Ken Kewley, Abstraction for Realists: Working From The Model, Drawing, Painting

With abstraction as your starting point, you will explore abstraction of the figure, still life, and  landscape. The statements, ‘you cannot make it up’ and ‘you must make it up’ will be your  guide.  Students will create collages with cut colored paper so as to push your understanding of color and form and learn to make adjustments to your paintings. What you put down on your paper or canvas are real things that you will adjust just as you adjust objects in a still life. You will also make sculptures to further develop your understanding of space. Using corrugated  cardboard, masking tape, and acrylic paint you will create small stage settings with figures drawn from your work with the model and then continue to draw, paint, and collage from these 3D sculptures. In doing so, a path from copying to composing is cleared. The workshop will equip you with many ways to push your figurative work, with or without a live model, without losing the abstraction,. Kewley graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a night watchman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1980-1990 and considers this a major part of his education.  In New York his work has been exhibited at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Lori Bookstein Fine Art and Pavel Zoubok. He teaches workshops and lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Hollins University, University of Arkansas, National Academy of Design, and the Jerusalem Studio School, including the Italian Summer Program. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Sun, ARTnews, and the New York Observer and included in many private and public collections. An exhibition of his new work will be held March 2015 at Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv.