Enhancing Color Perception: Painting Light, Form and Atmosphere Through Color Relationships
Adult Course | Registration opens 5/6/2025 7:00 AM MDT
This course is the result of Ceraso's study with Henry Hensche and the subsequent years of his own development of color seeing. His book, The Art of Color Seeing, is available but is not a prerequisite. You will learn a way of using the eyes that makes color seeing more accurate. In the three week course, over three Saturdays, you will paint a still life in the studio, then a landscape from a photograph and finally, on the third week, you will paint a landscape from life.
Learning Objectives:
As a result of this course you will have a deeper understanding and perception of color relationships that will allow you to bring more light and aliveness to your paintings. You will learn a way of using the eyes that facilitates this perception. And you will learn a process for mixing pigments to enhance your ability to capture the colors you see.
- Students should bring:
-oils, gouache paints or pastels recommend, slow drying acrylics and water colors are fine, regular acrylics work but are a bit more difficult -for oils, painting knife, with blade about 2 ½ inches long, about ¼ inch wide where attached to handle, tapering to a point or curved tip -palette -paper towels -canvas, paper or board 12""x16""; sanded paper recommended for pastels -recommended colors: cadmium yellow, cadmium yellow pale, cadmium lemon, dioxizine purple, manganese blue, ultramarine blue, emerald green, yellow ochre, titanium white (large tube), cadmium orange, cadmium red, permanent rose, magenta, cobalt blue, viridian, indian yellow, mars violet
Chuck Ceraso
Chuck Ceraso's lineage traces back to the French and American Impressionists through his teacher, Henry Hensche. Hensche was the student and protégé of Charles Hawthorne. Hawthorne, after painting with William Merritt Chase and Claude Monet, started the first art school, in 1900, devoted to the color discoveries of the Impressionists. When Hawthorne died in 1930, he left the school and teaching to Hensche who continued and further developed the teaching until his death in 1992.
One of several people around the country who continues to teach this approach to color seeing, Ceraso teaches to sold out classes at the Denver Art Museum and at his studio in Lafayette, Colorado. He has authored the book, The Art of Color Seeing, which is his description of the process Hensche introduced him to as well as his own insights into painting.
"After 40 years of painting, I'm more awed and inspired than ever at the challenge of painting. I've learned that to really see I have to let go of all of my ideas about what I'm looking at. A full presence of awareness is required for this seeing without thought, without ideas. This presence then seems to facilitate a more spontaneous process of painting, one unencumbered by a plan for a specific outcome. The painting has a life of its own and goes where the process itself takes it. In this, painting has become more an experience of revelation than as something I make happen"
www.cerasogallery.com