Principles of Landscape Painting

Learn the foundations of successful plein air landscape painting in a storied and picturesque setting. Guided instruction will address theories of value, mass, composition, representing light and color, optical effects encountered outdoors, perspective, and more. Morning demonstrations will include painting basics, from composition to completion of individual landscape paintings. Artist Patrick Okrasinski will employ both academic and Impressionist principles, sharing how to incorporate these into independent and original landscape paintings.

Students who participate in both Workshop series will explore the curriculum concepts in depth, while working on a multi-day landscape painting. The process of making a successful landscape painting, from pencil sketch to color-comp study to a larger work of art, will be demonstrated and explained.

Taking place in the historic town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, the “home of American Impressionism,” the Workshop will build connections between 19th-century academic training, Impressionism, New England schools of painting at the turn of the century, and representational painting today.

NOTE: Workshop enrollment will include a tour of the historic grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the original boarding house for artists where American Impressionism began. This one-hour event will be led by Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D., Principal Art Historian at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, and will be scheduled during Workshop hours.

Patrick Okrasinski first enrolled at the former US branch of the Florence Academy of Art in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2016, where he studied drawing and painting under Jordan Sokol, Amaya Gurpide, Edmond Rochat, Stephen Bauman, and Cornelia Hermes. There he practiced traditional skills-based methods while simultaneously pursuing landscape painting.

During the summer of 2019, Patrick spent three months as Artist-in-Residence in Giverny, working at Monet’s gardens and in the surrounding French countryside, made famous by the Impressionists.

In 2020 Patrick was awarded the prestigious Donald Jurney Traveling Fellowship, which allowed him to pursue his artistic and academic studies in the great historic and cultural centers of Europe. In 2021, he was part of a select group of painters accepted into the Hudson River Fellowship at Wethersfield, CT.

Dates:
Week 1: Monday, May 16 – Friday, May 20, 9am-4pm
Week 2: Monday, May 23 – Friday, May 27, 9am-4pm