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