Perception and Senses - A two day workshop

The workshop consists of two sessions Sunday 24th and Monday 25th of August 10.00am- 4.00pm (on-site)Cost £190

• Enhance Your Perceptual Painting: Develop deeper observational skills and fresh visual perspectives.
• Acquire New Creative Techniques: Learn innovative exercises to challenge and expand your artistic approach.
• Collaborative Learning: Gain inspiration and insights through group discussions and feedback.
• Lifelong Skills: Acquire valuable tools for continued artistic growth and unique personal expression.

Tutor: Suzon Lagarde

Painting life? Painting reality? Sounds like a beautiful yet impossible quest - how could one ever grasp on a flat surface, through fixed colours and shapes, an experience that is of multiple dimensions, woven through the senses, referencing outer worlds as much as inner consciousness? And yet, astounding paintings have been created - some that feel just right. What is it then? What informs those paintings that manage to go beyond representation, visual poems which move away from what we see and believe to know, connecting us instead with the mystery of our felt experience.

Throughout history, artists have tried to depict reality and made it more and more convincing thanks to break-through in techniques and modality of observation. Advances in technology regularly threaten to make art redundant and yet push artists to go beyond. We’re now finding ourselves in a time where our phone camera can take incredibly sharp pictures and AI has too started to emulate images. If these tools are now feeding us with an abundance of images, “capturing” what we see; maybe it’s time to move away from studious realism and to look into How we see and What we feel? It’s our chance to get curious about those fleeting and singular experiences, always with us yet most of the time over-looked and replaced by projections.

If you too feel curious, let’s get together on this 2-day workshop, dive into the here and now…and see if we can paint it! Through a range of playful and ambitious exercises, we’ll put our habits to the side for a moment (or forever!), observing anew, getting intrigued by how our vision works, how our inner mental world works, and explore ways to challenge our senses.

Expect to paint a lot, and above all to feel a lot. Working in a group will offer us the chance to discuss our varied experiences and get inspired by one another. The exercices we will have explored together will be in our artist tool box for life, whether with a brush in hand or just sitting on a bench, observing the world anew.

Sunday - What we observe, what we retainExercises on memory, painting with delay and repetition. Getting aware of what we remember gives us direct feedback into what we observe. Memory is a room beautifully filled with who we are, what moved us - tuning into that and learning how to strengthen this muscle.

Monday - Where do we observe from?Thinking about viewpoint, movement and field of view. If our experience goes beyond the visual movie going on in front of our eyes, how can we paint the source of this observation? What is this vision like anyway? What is blurry, what is sharp, what moves and gets distorted, what happens when we blink our eyes or relax our vision?

About Suzon LagardeNomadic French painter with a background in 3D modelling for video games, Suzon lived for 6 years in London before deciding to travel around the UK to paint. She had paintings selected in the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019) where she was awarded of the Leatherseller's Prize twice; into the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (2020) and Royal Institute of Oil painters annual exhibition (2019). Finalist on the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Prize (2018) and Pebeo Mixed Media Prize (2017-2018), she appeared on TV in two seasons of Portrait Artist of the Year, painting the actresses Geraldine James and Mirren Mack and in Landscape Artist of the Year 2023. https://suzonlagarde.com| @suzonlagarde