5 signs you've outgrown painting on your own
Many painters reach a point where making more work isn't enough. Progress slows, ideas repeat themselves, and creative confidence starts to plateau. In this article, tutor and artist Joe Richardson discusses how joining a community such as the the City Lit Advanced painting studio course and the Advanced painting: practice and discourse course can help you renew and grow your painting.
1. You're making work but not reflecting on it
A lot of the time, critical reflection is where the ideas are born. You make a mark on the canvas, rearrange an object, change something, and you don't necessarily know why you've done it. That's part of making the work.
But taking a step back and looking at the work, particularly with other people and in a different space from the kitchen table or studio where you've been working, can open up a whole new range of references, opinions and perspectives.
You can start discussing the work with people who see things differently from you, and those conversations can take the work in a completely different direction.
Critical reflection is a key part of the learning
I think that's something that's done incredibly well on the Advanced painting: practice and discourse course here at City Lit. It creates space for that kind of reflection. You meet a lot of different people who will challenge you and support you, and who bring a wide and diverse knowledge base to the group.
Learning about other artists, other disciplines and the discourse around painting is a vital part of the course. Reflecting on your work is as much a part of making the work as mixing your paints, applying paint to the canvas or going to the shop to source your canvas.
All of those moments are connected. You're thinking about the work, and the work is being influenced by everything around you.
Advanced painting studio is a year long course that offers a place to reflect on all of that: how you got to where you are, where an idea came from, where it might go, and what other people see in the work.
You can get feedback from your peers about how you're working and where you could go next. You come with an open mind, take your ideas further and push your painting further.
I think having a group of people around you is absolutely vital.
2. You're working alone
Working alone can be really tricky. You can get in your own head. You can get stuck. You can lose motivation.
It can also be incredibly rewarding because you can become really focused on your own work.
The Advanced painting: practice and discourse course offers you a mixture of both: independent study time alongside highly supportive and dedicated studio weekends and online sessions.
Those sessions create a chance to step back from your work, look at other people's work and develop your critical skills through that process. You learn about your own work by looking at the work of others.
If you commit to this course and show up each week as a group, you can build something amazing to go forward with. You can develop a creative community, a support network that you can hopefully rely on for a long time after the course.
That's one of the most valuable things you can acquire from taking any course, really.
The Advanced painting studio course is intended to be a community of advanced practitioners. It's a place where people can continue to work together, put on shows together and push each other.
Your tutors can push you, and your peers can push you too. You can work together to research and pull apart painting, and then put it back together again in new configurations.
3. You're relying on the same techniques and themes
If you find yourself working in a particular style over and over again, or responding to the same subject matter, this course can help pull and push you into different directions that you might not have considered.
Through the one-to-one sessions with your tutor and the weekend workshops, you'll get tailored advice about how to approach your practice.
On the Advanced painting: practice and discourse course, you'll also be put through a series of different processes, including automatic drawing, collage, drawing out in public and working between sculpture and painting.
These exercises will challenge what you already know about painting. They'll deconstruct it and reconstruct it.
You don't have to like everything, but we ask you to form an opinion on each workshop and reflect on it through writing and making. That can really help to break down that feeling of creative block, that feeling of being stuck.
Sometimes it's about getting stuck in with materials and experimenting. Maybe you're not using anything from the art shop. Maybe you're using new materials, or materials in your immediate environment.
This can become the stimulus for some really exciting work, and that's something we've consistently seen evidence of on this course, students using corrugated iron, wool and furniture.
On the Advanced painting studio course you'll be working alongside a range of different advanced practitioners who have gone on their own journeys with materials, techniques and practices. That might mean bringing in alternative materials, natural materials, or potentially not working with conventional painting materials at all.
I think working through the eyes of somebody else for a week or a weekend can be really valuable in reshaping your process. It definitely has been for me when I've gone on residencies.
I constantly learn from students as well. I like to work with found and unfamiliar materials, which is something some of our students on Advanced Painting have been doing recently, and that has transformed how I look at materials.
You can work with your tutor to develop these relationships with materials, and I think that's a really special part of this course.
4. You struggle to talk about your own work
If you're looking to gain confidence in talking about your work, taking a course is a great way to develop your voice, to find your way of talking about art. I've run sessions specifically on this, finding your language to describe your work.
On the Advanced painting: practice and discourse course you'll regularly be asked to speak about your work in each session. Sometimes you might not know what the work is yet, but talking about it can help you find words that mean something to you.
We're not interested in inaccessible art language for the sake of it. We promote accessible and diverse ways of talking about your work.
That might mean talking about your work in terms of recipes, sport or anything else that is more suited to you than using technical painting language. We will cover technical language as well, and you'll have the opportunity to learn more about it, but our ethos is that painting sits alongside all disciplines and the rest of life.
