Art Appreciation: An Introduction to How to Look at Paintings.

In this three-hour session, we will discuss what we do in front of paintings. This short session aims to be practical and useful, as it is designed to give you some keys to be more confident in your appreciation of paintings.

This session is arranged in three parts, with two short comfort breaks.

The first hour will be on painting techniques and the materials of a painting. We will seek to answer the following questions: What is the painting we are looking at made of? How was it made? And how does the technique affect the appearance of the work, We will look at supports (canvas, wood, plaster), tools, and pigments. We will learn about oil painting, egg tempera, watercolour, and fresco painting.

The second hour will be on the visual elements of a painting: light, colour, space, line, scale, texture, and more. When we look at a painting, what should we look at? How do our eyes pick on certain colours and patterns of lines? What is “composition”?

Finally, in the third and last hour, we will consider paintings that you will have chosen and submitted beforehand, and we will discuss them together. Ahead of the session, you will receive an email asking you to select a painting that’s in a public collection that you like or find surprising or beautiful... We will apply all we learned in the first two hours while looking at your selected paintings.