£320
Exploring traditional techniques for a contemporary practice.
Experience level: All are welcome
Half term 30 May 2023
Art materials included, although we will recommend certain specialist materials and brushes to buy (the recommendations are optional).
Limited places available please book early to avoid disappointment
Over the course of 8 weeks Rosanna will guide you through constructing a painting in stages through a variety of exercises in painting the body and how these could also be applied in a variety of situations. We will look at traditional techniques such as big form modelling, refining form and using toning and glazing to create effective subtleties. We will look carefully at light logic, colour mixing, use of warms and cools to create space and building up form in stages to get increasing levels of detail, all of which will bring a new level of refinement to your work. Please bring an image or images you may like to look at and work from, this could be a photograph or painting from art history that interests you, as in parallel to doing exercises looking at art history painting and traditional techniques, Rosanna will encourage exploring how these elements can be applied to develop your own unique practice. Specialist materials are included although you will be encouraged to bring or buy your own brushes as the ones we provide are student quality. Advice on brushes will be given before the course.
About Rosanna Dean
Rosanna Dean b.1988 is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (2019), BA (Hons) Painting Camberwell College of Art (2013) and studied Old Master painting at the Angel Academy Florence.
She recently returned from Kerala, researching Theyyam ritual and Indian temples. Her practice addresses conflicting ideologies surrounding representations of the divine. Seeking to establish connections between the ways in which societies have depicted religious belief over time, she combines the features of divergent practices from East to West to create work with a contemporary spiritualism.
Dean is fascinated with the grotesque, and beauty and repulsion intermingle in her canvases. The figures become decontextualized, ambiguous, anonymous forms that hover in space. The body stripped of its individual identity becomes a vehicle for exploring shared fears and experiences. The common site where different perspectives, viewpoints and histories collide. Dean creates an open discourse in deciphering the objects on her canvas and installations, to probe our contemporary beliefs, and question what the body means to her viewer.
Having taken religious painting of the past as her starting point, Dean has spent time deeply researching how its transformative effects are achieved. Her research has led her to employ centuries old techniques of layers and glazing to achieve the desired luminosity and lifelikeness with her oils. Her most recent works re tell stories through installations and performance that ask her viewer to consider their relationship to materials and dependency on rapidly disappearing eco-systems.
She worked with Gregory Ryan alongside environmental organisations (2009-12) and with artist and activist Rashad Salim developing the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).
All images except public domain images are copyrighted to either ⓒRosanna Dean or ⓒThe Essential School of Painting
