COLOR AS LIGHT with Jean-Pierre Roy

OVERVIEW

• Arrival: Sunday, May 11th with Orientation and Welcome Dinner in the evening.

• Studio days: Monday, May 12th - Friday, May 16th with Farewell Dinner on Friday evening.

• Checkout/Departure: morning of Saturday, May 17th.

• Meals: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (except on Wednesdays; the hotel's restaurant is closed)

• How to Reach Us: Pickup from Palermo (PMO) airport See our pickup policy

• Materials needed for the workshop: Oil paint, brushes, primed surfaces.   

• What we provide: solvent, medium, rags, brush soap, studio easels, support boards, sandpaper, pencil sharpener, kneaded eraser, chalk, palette knives, and jars at no additional cost.  Please see these provided items.

• Rentals: Sicily Artist Retreats provides Paint Pass and Plein Air Kit rentals.  You are welcome to bring your own materials or rent ours. Paint Pass gives you unlimited use of paint for a flat fee.  Plein Air Kits provide equipment for the field.  

• Purchases: In addition, painting surfaces (like paper and linen) are available onsite to purchase.

• Rental Car: Car rental is not necessary but recommended if you'd like to explore the area after class.

A typical intensive studio workshop day can look like:

8:00 – 9:00 AM Breakfast 

9:15 AM Transfer to Studio 

9:30 AM Model is posed, class begins 

1:00 – 2:00 PM Lunch break  

2:00 – 4:30 PM Class resumes 

4:30– 5:00 PM Clean up

5:00 PM             Transfer to hotel*

8:00 PM             Dinner at hotel

*Some evenings (after clean up) may also include a transfer to a local site visit before dinner.

ABOUT JEAN-PIERRE ROY

Born in Santa Monica, California in 1974, Jean-Pierre Roy is a Brooklyn- based painter and teacher. Growing up in LA, Roy started working in the film industry at 15. By 27 he had worked as an artist on a number of major Hollywood films and interactive projects. In 2001 he moved to NYC and received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2002 and was awarded the NYAA’s 3rd Year Fellowship upon graduation.

Roy’s obsessive “world-building”, often framed through a dystopian lens, allows his paintings to examine the human condition against a dramatic backdrop of the chaotic forces of entropy and emergence.

Drawing heavily from the discourse around evolutionary psychology and perceptual neurology, Roy’s work presents a “speculative” fictional space where contemporary anxieties about the environment, technology, and the limitations of the biological self can be explored in spaces charged with the beauty and terror of an “alien” ecosystem.

Roy has had a dozen solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in the US and abroad. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Torrence Art Museum in Los Angeles and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach. He is currently represented by Gallery Poulsen.

His work has been written about in The New York Times, The New York Post, ArtNews, Art in America, New American Painters, The Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, The Seattle Stranger, The Wall Street Journal, Hi- Fructose, and Juxtapoz amongst others. His work in many prominent private and public collections.

"I’ve been called a Visionary Landscape painter, a Climate Change artist, a Ruin-Porn painter, a Post-Apocalyptic Artist, a Dystopian Storyteller, a Sci-Fi illustrator and a “Speculative Fiction Author.” All of those titles are true, but none them get at what drives the emotion of the process for me.

There is a through-line between all of the work I’ve made. It’s been about trying to picture spaces that visualize the distance between the world that exists out there around us, the mix of what was presented to us and what we built on top of it or scraped away, and the world inside of us… the one programmed deep into our fish brains and our monkey brains… the one we can’t find anymore.

World-Building requires A LOT of analytical, obsessive logic, but ultimately it is an emotional practice for me. It comes from the desire to externalize an interiority: one of pain, joy, anxiety, loss, righteousness and uncertainty. Love and Anger. Self-loathing and self-adoration. The paintings are pictures of those inner places made visible as much as they are a reference to the world outside of me.

They are my way of non-verbally embedding consciousness and narrative into matter in hopes that they can become empathy generators and allow others to find some familiar terrain to expand their interiors into.

My painting “Acclimation Capacity” was made in response to much of my own body of work. After 20 years of making paintings about the strange and anxious place that humanity has found itself in, I felt that the ongoing climate crisis, Covid and personal health issues had rendered the “dystopian” both mundane and maddening. Seeking to find a way to suspend the viewers everyday familiarity with the subject, I flipped the proposition: “When chaotic divergence becomes the norm, how truly “alien” would harmony look?”

How alien would ecosystems feel that didn’t pit stakeholders against each other, or force biology into a battle against entropy and decay? What would a system where we fit into the cracks look like instead of one where we flattened the curves in our way?