Whichever avenue you find useful for thinking about your work, that's how we can talk about your work.
In my experience, that can really help open students up to how they approach painting, rather than how they think they should approach painting based on a particular, colonial or canonised version of art history.
This course is definitely trying to challenge that. We need a range of different voices to talk about contemporary painting.
On the Advanced painting studio course you'll have the opportunity to engage in monthly critiques alongside a dedicated seminar programme. These give you chances to talk about your work with others and get feedback from them.
You'll be able to prepare what you say, but you'll also learn to engage flexibly and reflectively with feedback. We encourage everyone to come with an open mind and explore those ideas, even if you don't necessarily agree with them.
Come and discuss them. Come and think them through before arriving at a conclusion.
Some of the best work can happen this way because you entertain an idea rather than immediately rejecting it. You let it percolate over the weekend before potentially rejecting it, or moving in a completely different direction.
5. You need challenge, not another beginner class
Advanced painting classes move beyond the kind of workshop where you're responding to a still life in a beginners' class, following an exercise from start to finish without having to make many decisions for yourself.
For example, the Advanced painting studio course requires you to think about what you're doing before you come into the classroom. It requires you to think about the materials you want to use, make decisions about how you will approach the exercises and think about what you want to get out of them.
There will be examples given, but you're encouraged to take them in your own direction. You're encouraged to break the rules rather than simply follow them.
You can go off piste.
You can challenge your tutors.
You might find that you've completed a lot of advanced programmes or beginners' programmes and now you want that network of advanced practitioners who are working at your level, who are equipped and willing to push you, and who are willing to be pushed themselves.
It's an independent environment where you can take your ideas to your teachers and have engaged critical conversations through the process of making.
You're thinking ideas through by actually making them rather than just working through exercises.
Sometimes the exercises are what you need. But sometimes what you need is to take a step back and think: *What do I need to do next?*
You can bring new things into the group and change the whole dynamic. Maybe you bring in an article, an object or an idea, and that ends up taking the form of the whole weekend.
It's a much more flexible space.
What professional artists do differently
You learn about what it means to be a professional artist in terms of ideas and conception, the importance of sketching and the importance of research.
Research might happen in galleries, through books or online. It might mean keeping a sketchbook with you at all times. It means continuing to experiment with materials and never stopping that experimentation.
It's also about attending exhibitions and learning how to go to openings and which openings are relevant to your practice.
It's about documenting your work and understanding the potential productivity of making as part of that documenting act.
And it's about learning how to sustain a practice by making your goals manageable and appropriate to how you work.
Your goals need to be tailored goals.
One of the reasons painters stop progressing is that they either run out of space, run out of time, run out of ideas, or run out of the will or headspace to research.
I think we offer that on this course. We give you that headspace. We give you the chance to fail.
If you chase commerce and fame and all of that, I think you can paint yourself into a corner and lose the love of painting.
I don't think you should always know exactly what you're doing.
I think it's important to have an idea of what you're doing, but also to try things that you don't know will work. To know both is important.
I would suggest to students that they keep their curiosity.
You need headspace and you need time to be curious, but that doesn't have to mean having huge amounts of time. It can be 30 or 40 seconds, a minute here, an hour there. It's about knowing how you work.
I think this course helps you to understand that because the way one person works doesn't suit another. We promote that really well through the tailored tutorials we give, how we support individual practice, and how we make it possible to work with whatever space and time you've got.
Advanced Painting Studio is meant to be a place that you can come back to year after year to reflect on your studio practice with a new and emerging group of people, to continually test where your ideas are at now and to meet you wherever you are in your practice.
What separates a developing painter from an advanced practitioner?
I think a developing painter is probably working through exercises, which I think is incredibly valuable and always worth going back to.
I think all painters are developing painters, really.
An advanced practitioner will have a grasp on those basics, but they're always worth revisiting. The difference is that the advanced practitioner comes with concepts and ideas.
They don't have to be fully formed, but they're starting to question why they're using paint or how they're using paint, rather than taking what they've been taught as read.
They're starting to question the history of painting, how painting relates to different subject areas, what they can bring into painting, what they can do with painting, who is painting and why they are painting.
That's combined with a continuous approach to experimentation with materials and a dedication to research alongside technical and conceptual concerns.
I think an advanced practitioner is also looking to work out how they reflect on their practice, how they continually engage with research and contemporary themes and concerns, and how they can support the work of others through critical critique.
That's what Advanced Painting: Practice and Discourse is about.
It's not about reaching a point where you've finished developing as a painter. It's about creating the space, community and challenge to keep developing.
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Revive your painting practice
Join a City Lit advanced painting course and become part of creative community.
