8 Thursdays £300
Experience level: All are welcome.
This course is now full. For more information on similar or the next class please contact the school.
On this online course Dan Coombs demonstrates 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 do 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.
Each week will begin with the discussion of a different artist. 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.
