One Week Holiday Course | Painting a Head

Overview

Painting portraits has challenged artists for over 2,000 years and this enduring fascination continues to thrive, long after the invention of photography. This course focuses on combining the practical aspects of applying paint on canvas with the intuitive, emotional, and expressive responses inherent to painting a fellow human being: the depiction of the head as form existing in space, as portrait, as well as the relationship between painter and sitter. Students are offered the chance to make sustained portrait paintings over several days as well as shorter studies. Emphasis will be placed on colour mixing, temperature, tone and mark making, varieties of palettes and methods relevant to an individual student’s practice. Examples will be given from artists both historical and contemporary: Valasquez to Dumas, Edouard Manet to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.