Last week we continued the series: Giving a contemporary face to ancient cultures. We explored the work of British born, Dubai based Anglo/Indian artist, Sacha Jafri. His phenomenally meteoric rise in the art world is unprecedented. Sacha Jafri’s career began as a teen...

This week we traveled back several centuries to visit the artist Johannes Vermeer, in the city of Delft, Holland. The class did sketches and studies while several students modeled and recreated the pose "the Girl with the Pearl Earring".  They had the mini- experience...

This week, to celebrate early signs of Spring and Mardi Gras, I selected the colorful and lively work of Gillian Ayres. She was an English painter best known for her large, vividly colored abstract paintings and prints. She was one of the leading abstract painters of h...

In celebration of Black History Month, we were inspired by the incomparable Wangari Maathai: Enviornmentalist, Activist, Mother, Professor, Politician, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was born in the small village of Ihithe, in the central highlands of the colony of...

While waiting for the full burst of Spring, I thought it would be nice to have some color this week, so I chose the work of contemporary Spanish artist Jose Merello for our lesson. Inspired by his lively paintings, the class did some of their best work this year. Born...

Our focus last week was chalk pastel studies. We saw examples of drawings by three Masters who pioneered the media:

Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Toulouse Lautrec. We also looked at the work of some colorful contemporary landscape artists. Degas and Lautrec were both...

Keith Haring was an American artist and social activist known for his illustrative depictions of figures and symbols. He is another example of our theme this year, of contemporary artists that put a new face on ancient cultures. His work has elements of cave paintings,...

Auguste Herbin was a leading figure of Modernism in the 20th century and a pioneer in the rise of abstract painting. Born in Nord, France in 1882, Herbin studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille before moving to Paris permanently. When he settled into the Bateau-La...

 Roderic O'conor was born into one of Ireland's most weathly and distinquished families. He attended an exclusive private school in England where he excelled and his  path as a Victorian gentleman was set from an early age. It was a shock when he 

 wanted...

Suzanne was born Marie Clémentine Valadon in a small town to an unwed mother who worked as a Laundress. They relocated to a poor neighborhood in Paris when she was five where she attended a convent school until age eleven. She left to take a variety of jobs including i...