Interior Painting Workshop with Peter Van Dyke

This week I took the week-long intensive workshop, Interior painting with Peter Van Dyke, a young and super-talented painter who's a graduate of the Florence Academy. Peter's been teaching a few years at PAFA, often the cast drawing classes and animal drawing and I had Peter for animal drawing last semester. Peter's a funny guy, very laid back--yet very knowlegable and intense about drawing and painting. A few friends at school took his painting interiors class last semester and they spoke very highly of the class and Peter--and more importantly I like their paintings. Since I need an extra painting class for credit I signed on early. It honestly was a big crunch for me to do the workshop with the amount of freelance work I have in the studio--but sometimes you just bite the bullet and don't sleep much of a week or so to get something you want done. the painting at the top was my final painting in the class and the one I am happiest with.
This was the first painting I the workshop, I worked on it for a day and a half and then moved on to the one below. I really tired to unify each space, each tonal space, the inside and the outside and their temperature envelopes , warm/cool, but also the different between the two rooms.
This was the second painting I did in the afternoon after I finished up the first painting of the yellow chair. The sun moved quick and this was maybe 90 minutes-2 hours tops and i had to stop as the light changed with the sunset.
Friday we had a Dirty Palette Club meeting at school during the class, I figured why not kill two birds with one brush. The yellow chair again made a great subject with it's horrid, yet alluring yellow covering...I'll be updating the DPC blog later.



Peter's painting philosophy is to try and group areas of your painting together--to keep it as simple as possible, and then within those groupings to build contrasts and values changes, reunifying areas and an interdependency of those relationships. That as long as you can look at it, love--you can paint it. What are you choosing to do with the tone range? The energy of the touch, how you apply the paint should resonate with the whole painting. Simple, but simple isn't easy and requires you to think and sometimes to be brutal and mash thing together to reunify them after you've painted them in. I think I learned a few things and was happiest with my final painting, I think I caught the essence of what Peter was trying to teach us, and they way artists like Sargent and Zorn, two of my favorite artists worked.
Here is where Peter's stopped his painting demo, and below you can see how fast and direct he goes, working big and loose and never being afraid to unify or reunify areas together.
Peter uses a view finder to get his composition set up.
And then he blocks in pretty quick, always thinking of the big masses. Later if he feels something is off he will go back in with a pencil and redraw into the painting to replace or correct angles, etc.


Peter worked all over trying to keep the areas of value and the envelopes of color and value strong at this stage. It was a great class and I highly recommend both taking a class with Peter if you can but also checking out his work on-line, at his website at the John Pence galleryand the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery.