Core Programs - 8 Week Courses - Beginning Sept 2nd!
Small Classes -> Limited Spots
5333 ave Casgrain, Montreal, 9th floor
Studio practices in painting that build technical fluency while cultivating a slower, more attentive, and expanded way of seeing.
8-WEEK DRAWING & PAINTING PRACTICES
Structured painting practice where technical development, material understanding, and expanded seeing are developed as a single, integrated way of working.
Each 8-week program is designed as a studio-based progression that combines instruction, observation, and guided perceptual practice. Students are supported in developing both skill and visual awareness through sustained engagement with material and process.
OVERVIEW
These programs are not structured as beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Instead, students enter through different modes of engagement—technical, contextual, or perceptual—and develop their practice through sustained, layered exploration.
All levels of experience are welcome. Guidance is adapted to individual practice, experience, and direction.
PAINTING STREAM
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course approaches painting as a practice of attention, perception, and material awareness. Across eight weeks, students develop technical skills in brushwork, colour mixing, texture, composition, and portraiture while also engaging in guided meditation and reflective processes that support slower, more attentive ways of working. Each class combines structured technical exercises with intuitive and perceptual exploration, moving between observation, memory, and imaginative construction. Students work with paint as both a physical material and a responsive field of experience, learning to notice how gesture, colour, and surface interact with emotion and perception. Historical and conceptual references span colour theory systems, still life traditions, portraiture practices, symbolic and archetypal image-making, and contemporary approaches to process-based painting. These frameworks are used as tools for expanding how students understand image-making rather than fixed stylistic models. By the end of the course, students produce a final “soul painting” that integrates technical control with intuitive response, supported by sustained attention and reflective practice. The course emphasizes painting as a way of seeing, feeling, and constructing meaning through material engagement over time. COURSE OUTLINE
week 1: brush handling & intuitive colour play Students begin with foundational brushwork and paint handling. Emphasis is placed on awareness of each brush lift and placement, developing a slow, attentive relationship to action. Colour is chosen intuitively, with exercises in wet-on-wet, dry brushing, and gradient transitions to build sensitivity to paint behaviour. week 2: colour mixing & systems of relationship Students work with RYB and CMY colour models to understand structural relationships between hues. Colour mixing is explored through direct experimentation, with attention to subtle shifts in tone, temperature, and emotional response. Reflection focuses on perception, nuance, and affect. week 3: texture, mark making & formula painting Texture becomes a language of perception. Students create small “texture cards” documenting surface, gesture, and emotional response. These cards function like a deck: shuffled and drawn to generate a “formula painting,” combining chance, structure, and intuition. Reflection includes bodily awareness and associative meaning. week 4: critique, perception & constructed form Students review formula paintings to examine the relationship between intention and outcome. The class then shifts into painting basic geometric forms in two colours, using varied textures and paint handling techniques. A natural object is introduced as a perceptual anchor for observation and response. week 5: still life & intuitive composition Students build a still life from personal objects brought from home. The focus is on emotional composition rather than formal arrangement. Painting is approached as a sustained observation of relationships between objects, memory, and perception. week 6: portraiture & imagined proportion Students study facial structure through slow proportion mapping and skin tone mixing. Alongside observational study, they develop an imagined portrait based on archetypal qualities, blending structure with intuitive construction. week 7: portraiture, mirror study & perceptual connection Students work from mirrors or photographic references while engaging in a preparatory meditation focused on presence and perception. The portrait process is informed by sustained attention, emotional tone, and interpretive awareness rather than literal accuracy. week 8: soul painting & integrated practice Students begin with extended meditation, journaling, and movement to identify internal states and needs. The remainder of the class is dedicated to a single open-ended painting session that integrates all techniques learned throughout the course. The emphasis is on intuition, presence, and material responsiveness. |
EXPANDED SEEING
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
Expanded Seeing: Painting is a studio-based practice exploring perception as an entangled relationship between inner attention and outer environment. Painting is approached not as image production, but as a way of noticing how awareness shifts through body, material, atmosphere, and time. Each class is structured around guided attention practices, intentional pauses, and sustained studio work on individually developed projects. Students bring their own ideas, materials, and directions, while the course provides a framework for how perception is cultivated during making. Any level of experience is welcome, and technical guidance as well as contextual input will be provided throughout each session as individual projects develop. Attention is repeatedly interrupted and renewed through timed check-ins, encouraging students to notice physical sensation, emotional state, thought patterns, and environmental influence while they work. The course also includes awareness practices connected to natural cycles, including sky observation, atmospheric perception, and lunar rhythm. Students maintain a weekly “interconnectivity journal,” recording moments of coincidence, resonance, or subtle alignment between their internal state and external world. The central inquiry of the course is