Core Programs - 8 Week Courses
Studio practices in drawing and painting that build technical fluency while cultivating a slower, more attentive, and expanded way of seeing.
To register, use the payment links below.
8-WEEK DRAWING & PAINTING PRACTICES
Structured drawing and 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.
DRAWING STREAM
|
cOURSE DESRIPTION
This course treats drawing as a practice of perception rather than technique alone. Across eight weeks, students move through grayscale, colour, form, memory, geometry, and portraiture, combining studio work with short meditation and attention exercises. Each class begins with a guided moment of stillness and intention-setting, followed by a brief contextual introduction, extended making, and reflection. Drawing is approached as something that emerges through sustained looking, where material, attention, and time shape what appears on the page. Historical references span early mark-making, symbolic systems, Renaissance perspective, mnemonic and geometric structures, and modern approaches to gesture and abstraction. These are used as ways of understanding how image-making has always been tied to perception, memory, and meaning. By the final week, students work with a live model, integrating contour, gesture, and long observation to explore presence over accuracy. The focus throughout is on slowing down perception and noticing how seeing itself constructs form. course outline:
Week 1: Grayscale Systems & Textural Seeing We begin with foundational drawing through controlled value systems using ink, charcoal, pencil, and pen. Students construct a 13-step grayscale while developing awareness of pressure, edge, and tonal transition. The second half of class focuses on slow texture studies, emphasizing mark making as a conscious, attentive process. Week 2: Colour Perception & Emotional Systems Colour is explored through ink, coloured pencil, pastel, and crayon. Students construct colour wheels, gradients, and layered studies while using cross-hatching and blending to mix tones. Emphasis is placed on colour as relational and emotional, with written reflection on perception and response. Week 3: Constructed Form & Natural Attention Basic geometric forms are constructed through value and colour studies across multiple materials. Students then collect a natural object from outside and return to draw it slowly in colour. The class emphasizes the relationship between constructed structure and direct perceptual encounter through sustained observation. Week 4: Object Portraits & Relational Perception Students draw personal objects brought from home, beginning with a shared tactile exchange where objects are handled by multiple classmates before being returned. The drawing process focuses on contour, gesture, and perceptual sensitivity shaped by memory, presence, and relational attention. Week 5: Perspective & Mnemonic Space Perspective is introduced as a perceptual system linked to memory and spatial imagination. Students develop mnemonic sequences mapped onto familiar paths and translate these internal structures into 1, 2, and 3 point perspective drawings, exploring the relationship between constructed and remembered space. Week 6: Sacred Geometry & Structural Rhythm Drawing is explored through systems of proportion, repetition, and symmetry. Students construct geometric compositions using circles, grids, and radial structures while also allowing for perceptual variation. The focus is on geometry as a rhythmic and meditative process of seeing. Week 7: Portraiture & Constructed Observation Students begin with proportional construction of the face using geometric structure, then move into live contour portraiture in pairs. The work alternates between structured mapping and sustained observational drawing, emphasizing attention, presence, and relational seeing. Week 8: Figure Drawing & Extended Perception A live model is introduced for sustained figure drawing. Students move through contour, gesture, and a long final pose, integrating all previous approaches. The focus is on sustained attention, presence, and perception over time rather than accuracy alone. |
HISTORICAL CONTEXT & MATERIAL EXPLORATION
|
cOURSE DESRIPTION
Drawing as a way of seeing what is usually hidden, and learning to trust what appears when control is no longer the starting point. This course approaches drawing as a living practice that shifts across time, cultures, and ways of seeing. We move from the earliest cave marks to symbolic systems, visionary imagery, emotional landscapes, chance operations, unconscious drawing, and abstraction as a way of perceiving invisible structures. Rather than focusing on drawing as representation, we treat it as attention, intuition, and inquiry. The course is open to all levels, and is designed to support both beginners and experienced artists through layered, exploratory processes that build confidence, sensitivity, and depth of perception. Each class follows a consistent structure: guided meditation and movement with lunar intention setting, a short historical and visual introduction, an extended studio exploration, and a final period of reflection and discussion. This rhythm creates a balance between grounded making and expanded perceptual states. course outline:
