Pastel and Gouache – Mixed Media Painting

Description

 Learn to use two beautifully compatible mediums—pastel and gouache—together. Each complements and enhances the other while adding richness, texture, and depth to a painting. Working from reference photos and still life, you will learn basic techniques for successfully integrating the two very versatile mediums. Students will additionally explore final finishing and framing.

Students must have completed vaccination for Covid-19. Falls Church Arts follows the current guidelines for masking, which are updated to reflect needs.

Richard Levine, born in Newark, NJ, is a painter and photographer whose professional career has spanned more than 30 years in the graphic arts working for prominent design firms and corporate clients. A graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University, he studied oil painting for four years with artists Alan Turner and Andrew Lattimore and photography with Gary Winogrand. Additional studies were at Cooper Union and The School of Visual Arts, NYC. Extensive travel throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia have formed the foundation for his personal work. Photo documentary work has included the Darfur refugee camps in Eastern Chad for the International Medical Corps and childhood health conditions in the Mississippi Delta with the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Richard has exhibited widely on the East Coast from Virginia to Maine in both solo and group shows. He is a 2017/18 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. He won second prize in the 2016 Bethesda Painting Awards. He was awarded a New York State Certificate of Merit for his exhibit: India, A Traveler’s Reflections. In September 2016 he was featured cover artist for the Journal of Financial Service Professionals.  His documentary work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York.

Artist’s Statement

My love of travel and exploration spark the inspiration, both spiritual and visual that I derive from experiencing new landscape, people and culture which in turn invigorates my work and challenges me to both portray and understand our world.  I like to paint and photograph in places where the weather, the traditions and the geography still dominate; where these elements identify and characterize a locale. Where I can still connect to what has gone before and one feels an authentic “sense of place.”

For the past several years I have been combining the abstract Color Field paintings of the Washington and New York schools with the vernacular architecture of rural New England and Nova Scotia. This has inevitably led me deeper into abstraction and I currently find my focus at the intersection of climate, culture and geology. The new work seeks to portray the evolving effects of climate change on the land caused by erosion and the movement of water and presented in a framework of indigenous culture and color. The work of Richard Diebenkorn and the poured paint techniques of the Color Field painters inspire and inform this new work. My current work on heavy watercolor paper involves pouring paint, tilting and manipulating its flow, adding texture elements into the wet paint and then repeating this process multiple times. I then overpaint with acrylic to enrich and solidify the composition.