Date: Thursdays, May 22-June 5, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM-12:30 PM Pacific Time, 1:30-3:30 PM Eastern Time, 6:30-8:30 PM London Time
Level: All
Medium: Oil, acrylic or pastels (Tim will demo in acrylics)
Supply List
In this 3-week course, we will explore themes of place and memory by creating a painting from a variety of source materials, including photos, drawings and color studies. We will use painting’s unique ability to create parallel realities – worlds that reflect our own emotions and sensations, but also offer ineffable visual experiences that are entirely new; our approach will be both figurative and abstract, heightening our awareness of how shape and color transform what we know and feel into the language of painting.
We will focus on the initial phases of making a painting, from ideation to choosing the size and proportions of your canvas to discovering meaning as the work develops. Practical experiments with color and composition will aim to evoke atmosphere, create narrative and summon the specifics of time and place. Class discussions will explore your discoveries within the context of historical and contemporary artworks, both as inspiration and to connect our work to themes that are universal as well as personal. Using his figurative work as a point of departure, Tim will demonstrate and discuss his approach to;
• Subject v subject matter; how do we choose what to paint and find meaning within our choices?
• Creating, finding and borrowing visual source material.
• Using thumbnail drawings to explore composition through theme and variation.
• Making quick painted studies to establish palette, value range and visual hierarchy.
• The initial stages of building a painting, from ground color to compositional drawing to establishing color relationships.
• Through the unpredictable progress of a painting, discovering the value of spontaneous, intuitive decision-making.
Homework will take the form of making and gathering visual source material, drawing compositional ideas and making a painting using all of these. We will look at and discuss your work during in-class critiques, and Tim will also give asynchronous feedback on your work after the last class is over.
This course will work best for artists using opaque color media, such as oil, acrylic or pastels. Tim will demonstrate using acrylics and various drawing materials.
Born in 1969 in Portsmouth, UK, 
