Instructor: Christopher Volpe
Monday - Friday
July 22 - 26
9am - 12pm
5 sessions

Many workshops teach abstracting the landscape, abstracting still life, or abstracting the figure but fail to say why. Enjoy loosening your brush and letting go of perfection, but let’s do it in service of something meaningful. Likening painting to poetry, this workshop teaches how to let go of fear and use your materials as instruments of emotion and ideas. Passionately create, discuss, destroy, and create again as you forge a personal visual language of memory, history, and metaphor. Connect to a wider audience through form, color, shape, and composition not for their own sake but as expressions of meaningful content. Class consists of a slide lecture, demos, exercises, tutored practice at the easel, and group collaboration.

Christopher Volpe is an artist, writer, and teacher in New Hampshire. His paintings often combine oil paint with unusual materials such as tar, ash, salt, and gold leaf for their poetic and political overtones. His work is collected internationally and held in the permanent collections of Smith College, New England College, the Whistler House Museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and various private individuals and corporations. Grants and awards include the MassMoCA/Assets for Artists, the NH State Council on the Arts, and the Saint Botolph Club Foundation. 

His work can be viewed online at www.christophervolpe.com.