3-Day Figure Painting in Oils: Exploring the Intensity of Color with a Limited Palette with Jenifer Balkan (January 2019)
DATE - Friday, January 25 - Sunday, January 27, 2019
TIME - 9AM-4PM
PRICE - $485
In this class, students will improve upon their overall approach to painting the figure with an emphasis on brush control, paint mixing, and color harmony. We will approach painting by learning to see our environment as composed of simple shapes and values, laydown shadow and light masses with confident brushwork which will lead to stronger visual statements and weightier painting. Students will work from a model, beginning with short poses in monochrome and gradually work up to longer sessions in full color enabling them to make quicker decisions leading to a more intuitive approach when handling the paint. This class is designed for all levels of painters who have life drawing experience. Jennifer Balkan will be doing demonstrations throughout the workshop and students will be working from a live model.
Our goal is to see the figure as an abstract composite of dark and light shapes (values) in order to create a strong value statement and to get it proportionally accurate, both of which will contribute to a compelling composition and statement of light and shadow. We will begin our study doing simple three-value shades using a monochromatic palette in order to focus solely on values. We will later discuss color; specifically, some color theory, color harmony and choosing a palette. We will mix paint together, afterwards we will do limited palette studies, beginning with very short poses and increasing time.
About Jennifer
Jennifer is originally from new Jersey in between the Holland Tunnel and the Jersey Shore. She studied Behavioral Neuroscience at Leigh University in Pennsylvania. She later worked in Seattle serving the mentally ill and developmentally disabled population. From Seattle she moved to Austin to study Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas. After working several years as a Social Scientist, she threw herself into oil painting and now paints fervently.
“My paintings are emotionally based psychological narratives where the details lie in planes of color. I choose to exaggerate color, in a sense break up a color field into its constitute colors, directing the viewer to particular areas by applying juicy bits of heavily saturated color. I strive to capture emotional states more than anything else, purposefully laying strokes down to create the illusion of an outer physical topography that houses an inner one of the soul. Though it is a cerebral concept that motivates me, the process of painting is superior to all else. Once I begin a painting, my interaction with the panel takes on a life of its own; it transcends whatever I can actually say about the painting once it is finished. Like some kind of meditation, I always hope to remain in this state during the entirety of my painting experience though life’s chatter gets in the way at times. When I can exist in that sweet place for much of the time when I am painting, I can say that my work is honest.”
