This Great Painting Adventure: Colour + Gesture +Texture + Love

Course Booking: This Great Painting Adventure: Colour + Gesture +Texture + Love

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Do you love paint but find the voices in your head get in the way of painting?  This practical painting course uses experimental painting techniques to help you learn about the ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ elements of painting. 

“Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want. I check it out, recheck it for days or weeks. Sometimes there is more to do on it. Sometimes I am afraid of ruining what I have. Sometimes I am lazy, I don't finish it or I don't push it far enough. Sometimes I think it's a painting.”  Joan Mitchell

This course is for you if you want to

• Learn about creative practice and the stages of a creative process
• Explore and develop your own unique visual language
• Nourish your painting practice, building self-awareness, compassion and freedom in the studio
• Work on a series of different pieces to create a body of drawings and paintings which you can take home and continue working on after the course

You will:

• Learn how to use different mediums including heavy gel body and glaze mediums
• Take risks, experiment and play as a way to free up and investigate techniques with acrylic paint
• Work with different tools and processes to create paintings using expressive colour and marks including splashes, stains, layers, gesture, colour and texture
• Work on different material substrates, for example different papers or artist panels, and at different sizes to see how this changes your relationship with your work
• Tune into your painting mindsets and practice being ok with uncertainty, with potentially ruining or destroying your painting as you push it further, with producing ‘bad’ paintings, with holding the paradoxical duality of your painting mattering and not mattering, with intentionally destroying your painting to discover something new, with lifting the pressure of producing ‘finished work’ and giving your painting time to develop, with falling in love with and being excited by painting and with your own paintings.

We will work outside and in the studio with fast, intuitive and expressive drawings and paintings inspired by the Shropshire Landscape.

*This course will be messy – wear working clothes you can get paint on or overalls. Be aware that you may, or may not, leave the course with finished paintings.

ALEX McINTYRE

Working as a professional artist since 2007, Alex paints from a studio in Hertfordshire, UK. She has exhibited in the UK, United States and Romania, with work in commercial and private collections worldwide.  She has shown widely in art fairs: self-representing at 17 editions of The Other Art Fair in London and New York, and represented at The Affordable Art Fair and Fresh Art Fair. In addition, she has shown in the following galleries: Byard Art, Kendall’s Fine Art, Bils and Rye Gallery, The Biscuit Factory, Artichoke Gallery, Mylo Fine Art, the Stone Space, Quercus Gallery, Irving Contemporary, Kingfisher Art Gallery, Rise Art, Saatchi online and Wychwood Art.

Alex is also a practicing transformational coach, undertakes project work in community and participatory settings and taught the foundation course at Bedfordshire University for 5 years.