Kieran Stiles Visual Thinking

Visual Thinking

Mixed Media / Landscape - Materials included

We haven’t scheduled this course yet. Please email us to register your interest for future availability.

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Course details

As artists, where do we get ideas from? Who are our artist mentors? And how can we learn how to transform our ideas into action?

Kieran Stiles Visual Thinking
Kieran Stiles

In this three day course, artist Kieran Stiles will share with you a liberating practical and analytical process to form a foundation for painting. This is about understanding the reasons why an image may be successful or unsuccessful. Exploring ideas around the framework of how we understand visual images are crucial to any painting practice. 

The course is about equipping you with a supporting structure to assist your creative process that can help you build momentum when you are working on your own.

The landscape surrounding us in St Ives will be our starting point with its rugged coastline and expanse of sea and sky. Explore how to mix watercolour, gouache, oil bar, coloured pencils, graphite, and pens with sponges, rags and palette knife in a textural and spontaneous way in a sketchbook. This way of working can allow for great freedom of expression and is a very immediate way of gathering ideas outside and inside the studio, creating a rich resource to build more sustained pieces from later in your own time. Over your three days with Kieran the focus will be on gathering and developing ideas in a sketchbook format, creating a rich resource to be inspired from in the future.

Part of the course will include a group visit to Tate St Ives to explore an analytical framework of visual thinking which can help us examine in a non-subjective way the value of the characteristics of the other artworks. This process can give you insights into understanding how artists control and guide our perceptions.

Kieran Stiles Visual Thinking
Kieran Stiles visual thinking art course charcoal seascape in a scketchbook

What will I learn?

  1. Understand the reasons an image is successful or not.
  2. Explore how to mix a range of media to create textural and spontaneous responses to the landscape in your sketchbook.
  3. Learn a more immediate way of gathering ideas inside and outside of the studio.
  4. Build confidence in a freer and more expressive way of working.
  5. Gain insights into how other artists control and guide our perceptions through their artworks.

Visual Thinking

Mixed Media / Landscape – Materials included

We haven’t scheduled this course yet. Please email us to register your interest for future availability.

Register Interest

Taught by

Kieran
Stiles

View Kieran’s Work

My enthusiasm for teaching is about fostering a creative community and trying to be helpful and useful to fellow creative people. At the foundation of this is a friendly nurturing environment, where exploring ideas through the experimentation of materials and techniques can help creativity thrive, and encourage a personal way of painting and seeing.  

What to Bring

Our studios are fully equipped and we provide you with all the materials you need for your course. However, if you have a favourite set of brushes or any specialist materials that you would prefer to use, please bring them with you.

Timings and Breaks

The first day starts at 10am and finishes at 4.30pm, please aim to arrive ten to fifteen minutes before the start time.

All course days after that start at 9.30am and finish at 4pm and there will be an hour for lunch. There are plenty of nearby places to eat and we will serve tea and coffee at break times during the day.

What our students say

I have done other courses at the school… and each time have enjoyed myself immensely! I will definitely be booking another course and highly recommend it to others, no matter what stage they are at.

Kieran was patient, knowledgeable and encouraging. He praised your strengths and helped to develop skills that you weren’t so confident with.

FAQs

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