Monday Evenings 6-9pm
On this 10 week online course Dan Coombs will demonstrate some of the techniques and devices required to paint from the imagination. Often it is quite difficult to find a way in to working from the imagination. How can you create a parallel world in painting, one that expresses the unconscious, the dream, or the hidden parts of the self? Drawing on many devices developed from surrealism and other twentieth century artists, Dan Coombs will show you ways to break down the boundaries between the real and the imaginary in your work.
The course is fully booked.
Fee £275
Please note our online evening classes fill up quickly so if you are interested in this course we advise early booking to avoid disappointment.
Collage by Lucy Threlfall 2021 
Pandora’s Box by Lucy Hensel 2020 
The Pomegranates, mixed media on board 32x40cm by Issi Nash
Each week will begin with the discussion of a different artist for half an hour. Work will be made in response to this, and the session will end with a discussion of everyone’s work. The aim will be to develop you work in new, exciting and experimental ways, learning devices and techniques that can then be taken back to the studio and developed to push your work in a newly imaginative direction.
About Dan Coombs…
Coombs is a London based painter, a graduate of The Ruskin School, Oxford (1989-92) and the Royal College of Art (1992-94). He was Rome Scholar in painting British school in Rome (1994-5). He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Dan creates his compositions from studies in collage and paint, which unite his figures with entirely invented surroundings, landscape dream worlds and interior spaces. These are human encounters charged with a mysterious, symbolic power. They are explorations of guilt, beauty and fear of isolation; that draw on myth, religion and psychoanalysis in order to grasp the real within the imaginary.
The paintings of Dan Coombs have a formality of composition and balance that underpins the energy of their execution but remain deliberately left open to interpretation from the viewer. They are attempting to capture the essence of an emotional situation, to represent ideas or embody meanings. The figures have an uncanny ambiguity – they can be interpreted as emanations of the artist’s psyche, or as creatures in their own right – trapped within dreamlike, gestural landscapes of heightened colour. Solo shows include Nudes, New Art Projects, Heaven and Earth at The Fine Art Society, The Dreamers at Fred Gallery, The Garden at Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, The Cornerhouse, Manchester and The Approach Gallery, London.
