Michael Thorpe

The aim of these courses is to enable you to understand and have the confidence to use colour as a focused aspect of your creative process and to understand its relationship with form and content. Both courses will be primarily practical but will be supported by a number of short, illustrated presentations. You will make paintings exploring various ways of using colour [e.g . objectively, subjectively, decoratively, symbolically etc.]. This will be done in the context of regular presentations exploring the theoretical and practical developments in the creative and expressive use of colour.
In the first course [Oct - Dec] you will make work in the context of presentations exploring contemporary colour theory, the innovation of impressionism and the consequences of the post-impressionist painters reaction to what they saw as the conceptual and expressive limitations of impressionism. We will consider the work of Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat amongst others.
In the second course [Jan - Mar] you will make work in the context of presentations exploring artists and work that evolved from the various post impressionist innovations as well as other significant 20th century modernist developments. We will consider other colour theory [ie Albers], the the work of Matisse and the fauvists, Picasso and the cubists, Kirchner and German expressionism, Kandinsky, American abstract expressionism and the Washington colourists amongst others.
The final evening session of each course will be a presentation in which you will review the work you have made and what you have learned and consider how you might use aspects of it to inform and develop your ongoing personal work.
Course 2 can be taken independently of Course 1.
Because of the one to one teaching employed the course be used to meet various individual needs including: developing a more informed attitude to colour in your ongoing work, as part of folio preparation, to establish a more thorough intellectual and practical understanding of 19th/20th century art etc.

Michael Thorpe was the principal lecturer and Head of Painting on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course and the Course Director on the PG Cert in Professional Studies in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. He was previously a painting tutor at the Royal College of Art for ten years and was elected a fellow of the college. He was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has also taught and lectured at many British and overseas art schools and universities including School of Visual Arts, Parsons and Cooper Union in New York, Brown University Rhode Island, Kolej Bandar Utama in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia and most recently Sharjar University School of Art in the UAE where he wrote and taught the colour module of the fine art degree course. He has been awarded a Boise, a Leverhulme, an Italian Government and an Abbey British School at Rome scholarship and spent a year in the USA on a Winston Churchill Fellowship. He is a member of the London Group where he exhibits regularly and has work in public and private collections including the Arts Council of GB.