There are no available registration dates at this time.

NOTE: This class will be held in a live, online format using the Zoom Platform. 

Class meets Mondays 1-3pm ET from March 7 to March 28 + 1:1 Crits with instructor as needed  

Learn to use nature as a metaphor for feeling, creating lush, dynamic works laden with ambience of hue and movement, and through the manipulation of photographic image, a vague suggestion of landscape that sometimes morphs into nothingness.  

René Magritte once said that there are no answers in paintings. Just questions. 

Questions are seated in the critical discourse of the duality of realism and abstraction, prompted by the enormous power of visual imaging within our current culture of chaos, loss, pain, and anger — and the hopeful yet vulnerable comfort of nature, which we must value, rescue, preserve and embrace.

There will be two sessions:

The Cosmic Landscape I 

February 7th – 28th

The Cosmic Landscape II 

March 7th – 28th

Students can take one without the other. Or both. Each workshop is designed to access a full range of sensory experience through visual  imaging – painting, drawing, photography – allowing us to capture something unexpected, perhaps even ephemeral.  We will meet for group discussions on Mondays, in addition to 1:1 crits with the instructor, creating petite yet powerful bodies of fresh works. All levels welcome. This course will be live, via Zoom, from Kate’s Maine studio.

Students should be prepared with:

  • Edits of digital images they hope to work on
  • Floor or desktop easel, or wall mount from which to work
  • Traditional drawing and marking materials
  • Wet media: inks, shellac inks, oil or acrylic paint, appropriate tools and mediums
  • Blank page notebook for drawing, writing and recording perception

 

Students should also anticipate having two digital images printed on substrate (foam, stretched canvas, or metal) as the course evolves.  Image selections for these will be made after the course starts.

Foundation level studio art experience or understanding is highly recommended.

 

Photo credits:

Banner: Kate Beck, Lisboa 2015

Kate Beck, Italia. Digital C-print, Oil Paint, Technical Embellishment. 2021

Steve Harp, Untitled. Over-painted Photograph, 2021

Janice Weingrod, Untitled. Over-Painted Photograph, 2021

Heather Walsh, Thought Bubbles, Over-Painted and Layered Photograph, 2021

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Instructor: Kate Beck

Katherine Beck is an American painter and writer. A constant investigation into light and space has been my aesthetic experience with visual art. My works materialize through formalistic criteria of organized scale, color, and spontaneous brushwork, engaging historical techniques of oil painting within conditions of 20th-century American abstraction. I am influenced by traditions in landscape painting, particularly the Hudson River School, as well as the nuance of color and perspective developed in late 14th-17th century Flemish, Netherlandish, and northern Italian painting.

Recent fascinations include experimentation with lens-based image in the landscape, including conceptualization by overpainting, presenting fresh opportunities for feeling and illusionistic space, and furthering the obscurity of realism, and the nature of abstraction.

Kate has been collaborating, creating, and exhibiting her work within the United and States and Europe for over twenty years. She is a recipient of professional grants from the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art Covid 19 Artist Relief Fund in New York. She is a BAU Institute Fellow (New York, Italy, France), and has collaborated with poet laureate, Thomas A Clark, Scotland; Berg, Jones, & Sarvis (performance), USA; Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Germany; The Newlyn Gallery & Exchange, UK; parisCONCRET, France; and Peter Foolen Editions, The Netherlands; and in New York with September Gallery; MinusSpace; Masters & Pelavin; OK Harris Fine Art; The Drawing Center; and Kentler International Drawing Space, among others.

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