About the Workshop
Painting the Landscape from Photos – using oil, acrylics, or gouache
Two-Day Oil Painting Workshop
In this two-day studio workshop, we will explore the art of painting the landscape from photographs, focusing on the essential elements that bring a painting to life: color, light, temperature, and atmosphere. Working from the same reference photograph, each artist will have the opportunity to interpret the landscape in their own way while exploring how color relationships, warm and cool tones, and the effects of light can create a compelling sense of place.
Our goal is to create paintings that are both loose yet descriptive, capturing the character and feeling of the landscape without becoming overly detailed or photographic. We will focus on simplifying shapes, establishing strong value relationships, making confident brushstrokes, and using color to convey depth and atmosphere. Through demonstrations, individual painting time, and group discussion, we will examine how to suggest detail with economy and keep the painting fresh, expressive, and painterly.
Whether you are looking to strengthen your understanding of color and light or develop a more confident, expressive approach to landscape painting, this workshop will encourage you to look beyond the details of a photograph and discover the underlying structure, beauty, and spirit of the landscape.
Workshop Media: Oil, acrylic, or gouache paint
Artist Statement
Brian grew up in New York and moved to California in 1980 and was soon enrolled in the School of Arts at the United States International University, in San Diego. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and received his BFA in 1983 and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Commercial Art. During his years as an Art Director in Southern California, Brian had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the United States and Asia increasing his awareness and appreciation for all types of art grew with each trip. Each museum visited and every gallery opening brought new and exciting works of art into his mental portfolio, but he was always drawn back to the artists and paintings created in the very place he resided, namely the California Impressionists of the first half of the 20th century.
Weekly visits to the Irvine Museum in Orange County helped broaden Brian’s knowledge and appreciation of these outstanding artists and he knew this was the type of work he wanted to pursue with his own oil paintings. He quickly immersed himself in the Plein Air movement that was growing in Southern California and within months he was showing his work in a gallery in Laguna Beach, the seaside town where many of the early California painters lived and worked.
A trip to New York in the summer of 1995 proved to be a turning point in Brian’s painting career. He was given a private tour of the Brooklyn Museum’s John Singer Sargent’s watercolor collection. Sargent was a major inspiration and the experience at the museum helped solidify Brian’s artistic vision for his own work. He began to approach his painting with the California and French Impressionists movements and Sargent’s work in mind.
Brian began teaching painting classes at the Palos Verdes Art Center in California in 2001. In 2003 he moved to North Carolina and within a few years to Virginia where he resides today. His work is displayed throughout the United Staes at Art Festivals and Exhibits and he continues to teach painting workshops in Ireland, Italy, France, Spain and various destinations inthe United States.
Brian’s work has found its way into hundreds of private collections in the US and abroad as well as corporate collections such as The Norfolk Southern Corporation in Norfolk, Virginia, The Bank of Hampton Roads in Norfolk, Virginia and The Lincoln Financial Group in Richmond, Virginia. The breadth and complexity of his work grows stronger each year, as does his subject matter with the continuation of painting trips to Europe and travel within the US.