Landscape Painting Course Overview
Thursday, March 1, 2012
This is a six-week class meeting four times a week for 90 minutes.
This course is time spent studying the technique of outdoor painting in oils striving for the color perception exhibited by French and American Impressionist painters.
Sequence
The students first watch as I demonstrate by painting out of doors the Charles Hawthorne/Henry Hensche technique of applying pure oil colors right out of the tube to the canvas with a palette knife, then mixing and relating the colors with each other. We also look at a slides demonstrating Hensche’s method of impressionist landscape painting. The students paint at least two and possibly four scenes directly from nature out of doors, both a gray day and sunny day version of each, returning at the same time each day to study the color. They stand up to paint at easels, juggling their palette knives, paper towels, and an egg carton filled with oil color to paint. (When wind is added to the formula, it can be quite trying to concentrate on color relationships.) They are evaluated on their progress in seeing color, their work ethic, and the rightness of the color relationships in their paintings.