Six evenings in the studio with the figure, working from the living model for four of them and from everything else that carries a likeness for the rest.
26 Oct | 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Nov
The figure is the oldest subject in painting and still the least settled. Over six evenings you will approach it from both directions at once, the systematic and the inventive, drawing and painting the body as it is and as it might be.
A model sits for four of the six evenings. The other two turn to photographs, film stills, your own drawings, memory and imagination, where a figure can be pushed, stretched and reinvented with no sitter in the room. Working across both is the point. Each keeps the other honest.
The course leaves deliberate room for the unexpected and the expressive. You should finish with a small varied body of work and a wider sense of what a figure painting can be.
What you will work on
- Painting and drawing from the live model
- Portrait and full figure, treated as one enquiry rather than two
- Working from photographs, film stills, drawings, memory and imagination
- Systematic observation set against experimental and expressive approaches
- Individual guidance at the easel and group discussion of the work
