This workshop will focus on cultivating perceptual discrimination and visual clarity by practicing critical looking at nature and the relation of that looking to constructing a drawing or painting. We will ask what we are seeing, how we are seeing, and then how to translate that to paper, panel or canvas. The class is intended to push the mid- range to advanced painter further -- into a visual boot camp, which is also fun and productive.  In the tradition and spirit of the “first strike” or alla prima, emphasis will be placed on;

1) Examining the perceptual processes in front of nature 
2) The editorial response that follows and how that takes form graphically 
3) Perhaps most importantly, on shaking up and/or questioning what is meant by “finish”. 

We’re not concerned with making anything “pretty”, sale - able or trophy-winning.  With painting, one never really gets a trophy anyway – it’s always work in progress. In addition to three full day outdoor sessions, on the evening before the first day there will be a 90 minute slide talk presenting paintings and drawings made by past and modern masters, to lay out a foundation of visual themes for the next three days. (All participants should please attend, it will be impossible to go over the same ground the next day.) Shils will discuss how, via graphic organization, we look and make sense of construction, paint and drawing language, and how different artists have used the processes of working outside (both directly and in the studio) to achieve visual unity in their responses.

Shils (b. 1954), Philadelphia, has painted outside for more than 30 years. His paintings are represented by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York, Davis and Langdale, New York and Rothchild Fine Art in Tel Aviv.  Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship for Residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been presented in solo shows in New York, Philadelphia, Tel Aviv, Boston, Scottsdale, Richmond, San Francisco and Cork (Ireland).  Critical review and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Sun, Ha'aretz, The Jerusalem Post, Art Critical.com, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Irish Times, Art in America, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Art New England, American Artist, The Hudson Review and The Philadelphia Daily News. He is an annual visiting critic at the Vermont Studio Center and a weekly critic at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)where he also teaches painting and drawing.  Shils has also teaches the master class for the Jerusalem Studio School in Italy and Jerusalem.   Shils spent 13 summers painting on the northwest coast of Ireland, an extended painting campaign described in the PBS film documentary, “Ballycastle,” which won numerous awards, including First Place for Documentary Excellence, Society for Professional Journalists. Shils studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Seymour Remenick and at the Philadelphia College of Art.