Letter From the Instructors
Dear Fellow Artist:
2009 will be the thirteenth year that we have presented The Intensive Studies Seminar—a program unlike any other you have ever attended. The planning of our seminar is a group effort by the five of us. Each of us brings a slightly different approach to painting and teaching, but our basic teaching philosophies are the same: to help each participant find and develop his or her own personally expressive way to paint. Our program is unique.
If you haven’t been to our seminar before, we would like to tell you a little bit about it. We designed this 10-day seminar for developing painters who are ready to move beyond the typical watermedia workshop approach that emphasizes techniques and a narrow choice of concepts. We’re different. With five instructors bringing five different perspectives, we offer each participant a multitude of choices in direction and concept.
We don’t emphasize technique (although we’ll offer help if you need it), and we don’t expect you to be a master of the medium. If you have a few years of painting experience, that’s enough. We do emphasize concept—what you’re going to do with your technique to express your ideas, interests, and feelings. We’ll offer you (in our studio instruction, personal critiques, and slide presentations) a variety of approaches to choose from and will suggest numerous ways you can employ color and design to make a more effective and creative painting. As we rotate from group to group, we’ll offer individual instruction, suggestions, and technical help. We’ll help you identify what you want to do and why, and then offer suggestions on how to do it.
In short, this seminar is about the way you paint (or want to paint) and not about the way we paint. And none of us believes there is a hierarchy in painting, that non-objective painting is superior to more realistic styles (or the reverse). We’ll help you make the choices that will be the most satisfying to you.
The title Intensive Studies Seminar may sound a little daunting, and the painters who attend do work hard. But the feeling in the studio is one of excitement and enthusiasm; the participants are supportive and non-competitive. It’s a unique opportunity to learn and grow as an artist. We hope you will join us.
Sincerely,
Fran Larsen, Toph Schink, Skip Lawrence, Katherine Liu, and Alex Powers