Your Visual Language: A Guided Painting Practice

Five abstract painters. Five practices. One question threading through all of them: what does your hand want to say? This course follows how Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint, and Sonia Delaunay each found a visual language of their own, and guides you to begin finding yours. Each lesson pairs a short art history conversation with a guided practice inspired by that painter's approach. A sixth session gathers everything together and asks what you've begun to notice about your own way of working. Because this is an audio practice, your imagination does the work a screen can't. You build the painting in your mind first, from nothing but words, so there is no image to copy and no one to imitate. Whatever arrives, arrives from you. Then you open your eyes and let your hand respond, with curiosity leading the way. By the end you'll have five practices to return to and the beginning of a visual language that is distinctly yours. Music sourced from MusOpen and Wikimedia Commons. Course artwork by Kristen Phillips.