Life Painting: Perception and the Sustained Pose (Summer School Short Course)

At the start of the first week, you'll take part in a collaborative creative process to decide on the model poses and colour environments. These poses will then be fixed and sustained for the full two weeks.

Conversation and one-to-one tuition will be offered on issues specific to the experience of a sustained visual exchange, such as:

• perceptual shifts taking place between the artist and subject
• colour mixing
• tone and temperature
• form and the role of structure in terms of proportion and spatial relationships

The course will also include discussions, slide talks, workshops and invited speakers. These will act as a catalyst to exchange, discover and articulate ideas which inform and unfold from this particular activity.

Perceptual issues will be considered and contextualised in relation to recent developments in the neuroscience of vision. (This includes ideas about optics in relation to illusion and the imagination.)

You'll explore the practice of ‘painting from appearances’ and the various strategies employed by artists working in this way to enrich the experience of making a sustained painting from the life model.