Week 1: Prehistoric Trace We begin with the earliest traces of human mark-making in caves and ritual environments. Drawing is approached as gesture, contact, and presence, where the body and surface meet. Week 2: Sacred Symbolic Systems Early cultures develop drawing as symbolic and cosmological language. Students build structured visual systems using repetition, geometry, and rhythm as meaning. Week 3: Medieval Visionary Drawing Drawing becomes a record of vision, light, and inner perception. Students explore imagery that feels received rather than constructed, working with layered and non-physical space. Week 4: Romanticism Attention shifts toward emotion, atmosphere, and the inner experience of landscape. Drawing becomes a translation of feeling, distance, and the sublime. Week 5: Symbolism Dream imagery and psychological associations form structured visual languages. Students work with fragments, memory, and recurring symbolic patterns. Week 6: Dada Drawing is interrupted through chance and procedural systems that resist control. Randomness becomes a generative force that reshapes intention. Week 7: Surrealism Unconscious processes guide drawing through automatism and associative flow. Images emerge through continuity rather than planning or control. Week 8: Spiritual Abstraction Drawing expands into perception itself, where form, line, and colour are experienced as energetic or invisible structures. Students integrate the full arc of the course into abstract perceptual fields. |
EXPANDED SEEING
|
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Expanded Seeing: Drawing is a studio practice focused on drawing as perception, intention, and intuitive making rather than representation or technical problem-solving. Students are guided toward a more receptive state of making, where the work develops through sustained attention, embodied awareness, and responsiveness rather than control or over-planning. Students enter the course with their own individual projects, which may be at any stage of development and can take any form, scale, or subject matter. Any level of experience is welcome, and technical guidance and conceptual support are provided throughout as each project develops. The beginning of the course is dedicated to clarifying each student’s intention, helping establish a clear direction that will carry through the full eight weeks. The course emphasizes learning how to enter and maintain a focused state of making where perception is continuously renewed. Through guided attention practices and structured interruptions, students are brought back into awareness of the body, breath, and present moment while working, allowing them to notice how thought, emotion, and environment influence the drawing process. Over time, students develop the ability to stay with their work in a more open and responsive way, allowing drawings to unfold through sustained attention rather than fixed outcomes. The central focus of the course is creating from a place of clarity, alignment, and perceptual presence. COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1: Entering Intention & Defining the Work Students begin by clarifying their individual projects and establishing a clear inner intention for the work they will develop across the course. The emphasis is on recognizing what is genuinely seeking to be expressed, rather than what is being planned or controlled. Week 2: Grounding Attention & Clearing Interference Students learn to stabilize attention in the body and recognize habitual mental patterns that interrupt flow. The focus is on settling into a clearer perceptual state where making can begin without over-direction or internal noise. Week 3: Opening Intuitive Flow Students begin to allow intuition and spontaneous response to guide drawing decisions. The emphasis is on trusting immediate perception rather than pre-planned outcomes, while staying grounded in physical presence. Week 4: Listening to the Work as It Develops Attention shifts toward responsiveness rather than control. Students learn to “listen” to what the drawing is becoming and respond to it as an unfolding process rather than imposing direction onto it. Week 5: Removing Over-Construction Students explore what happens when overthinking, correction, and control are reduced. The focus is on allowing the work to remain alive, unstable, and responsive to moment-to-moment perception. Week 6: Alignment of Body and Intuition Drawing becomes fully embodied, with attention moving fluidly between physical sensation and intuitive decision-making. Students work toward alignment between internal awareness and external mark-making. Week 7: Sustained Flow State Practice Students work for extended periods within a continuous state of attention, minimizing interruption between perception, impulse, and action. The emphasis is on staying inside flow without breaking into analysis. Week 8: Integrated Expression of Intent Students bring together all aspects of their process into a sustained body of work that reflects their original intention, refined through weeks of perceptual and intuitive development. The focus is on coherence between inner direction and outward expression. |
PAINTING STREAM
|
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. |
HISTORICAL CONTEXT & MATERIAL EXPLORATION
|
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. |
EXPANDED SEEING
|
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. |
OUTCOME OF THE PROGRAMS
Across 8-week courses, students can expect to develop:
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
