Peter Smales Oil Painting Workshop

Event Description and Cost

A one day oil painting workshop learning about Peter’s approach to composition, colour mixing and how to enhance your subject. $160.00

Workshop Outline

The day will start with Peter doing a demonstration painting.  Questions are encouraged and Peter will be discussing his approach as he paints.  Key topics covered include:

• composition – the basic principles and strategies that can be applied to any painting subject and what should be considered before starting; and
• simplified colour mixing – a basic artist’s palette requires only six colours, ie. warm and cool of the three primary colours and white.  I will demonstrate how any colour and tone value can be mixed using these six basic colours.

Later, students may copy his painting or work from a photo of their own.  Peter will be assisting each student individually as they put into practice the aspects covered in the morning demonstration.

Who should come and what to bring?

Beginners through to advanced.  BYO paint kit and lunch.  Easels, tea and coffee are supplied.

About Peter

Born in London in 1958, Peter arrived in Australia in 1966.  He started painting in his early teens, receiving early encouragement from the watercolourist  C. Dudley Wood and the portrait painter, Sir William Dargie.  He attended the classes of Alan Martin and Ron Crawford, both students of Max Meldrum, who gave him tuition in the “tonal realism” style of painting.

In 1983 Peter completed a Bachelor of Education at Melbourne State College, majoring in Painting.  He subsequently taught painting and drawing there for three years.  During this time he returned to Europe for a tour of the major art galleries. 

Peter has held exhibitions annually since 1982.  Drawing his inspiration from nature, his paintings are principally known for their rich colours, captured moods and impressionistic effects. 

Artist’s Statement: 

"My art is fixed firmly in the visual world and paint is the medium I have chosen to express myself.  Taking Paul Cezanne’s dictum that art is a return to nature, but not to be taken at face value.  Art, artifice, artful – the word implies a contrivance and selection.  The four sides of a painting, not found in nature, impose all the conventions that have been adopted by artists over time – the two dimensional decorative abstract and colour possibilities.

Changing light, of beguiling subtlety, falling on objects provides endless and inexhaustible motifs.  In the end a painting is paint, not reality.  I like paint and I want the end product to look something like the subject and something like paint.  That’s the hook – an art for art’s sake aesthetic."