As part of the teaching process I take a picture of every painting, every day. When the figure Painting week is completed, there will be 5 photos for each student unless a day had to be missed.

WEEK 1
It is not just amazing to see the changes - but it is also a wonderful teaching tool as objectivity is greatly increased, viewing the paintings like that. It should be added to the traditional methods of evaluating a painting which are turning them upside down and using a mirror, to show up any and all problematic areas and mistakes as well as what should be worked on next. In viewing the progress through photos patterns and mechanisms of the student that are detrimental to the evolution of a painting become very clear. One example would be that areas are being changed or obliterated and overworked after they already worked and pointing out the areas that worked in earlier stages help to sharpen the students awareness of what works and what doesn't.

The course is very exciting and everyone is having intense fun, while finding it really relaxing. Everyone is working hard and really focussed, learning so much in a relatively short period of time, savouring the vibrating atmosphere and interchange and mutual input that one normally finds in art colleges. All the basics (all but one of the students are beginners to oil painting) were covered regarding materials and their use, different types of underpainting, handling the palette and colour, various techniques of painting, and much more.

The students received a full theory pack that will serve them for a long time to come - and I am afraid I overdid it again, each one is quite a fat pack of issues on all manner of oil painting aspects and problems, ranging from the basics of materials and paints, historical data, how to build stretchers and stretch canvasses, to all possible techniques and covering specific data regarding colour, colour mixing, handing of shadows and lights and many similar specific areas, theory ranging from compositional basics to perspective, understanding abstraction and more.

END OF WEEK 1
We have finished our first week of the Summer Course, Figure painting.
A couple of paintings are not finished, some need a few touches. Everyone has learnt a lot about the very basics of painting, right from the beginning, what to do with a brush, how to handle paint, the beginning of how to use colour, direct painting and glazing techniques and one of the students even went straight into impasto, which presents a whole additional set of things to learn.

What has also become clear is what individual problem areas each student has that have to be addressed, and with the help of the progress photos (which means that a student really sees what I am talking about) specific steps of development have been worked out by me that will be addressed in the future, to overcome these problems, habits or mechanisms. As always in painting, the ability to see and know when an area works, to leave it alone and carry this observation over, integrate it into ones progress, is the most important thing to learn - and also the hardest. One needs to let go in painting, to have freshness and spontaneity - but one still has to be very aware of what one is doing and why, otherwise one can lose this in a painting very easily, it can become laboured and overworked, muddy. Redefining, reworking, does not mean getting rid of what one has done, it means to work with it while keeping it fresh.

I often say that one should evoke a feeling and attitude of generosity - while being sensitively delicate while painting. One of my students coined a nice one for this, she said one has to be "Thoughtfully liberated and spontaneously restrained".

All in all, we had a great week with lots learnt, lots of progress and clarity of where to go from here. The paintings are mostly around 50 by 40 inches, not a small scale exactly, and I think they have produced some very strong paintings with a lot of promise.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW WEEK 2