The Painted Altarpiece

This drawing and painting workshop will address exactly how painting contributes to the devotion and liturgical celebration at the altar.  Our primary focus will be to design and paint an altarpiece in embryo during the course of the week.  Our particular aim will be to develop a practical working methodology that will better enable the artist to organize the task of making a beautiful altarpiece.  We will identify the visual events wherein each of the constituent elements of line, shape, color and volume work together to compose the union of form and content.  To learn this manner of breaking out the differing drawing and design modalities will help you to invest your compositions with clarity, integrity and proportionality of structure. In this way the material nature of your art will begin to act as a sort of container that holds meaning while also revealing it as a luminous portal between the visible and the invisible world.

There will be time for questions: What are the similarities and differences between the Icon and the Altarpiece?   What is the proper relationship between artistic freedom and religious decorum?  What are the key factors that enable a successful commission?  What are the various historical types, the vocabulary, the doctrines and the concepts that aid an artist in their work to make a fine altarpiece?