The painting might not depict a Utopia we recognize, but it is one where the players in the narrative move within behaviors adapted for integration into a whole. In this sense, “Acclimation Capacity” invites viewers not to solve a visual puzzle, but to be persuaded into a dance of color and composition that speaks to the great vibrating sea of biology that sits just below and above our bubble of the self."

WORKSHOP DETAILS

The class is focused on learning objective metrics to better understand the way color relationships dictate how we subjectively experience color. There are workshops that introduce the artist to specific notions of color, offering new chromatic “maps” (palettes) to explore. There are a near infinite set of color “maps”: temperature maps and saturation maps, earth color maps and chemical dye-based maps, limited-color maps for painting flesh and maps just for trees and mountains. What this workshop sets to do is not to explore a single “map” with the student, but to create a “compass” that can be used on all maps.

Designed for the painter with some experience with the materials, the workshop introduces the artist to working theories of temperature,luminance and the basic grammar of form linking color and light. Over thecourse of the workshop students learn the core principals of how we see and learn to translate those principals into painted forms. How do surface properties affect the color and value of a light source mapped across an object? What is the Illuminator and what is the Illuminated? Does light come from places other than the light source? Is there a difference between the brightest the object gets vs brightest moment on an object? What does this do to our notions of color, temperature and form?

Working from the model both in the studio and under the unique conditions of the Sicilian Coast, students will learn to conceptually separate thegrammar of light in discrete phenomena in order to create a new hierarchy. Thus, students will re-examine their understanding of the optical phenomena that govern the artist’s decision tree. This is a fundamental step in bringing the artists understanding of color and light to the next level and beyond.

Both individual working critiques and a final group critique will be performed. Easels and drawing boards will be provided. Student must bring their own brushes, surfaces and paints. Materials list to be provided.

JP'S MATERIALS LIST

• Cotton Rags or paper towels

• Small container of linseed oil

• Small container of Odorless Mineral Spirits

• Palette: either wood, glass, or paper palette for oil paint. (i recommend

• the paper palette so we can easily clean up messy palettes.) Notebook

• and basic drawing materials. Painters tape is always a good idea.

Brushes:

Bring a variety of sizes from small to medium. Rounds and filberts are recommended, with some on the soft side (bristle brushes can often carry too much paint and are hard to blend with.) I like Princeton or Raphael as they are soft but still hold a good amount of paint. They aren’t expensive, but hold up well.

Oil paints:

We will be using 3 different Triadic Primary Limited Palettes over the workshop. I will explain what this means and their usage, but the

recommended pigments are below.

1. Titanium White

2. Blue or Cold Black, (if you can’t find one, we will mix one)

3. Transparent Red Oxide (i like gamblin for this one)

4. Yellow Ochre

5. Cadmium Red

6. Cadmium Yellow Medium or dark

7. Cadmium Yellow light or lemon

8. Quinochronone Magenta

9. Cobalt Teal (gamblin is also good for this one and cheaper than

old holland)

10. Ultramarine Blue

Surfaces:

10 Medium size surfaces (no bigger than 24” x 18”. 16” x 12”) Canvas or panel is fine, but I recommend sheets of 140 gram or higher Hot

Press watercolor paper with two coats of grey (or other tone) gesso on EACH side. They are cheap, easy to resize, and have a wonderful

surface.

Drawing tools are also recommended (pencils, erasers and charcoal) although I will be encouraging all block-ins to be done in paint.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

For your convenience, essential materials for the workshop are available for rental or purchase to facilitate your travel. In addition, you'll enjoy several excursions to gorgeous local sites during the week.

Refreshments are available during studio breaks.  Delicious home-cooked Italian lunches are provided on studio days.  Box lunches are provided on most excursions.  Dinners are provided at the hotel except on Wednesdays (when the hotel's restaurant is closed). You will have the option to eat at a local restaurant or pizzeria with JP and other participants on this day.  This dinner is not included.

For those bringing a Non-Participating Partner, we highly recommend that they book local excursions or tours while you are in the studio here! We recommend that Non-Participating Partners rent a car or arrange car services through Baglio Custera in advance so they can easily travel around on their own. Since there is no lunch service at Baglio Custera, Non-Participating Partners are encouraged to eat lunch at a local cafe.

ACCOMMODATION

You will be staying at Baglio Custera, a boutique hotel in the heart of Marsala’s countryside. Known for its gardens and luxurious swimming pool, this modern resort stands on the Rakalia hill, the site of an ancient shrine to Hercules, surrounded by olive and orange groves. Baglio Custera is a brand new hotel built on ancient lines, those of the "baglio," or farmhouse.

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From start to finish you will enjoy the extraordinary cuisine of the region influenced by the unique flavors of the Mediterranean including garden-fresh vegetables, ancient grains, and seafood.  The majority of meals, accommodation, and ground transport are included in your package, including a celebratory welcome dinner with JP.