October 23-25 10 am-4 pm EST Instructor: Kenny Harris Visiting instructor Kenny Harris will teach students how to create atmospheric and energetic still lifes that feel intimate, luminous, and deeply resonant. We will focus on contemporary still life in this 3-day painting workshop. Working directly from observation, we’ll explore how simple composition and tonal sensitivity can create powerful, evocative images. The first day will focus on setting up a still life, selecting objects, preliminary drawing/studies and a demo by the instructor. On days two and three, students will focus on their own painting with lots of individual attention and guidance from the instructor. If a student chooses, they will have guidance incorporating the surroundings to augment their still life with the interior environment. We will focus on controlling our palette to achieve subtle shifts in value and color to build mood and atmosphere within our still life. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of light—how it shapes form & space, creates color harmony, and unifies a painting. We’ll look for strong graphic shapes of light and dark for our composition, then we will add atmosphere and variety to spice up the paintings. We’ll also touch on Form Language and Edges—when to use sharp, firm, soft, and lost edges. Edge control helps us to communicate forms and to guide the viewer’s eye. Kenny will show you different types of mark-making to achieve these edges, or to describe the texture of a flat surface or a turning form. If you’ve never scraped a painting or used your palette knife as a painting tool, we’ll get into it! CLICK HERE for materials list & suggestions for subject matter About the instructor: Kenny has been a fixture in the Los Angeles art scene since arriving in Venice Beach in 2001. He has made a career out of describing his environment both at home and abroad. He has traveled around the world, depicting subjects ranging from the grand to the mundane. Drawn to quiet subjects, his tonal palette and spare spaces evoke a calming energy. Travel is a constant pull for this artist, and he has made bodies of work focused on Central America, South America, Italy, France, Cuba, Turkey, China, Ireland, and Russia, as well as the US, and his backyard of Venice Beach. He borrows from both modernism and classicism to achieve a naturalistic style full of grace, balanced with formalism and urgency. Classical motifs are cropped with a modern eye; rendered forms are contrasted with palette-knife scrapes and impasto. His style and palette continue to evolve, recently focusing on still life with vibrant color. A semester abroad in Florence was a formative time for him, studying Renaissance Art History and classical figure drawing at the atelier of Charles Cecil. He copied drawings at the Gabinetto in the Uffizi and drew in the churches. Later, he developed his tonal palette while studying under Frank Mason at The Art Students’ League of New York. More recently, he earned his MFA at Laguna College of Art Design in 201,7 focusing on portraiture. Kenny was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Laguna College of Art Design, where his passion for painting inspired a generation of young figurative artists emerging in the Southern California art scene. In 2025, he left teaching to return to his studio practice full-time. He was awarded the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Grant in 2016. He currently shows at Billis/Williams Gallery in Los Angeles, George Billis Gallery in New York, Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam, and Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Seattle. We are unable to give refunds or exchanges for visiting artist workshops unless Townsend Atelier cancels the workshop or if we can fill a cancelled spot with someone on the waiting list.
