Thinking Visually in the Key of Play w/Stuart Shils

When we arrive at a difficult place in the studio, are we comfortable being outside the comfort zone and then, where do we turn to make decisions about what’s next?

Are we willing to RISK diving deep into an instinctual response with no care for right or wrong? And how do we construct the confidence to risk acting intuitively?

PLAY isn’t about acting like a child but rather, the cultivated, intentional, consolidation of everything we know and everything we don’t know which is just as important as ‘knowing’. Play is the way we pay attention to the cultivation of off leash curiosity.

PLAY requires relearning how to forget all the regimentation, rules, techniques that we’ve been ‘taught’, and GETTING TOTALLY LOST IS THE PRIMARY WAY FORWARD to the pace where illumination can occur IF we get out of our own way.

a few questions to consider:

- do you ever forget who you are?

- how do you see what you don’t know is there?

- are you able to find your way without knowing the way?

- are you making it up as you go or sticking to formulas someone taught?

-where is the source of your decision making?

-do you recognize ‘accidents’ as full of possibility or do you marginalize them, playing it safe with recipes and rules?

- how many questions can go unanswered and which ones do you pay attention to?

This class is devoted to developing, toughening, and honing your visual confidence, and not to making pretty pictures that galleries might want.

Instead, we will address observation in the studio as a path of interrogation and curiosity with no fixed or predetermined sense of destination and certainly no ‘correct’ idea of ‘finish’ or what the paining is supposed to look like.

An observationally rooted painting is not only about what is seen, but also about you, your felt point of view and most importantly, what is evolving on your working surface. Many of us are so busy doing what we think is correct that cannot hear what the painting wants.

On day 1, before painting, some foundational emphasis will be placed on drawing as the critical choreographic fuel for the visual thought engine. Painting IS drawing, but most of us don’t draw as a daily finding our way process.

For two days we will work with a clothed model but not for ‘anatomy’ and, the overall space will also be a consideration, painting with acrylic paint on paper. Acrylic dries quickly, is less toxic in the air than oil and for those of us who think that oil paint is the most serious approach and acrylic less so, it will give us another way of considering what is possible.

There will be many unexpected exercises to stimulate your visual imagination including working at times, collaboratively.

a participant’s response to a recent class:

Stuart’s workshop takes you on a path of discovery of your own resources as a painter. With the focus on a few paramount concepts and by means of powerful tools, one learns that the key to painting lies in asking the right questions. From the technical (where is the light, what shape is the light, what temperature is the shadow…), to the gestalt (what can I do without, what is missing, how does it feel), to the philosophical (what should I paint and why should i), to the existential (what is the meaning). I feel like I went hoping for a fish and I came back with a fishing rod.’

IM