert D’Arista. During her long artistic career she has lived for extended periods in France, China and Italy. Siner’s work is classically derived and highly structured while also being gesturally expressive. She works directly from visual perception, trying to catch vision ‘in the act’, focusing on light and the everyday world of objects and transience.

Siner is also a devoted teacher who has influenced a generation of painters. She has been on the faculty of l’Institute d’Universités Américaines and Lacoste School of Art in France, visiting professor at Xiamen University in China, artist-in-residence at Savannah College of Art and Design, Dean of Faculty at the Washington Studio School and teaches master classes in the USA and abroad. She is a frequent guest artist and public speaker.

In 1976 Siner moved to France, exhibiting her work in Aix-en-Provence and Paris. She followed medical studies at the Faculté de Médicine in Marseille, taught anatomy at Georgetown Medical School in Washington DC, and completed facial reconstructions for law enforcement in Virginia. She is well known for her expertise in artistic anatomy as seen in her figurative sculpture. In 1991 she lectured in the six major art academies in China, and returned several times to teach painting at Xiamen University. Since 2008 she has been in Venice, enamored of that city’s ever-changing surfaces. www.maggiesiner.com

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