Beginning Acrylic Painting

(ART 62)

This course will train your eye to see color in new ways and give you the basic skills to translate your vision into paint on canvas. At the beginning of each class, we will view and discuss slides of paintings by such artists as Van Gogh, Monet, Sargent, Fantin-Latour, and Thiebaud. By doing so, we will develop a common vocabulary about composition, form, color, and brushwork, and we will deepen our appreciation of the creative process. Basic instruction and demonstrations in color, composition, and painting technique will be provided, with our subjects selected from a series of increasingly complicated still lifes.

The class environment is designed to provide support for students at all skill levels, though some drawing experience is required. This course will also include a visit to the instructor’s studio in Woodside.

Jim Caldwell, Artist; Architect

Jim Caldwell has been painting the California landscape for twenty years, and has published two books of his paintings, The Golden Coast: From Big Sur to the Russian River and The Golden Coast: Landscapes at the Edge of the Continent. He trained at Williams College, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and the Yale School of Architecture. His paintings appear in nearly 300 collections worldwide. He has had thirty individual shows and participated in twenty group exhibitions.