Description
Friday through Sunday, June 26-28, 2026
9:00 am to 4:00 pm
Please pack a lunch to eat during a short lunch break.
This a 3 day workshop in oil painting.
“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” – Plutarch
Painting is about paying attention and capturing a moment. Paying attention in a contemplative way allows you to have a fulfilling relationship with your painting subject(s). As painters, we must respect this relationship and get excited about the exchange of energy manifested through gesture, movement, weight, edges, texture, and color harmony.
Spending time pushing paint around is a lifelong journey. In this workshop, we will explore the poetics and magic of painting. How can a still life be both simultaneously meditative and thrilling? The hope is that finding one’s place within this inquiry can motivate you to paint often and deepen your purpose on your artistic path.
Gain Mentoring and Valuable Insight: Drawing on her acclaimed career as a painter and teacher, Abbey begins by discussing topics such as selecting painting subjects, concepts and content in still life painting, poetic realism, and her strategies to begin and finish a painting in one sitting. Abbey also shares her thoughts on beauty, gesture, the Old Master’s concept of light as a subject, alla prima painting, celebrating the sensitivities of a brush, and classical still life painting today.
Through lectures, demonstrations, and one-on-one instruction, Abbey reveals all of the techniques and methods that have made her painting practice so successful and prolific. While working in the studio together, Abbey will address subtleties of color mixing, lighting, materials, blogging, galleries, social media, and marketing.
Abbey provides specific, actionable methods and inspiring tips tailored to you to help you move forward in painting.
Oils. For all levels, beginner through advanced.
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Falmouth Art Center Refund Policy:
Refunds will not be given within two months of the start of this workshop. Workshops are not pro-rated. A $25 processing fee is withheld from all refunds.
The Art Center reserves the right to cancel any workshop due to insufficient enrollment, in which case tuition will be fully refunded.
Abbey Ryan, American (b. 1979) is a painter whose focus is on the poetics of painting and classical painting as a meditative practice. Balancing traditional artistic expression with innovation is at the heart of her creative research and practice. With today’s accelerated pace of life, Abbey’s classical painting practice is an act of cultural preservation and revival. Painting is part of Abbey’s mindfulness practice and it fosters her belief that magic is still possible in life and in art. The practice of making a small painting a day speaks to her interest in practice, classical realist still life, and trompe l’oeil (French for “fool the eye”) painting. Making daily paintings and blogging them speaks to her interest in ritual, making art that is accessible to all, and the changing complexities of selling art on the web. Through her classical still life and trompe l’oeil works, her research includes the Golden Ratio, Robert Lax’s poetry, the Japanese aesthetic wabi sabi, women’s voices, and Dutch Golden Age painting, among other interests.