Composition, Color and Creative Cacophony
Workshop | This program is completed
Join Charlie Hunter and Mitch Baird for an intensive, fast-moving and fun workshop focusing on the common elements and painting techniques utilized by two very different artists to create dynamic, successful paintings. Charlie Hunter is known for his near- monochromatic palette, while Mitch Baird is unafraid to utilize a full range of color. Seemingly disparate in approach, both artists emphasize a common devotion to the fundamental principles of painting/drawing, values, edges and composition.
Daily demos and short lectures will reinforce these core precepts, followed by lots of hands-on painting time - and a workshop highlight - a critique session at the end of each day in which successes, challenges and various approaches are discussed. Individual attention is a high priority, as well as laughs, irreverence and lots of enthusiasm. www.hunter-studio.com
www.mitchbaird.com
Charlie Hunter
"Charlie Hunter has the uncanny ability to seize upon the most?ordinary things and transform them with his brush into bewitching jewels of design and artistic perception." - Richard Schmid
Using water-mixable oils and a tonalist technique, Hunter's work is simultaneously journalistic and subjective. He works in Bellows Falls, VT, 20 miles from where he grew up on the highland farm of his great-great-great grandfather.
Charlie Hunter is a nationally recognized painter of the post-pastoral American landscape. His distinctive, low-chroma work, exists, as he says, "halfway between a photograph and a memory."
Heavily reliant on a mastery of values, edges and composition, utilizing a variety of moderately unorthodox techniques; manipulating paint with a window washer's squeegee or impressing the pattern of paper towels into a painted surface to evoke halftone screens of lithographic reproduction, Hunter's work examines the pressures of modern urban and suburban culture upon small-town and agricultural communities, simultaneously celebrating "what natures does to what man creates."
Initially a graphic designer of tour posters for musicians such as the Jerry Garcia Band, Bob Dylan, The Clash, Eurythmics and REM, Hunter became a music manager and event producer, before turning to painting full time in the 2000's,
His work has been featured in numerous art and lifestyle publications, is in multiple collections and museums, and was the recent subject of a one-man show, SEMAPHORE, at the Brattleboro (VT) Museum, curated by fellow artist Eric Aho. With painter and designer Larry Moore, Hunter created the En Train Air painting train, a concept they hope to revive post-pandemic. Hunter's weekly live stream, REASONABLY FINE ART TALKS, has a fervent following.
Mitch Baird
As a representational painter Mitch believes that painting is a celebration of life and the beauty that surrounds us. He is devoted to the traditions of the late 19th century artists who looked to the figure and nature for inspiration regarding light, color, and design. Seeking out this inspiration, Mitch works directly from life to capture the qualities and nuances of natural light and color harmony. He has a strong conviction that great artistic communication depends on good draftsmanship, design and vision. His artistic desire is to "portray a positive visual statement and hope the viewer will experience what I see and in some sense be inspired, uplifted, or moved by my painting, whether it is of a small intimate setting or a grandiose subject."
Mitch resides in the desert southwest in Mesa, Arizona. He is a Signature Member of the Oil Painters of America, the American Impressionist Society, and the former President of the prestigious Plein Air Painters of America (PAPA).