The Structure of the Visual Moment: Honing Perceptual Craft A Three-day Outdoor Painting Intensive

The Structure of the Visual Moment: Honing Perceptual Craft

A Three-day Outdoor Painting Intensive

Intermediate and Advanced Workshop

Stuart Shils

During this three day workshop, we focus on cultivating perceptual discrimination and visual clarity by understanding close, critical looking at nature and the relation of observation to constructing a drawing or painting. We ask ourselves exactly what we are seeing, how we are seeing it, and then what to make of it on the working surface. The workshop is intended to push the intermediate to advanced painter further into a kind of visual boot camp, each day consists of a concentrated and comprehensive work schedule, but also fun and productive. In the tradition/spirit of “first strike” or direct attack, emphasis will be placed on examining the perceptual processes in front of nature, the editorial response that follows in the head of the painter and how that takes form graphically, and perhaps most importantly, on shaking up and/or questioning what is meant by “finished”. We will not be concerned with making anything “pretty”, saleable or “trophy” like. With painting, one never really gets a trophy anyway – it’s always work in progress.

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