Watercolor Challenge with Elizabeth O’Reilly

Four Saturdays, January 22, 29, February 5, and 12, from 9 am to 12 noon (ET)
Online via Zoom

Students will become familiar with the watercolor medium and gain reasonable control so as to paint subjects including still life and landscape through looking at a particular watercolor painter each week. Through this course, students will learn to organize the chosen subjects into compositions showing an understanding of value, color, and form. Each class will explore some aspect of the elements of design or an exercise specific to the medium such as making washes, understanding transparency and opacity, and incorporating these into a painting. Making a competent composition with watercolor is a goal as well as gaining an understanding of value, positive/negative shapes and qualities of line and color.  There will be some demonstrations as well as individual and group critiques in order to highlight strengths and to offer constructive suggestions. Each class will begin with a presentation on zoom of a particular artist: Charles Demuth, Charles Burchfield, John Marin and Hilda af Klint. Students will work on technique, exploring aspects of the artist in question, and reconvene to get feedback. There will be a homework assignment each week based on making a painting in the style of one of the four artists presented in class. 

Elizabeth O’Reilly received her BEd from The National University of Ireland, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the UCROSS foundation, Wyoming and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois. O’Reilly has received numerous awards including a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, a Charles G. Shaw award for painting and a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. A documentary on her work, Ealaiontoir Thar Saile (An Artist Abroad) was shown on network TV in Ireland. O’Reilly taught an outdoor landscape class at The New School for Social Research for many years. She has taught extensively at colleges in New York City, including Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute. She also taught watercolor and collage at The National Academy School and currently teaches at The New York School of the Arts in New York City and at The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.  O’Reilly shows at the George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, New York, and she showed at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine with Lois Dodd in the summer of 2021. Her work has been reviewed in Art In America, The New York Sun and Art News.  O’Reilly’s work is found in many corporate and public collections, including the State Department, Washington D.C., The Office of Public Works, Ireland, the Memphis Brooks Museum in Memphis, TN and the Ogunquit Museum in Maine.

Download the supplies list here. 

Cost: $216; $180 member