Acrylic painting workshop

Inspired by the painting of Merlin James, this workshop will guide participants in using traditional and contemporary techniques of applying and working with acrylic paint. During the first part of the class, we will build up a composition using techniques such as working wet on wet, applying paint in a series of thin glaze-like layers, and experimenting with mediums including sawdust and plaster. An intuitive approach to perspective will be taken, employing fluid linear marks to describe spatial distance. Using a constructed scene set up in the gallery as a starting point to paint from, we will work towards making a pictorial space that incorporates both observation and invention.

The latter part of the class will introduce the option to deconstruct the paintings both critically and physically: etch into and incise the surface, begin treating the canvas like an object rather than a painting by working on the reverse or altering the shape of the frame.

Materials are included but participants may bring their own.
Weather permitting, this workshop will be outdoors in the Parasol unit garden.

Anna Ilsley (1982) was born in Hertfordshire, England. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art Painting from Brighton University in 2006, and in 2008/9 took part in a traveling residency to draw the land as it evolved from England into Bangladesh.

Completing her Post Graduate Diploma at The Prince’s Drawing School in 2010, Anna then travelled by land, sea and air from England to Svalbard in the High Arctic to make observational drawings in 2011. She exhibited with Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA 2011-12 and with Creative Cities at the Barbican in 2012, and was recently awarded the arts bursary from British School at Greece, which will involve a residency in Greece in September 2013. She is currently working on a series of transportable and permanent murals based on ancient tropical worlds, and paints from her studio in Bow, London.

Image: Courtesy of Anna Ilsley