how perception is never isolated: it is continuously shaped by body, environment, atmosphere, and attention itself. COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1: Grounding & Arrival into the Body of Work Students establish grounding as the entry point into painting, learning to stabilize attention in the body before beginning their work. Focus is placed on noticing habitual mental speed, physical presence, and how perception is immediately shaped by environment, light, and atmosphere. Week 2: Call-Back of Energy (Retrieving Attention) Students practice noticing where attention leaves the body during making and learn to bring it back into present-moment awareness. The emphasis is on reducing fragmentation of attention and recognizing how external stimuli and internal thought patterns pull perception away from the work. Week 3: Grounded Expansion (Cosmic Flow + Stability) Attention is trained to expand into intuition, imagination, and environmental awareness while remaining anchored in the body. Students explore how shifts in atmosphere, light, and internal state can be held without losing clarity or grounding. Week 4: Relational Presence (Guiding Influences of Perception) Students develop awareness of internal guiding impulses during making, learning to distinguish intuition, memory, and projection as perceptual experiences rather than fixed truths. Attention is also placed on how subtle environmental shifts influence decision-making in real time. Week 5: Field Perception (Auras as Sensory Boundaries) Perception is extended into the space surrounding the body and painting, treating attention as a shifting field rather than a fixed point. Students observe how emotional tone, atmosphere, and spatial awareness shape the edges of perception during making. Week 6: Protection Structures (Stability in Deep Process) Students develop internal stability while working through uncertainty, intensity, and complexity in their paintings. Focus is placed on maintaining clear attention and energetic boundaries while staying engaged with evolving work. Week 7: Integration of Perceptual Systems (Multi-Layer Awareness) All previous modes of attention are held simultaneously as students work with body, emotion, material, and environment as one continuous perceptual system. The emphasis is on staying present within complexity without collapsing or simplifying experience. Week 8: Sustained Unified Field Practice (Continuity of Perception) Students sustain uninterrupted awareness while working, integrating all prior practices into a continuous state of making. Painting becomes a record of sustained perception where attention, body, emotion, and environment are no longer separated but experienced as one field. |
HISTORICAL CONTEXT & MATERIAL EXPLORATION
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course approaches painting as a living perceptual practice that moves across history, intuition, and material transformation. We begin with the earliest traces of image-making and move through symbolic systems, visionary traditions, atmospheric painting, material experimentation, perceptual studies, and finally abstraction as a way of working with visible and invisible forces. Rather than treating painting as depiction, the course frames it as a practice of attention, sensation, and inquiry into how images form through colour, light, surface, and material behaviour. It is open to all levels, and supports both beginners and experienced painters through structured experimentation and expansive studio work. Each class follows a consistent rhythm: guided meditation and movement with lunar intention setting, a short historical and visual introduction, an extended painting studio session, and a final period of reflection and discussion. This structure creates a balance between grounded material practice and expanded perceptual awareness. COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1: Prehistoric Trace We begin with the earliest painted marks found in caves and ritual environments. Painting is approached as contact, pigment, gesture, and presence, where image and surface are inseparable. Week 2: Sacred Colour Systems Across cultures, colour has functioned as more than decoration: it has carried symbolic, spiritual, and cosmological meaning. Students explore colour as a language, working with limited palettes and intentional relationships between hue, value, and emotion. Week 3: Medieval Light & Icons Painting becomes a vessel for light, contemplation, and devotion. Students investigate luminosity, layering, and symbolic space, exploring how colour and surface can suggest realities beyond ordinary perception. Week 4: Romantic Atmosphere Attention shifts toward emotion, weather, landscape, and the sublime. Through paint, students explore atmosphere, mood, and the dissolution of solid form into light, distance, and sensation. Week 5: Symbolism & Visionary Painting Myth, dream, memory, and personal symbolism become sources for image-making. Students develop paintings that move beyond observation and into imaginative, psychological, and symbolic space. Week 6: Process Painting & Material Agency Control is loosened as paint itself becomes an active participant in the work. Through pouring, scraping, staining, layering, and experimentation, students explore how materials can generate unexpected directions and discoveries. Week 7: New Materialism & Perception Painting is approached as a relationship between body, material, environment, and attention. Students investigate perception, emergence, and the ways meaning can arise through process, interaction, and sustained observation. Week 8: Spiritual Abstraction Painting expands beyond representation into colour, gesture, rhythm, and energetic form. Students integrate the themes of the course into an abstract work that reflects their own evolving relationship to perception, materiality, and image-making. |
DRAWING STREAM
Please note that due to overwhelming interest in painting, the drawing stream is currently on pause. Please send me an email if you wish to request a drawing class . Thank you for your kind understanding :)
OUTCOME OF THE PROGRAMS
Across 8-week courses, students can expect to develop:
- Technical skill in drawing or painting
- Stronger visual observation and material awareness
- Increased confidence in personal image-making
- A more attentive and expanded way of seeing
- A sustained studio practice grounded in both structure and intuition
