Emily Eveleth, Painting Workshop, The Painted Object, Transformation Through Presentation

How can you take an ordinary object, that one right in front of you, and make it extraordinary?  Merging the analytical and the intuitive, thinking and playing, this workshop will be a time to invent, explore and experiment.  Putting aside the idea of making finished, perfect paintings we will take all possibilities at our finger tips—placement, gesture, composition, line, color, thick luscious paint – and create a wealth of feeling with painted subjects by expanding our ideas of presentation.

Working primarily from observation, each day will start with quick thumbnail sketches and fast, loose oil studies to get things rolling.  With these we will explore strategies that move an idea, an emotion, a feeling from its initial dynamic impulse to a flesh and blood painting.  Interspersed will be short discussions on topics ranging from historical ideas of beauty, the grotesque, the abject, the sublime.  Class time will be mainly focused on careful looking and intensely focused painting.  A central still life with a variety of objects will be provided.  In addition students are encouraged to bring a few objects of their own to add to the mix, one chosen for its meaning the other for its looks.  

The aim of this workshop is to be both conceptually provocative and technically informative  – a no-holds bared investigation into our individual and collective understanding of what painting an object can mean.  Working in oils is suggested, but not required, and a lively curiosity is a must.

Emily Eveleth has been eliminating boundaries between genres and finding vulnerability, humor, pathos and sensuality in the most unlikely of subjects for twenty years. She is represented by Danese/Corey, New York, and the Miller Yezerski Gallery, Boston.  Recent solo shows include a ten year painting survey at the Smith College Museum of Art.   Her works can be found the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  and the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, among others. They have been featured in shows at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, the Katonah Museum of Art and the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY.   She has received grants from the Art Matters Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts and  she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.   Her next solo show will be with Danese/Corey, New York.