Through the Lens of Color: Landscapes in gouache and watercolor with Renee Pitts
Thursdays 4/9-4/30/36 from 2:00PM-5:00PM
Various locations on the campus: Lecture room, Red Table youth room, various outdoors
$50 per student
Explore watercolor/gouache and landscape while taking inspiration from the natural world, architecture, and three exhibitions: The House, The Highlands, and the Great Big Sea and Point of Departure: Recent Landscapes by Charles Goolsby, and Light and Sanctity (Ray Byram). In this 4-session class, Artist-Educator Renee Pitts will lead the group through exercises and projects focusing sketching, color mixing, application techniques to be used in the study of botanicals, landscapes and/or industrialscapes through watercolor and gouache. Upon the completion of these classes, the art that participants produce will be put on display in the reception room of the Town of Abingdon’s Tourism Office (art will be returned to the students at the end of the exhibit period). The special tuition rate for this class is made possible by generous support from the Town of Abingdon arts grant.
About the Instructor:
Renee Pitts is a multifaceted artist working in the mediums of oil, watercolor, acrylic and fiber arts. She is a former high school art teacher with degrees in education and art from East Tennessee State University who now teaches people of all ages to enjoy learning and growing in their art pursuits. Nature has always been an endless source of inspiration and teacher. As she has painted plein air she has learned to allow the landscape, its elements of atmosphere and living and changing face through weather and season to influence her style and expression. The discipline of knowing what to leave out and what to record has become an exhilarating dance with brushes, value and brushes. The many factors of the landscape can be reduced to the emotion that is sparked as she paints outside and capturing the essence of the scene is established by balance, simplicity, value, shapes and importantly design. Renee has helped many students learn to paint and apply important principles so that they are able to enjoy wonder in their painting. In this class she will help students discover technique and processes that will lead them to paintings that express the moment they long to record while painting in nature. She will help lead them in exploring the possibilities that the medium of watercolor offers the plein air painter. Renee’s home studio is located in Bluff City with the view of Holston Mountain and surrounding countryside which provides a setting for her own inspiration as well as students who take her classes.