2026 Workshop Series – My thoughts about these workshop choices
I have crafted and molded these workshops to address the areas in creative painting that have, over the years, proven to be the most effective. Painting is a unique art form unto itself, and recently, I'm afraid that oil painting has been stripped of its true strength: creating rich, unique color fields that seem to emanate light and entertain the eye. It has become flat decorative abstract doodles, abstract color design to augment a room's décor, tight illustrative documentation of faces or places, deep dark landscapes that belong in my grandparents' drawing room. Oil painting is a wonderfully expressive tool used to enhance one's visual pleasures.
Building the painting as a child would build with blocks—big supports on the base layer, middle size blocks on top to form a sturdy structure, and finishing with the smallest subject accents; the beauty that the viewer first sees. The first element that a viewer sees should be the last marks the painter applies. These workshops are designed to address skills needed to make art, not simply paint pictures.
Since I feel all of these topics are essential to our artistic development, I recommend choosing the date that best suits your availability—or, if you'd like to focus on growth, select a workshop that addresses a specific skill you want to strengthen.
Each session runs Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. and explores a different aspect of our craft:
January 6-8 | The Layering Process
A necessary methodology that best allows for creativity
January 27-29 | Color Theory
This is the attraction the hook that separates our work from other painters, the ability to create tone, atmosphere, emotion by simply limiting our palettes
February 17-19 | Follow the Leader: Low Country
Exercises the artist's ability to accent and emphasize the small vertical shapes that the layperson fails to notice--reenforce and control eye movement by using the unique beauty and icons of the marsh
March 3-5 | Small Panels and Paper Workshop
Strengthens our application and singularity of brush stroke and knife work
March 17-19 | Follow the Leader: High Country
Enabling us to see the diminishing "U" shapes that recede and create the illusion of depth without overly relying on individual item description
April 14-16 | Trees
Reinforces the variety of uses this strong vertical shape of individual trunk or the collective copse of trees plays in our interpretation of the landscape
May 5-7 | Abstract and Abstract Floral
A necessary methodology that best allows for creativity, variety of mark making and tools, the first introduction to mimicking nature’s rhythms and colors not merely copying them
May 19-21 | Water: Prismatic Progressions
The most obvious and useful device the painter can utilize to move the viewer's eye in a specific direction besides providing genuine beauty
June 2-4 | Figures in the Landscape
Like trees these strong and magnetic shapes serve to attract and therefore distract so that we can make magic more acceptably in other areas of our paintings.
Date T-B-D | Faces
Simply fun!