Instructor: Stuart Shils
Thursday - Saturday
September 11 - 13
8:30am - 5pm
3 sessions, with a Wednesday evening Lecture

An immersive 3-day/hybrid studio class offering a guided series of investigative and provocative thought games in paint examining the nature of abstraction, the voice of color and the shape of observation. Focus will be on establishing a deeper empathic connection with your perception of structure and the structure of perception.

Experience level for this class is for medium range to advanced painters.

During days 1 & 2 we’ll work in acrylic paint from reproductions of older and 20th c. masters, moving through a series of guided exercises/explorations to understand that the choreography of abstraction – the structure of color and shape – is THE foundation, THE great engine behind all painting and visual thought regardless of century and, a kind of fertilizer for influencing your own evolving sense of design and visual exploration. Focus will be on the inter relationship of how we see what we see and on integrating boldness and risk into your own graphic strategies. Significant emphasis will also be placed each day on drawing interpretively as the most abstract and essential graphic language. Given the surroundings on our campus, we will also go outside occasionally for the first two days and draw from observation as a way of expanding our comfort with drawing as an analytical examination of how we can see much more so than what we see.

But this is NOT a copy class, so that rather than ‘copying’ the superficial appearance of paintings from the past or nature, our work will be more akin to excavating and digging to get inside of the structure of paintings and seeing as living presences, and learning to use subjective shorthand for describing not only what there is, but also for what and how we see what is there interpretively.

Day 3 will bring all this into focus working from a live model (not nude and not with emphasis on anatomy) but rather, emphasizing the anatomy of your own visual perception and how that relates to the graphic anatomy of the working surface in paint. Emphasis will be on the development of color mood and the model will be seen not as an isolated object, but as part of a seamless context within the studio as a color stage.

The point of all these days is experiential process and the takeaway will not be ‘finished’ trophies ready for sale at a gallery but rather, an expanded musculature for understanding how you see the world, how you look at art and how you are able to consider navigating within the possibilities of form in your own work. Finish will be explored not as a predetermined idea of other people’s expectations imposed on your own inclinations, but rather with emphasis on how you allow your visual response to develop from the inside out, improvisationally, guided by a marriage of the analytical and visually intuitive minds.

materials list

Stuart Shils (b. 1954, Philadelphia) painted from direct observation, either outside or looking through windows for 30 years and is still engaged with the pursuit of an idea of or feeling for landscape, only now it’s not so much about looking out as with looking in.

There were solo shows in New York, Philadelphia, Tel Aviv, Boston, Scottsdale, Richmond, San Francisco and Cork (Ireland). Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship for Residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Critical review and commentary appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines, including: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Sun, Ha’aretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Brooklyn Rail, artcritical.com, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Irish Times, Art in America, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Art New England, The Hudson Review and The Philadelphia Daily News.

For more than a decade Shils was an annual visiting critic at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) and for 15 years was a weekly critic at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) where he also taught painting classes. Years ago he worked with the master class at the Jerusalem Studio School (JSS) in Italy and Jerusalem. Between 1994 and 2006, Shils spent 13 long summers on the northwest coast of Ireland, an extended painting campaign described in the PBS film documentary, “Ballycastle,” which was presented internationally and won numerous awards, including First Place for Documentary Excellence, Society for Professional Journalists.

Shils studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Arthur de Costa and Seymour Remenick and at the Philadelphia College of Art (UARTS) with Francis Tucker, Doris Staffel and Eugene Baguskas.