Portland Spring 2027

This is an open level class. It is accessible and understandable even if you have never drawn, mixed color, or painted before. A mix of demonstration, lecture, and hands-on painting will introduce students to my ideas, techniques and the concepts that motivate my work. This class is perfect for students who want to loosen up. Learn to not be afraid to make mistakes, learn that you dont need to know how to draw', mix color, or paint to be a painter. It's about having fun expressing yourself and learning to change direction. Just because you start painting something doesnt mean that's what you have to finish. I teach you to find new direction and excitement to keep the process moving in unexpected ways. So much of the best work happens on accident.

In this mixed-media painting class, you will learn to create paintings that emerge from an abstract base of markings, colors, line, and shape, to form expressive and organic creations. Students will learn painting and mark making techniques that will encourage imagery and connection to their work. Through a series of painting exercises, you will explore and express your ideas by imagining what could be created from abstraction rather than confining your ideas to predetermined outcomes. Within the process, we will create narrative dialogue by noting what we see and feel in our work . Through the practice of subtractive painting, we will remove the parts that are no longer relevant or keep us trapped from progress. This teaches us choice and freedom to change direction in our work. We continually build layers within our paintings, combining fragments of passed ideas with the new until we arrive at a feeling of completion . Through this engagement we learn to experiment, take risks, re-associate our work from perspectives unconfined by our expectations. This allows us to see things DIFFERENTLY and move to a more expressed and personal engagement when painting. Using simple materials and techniques, you will be free to express yourself within your paintings in new ways: learning from the raw base of art, discovering your personal likes and dislikes, connecting you to your practice and imagery from a position of experimentation and instinct.

I want to teach you to imagine the unimaginable. For me, painting is an experience in every way, i love the feeling of each of my mediums and methods, drawing clenched fisted, wrong handed, without looking, using my hand and palms to smear and mix acrylic paints, using ​​brushes, scrapers, oil crayons, and pastels in any way that comes to mind. I'm always looking for a new technique to inspire me. Painting in many reckless layers searching for a meaning in random intentions, then pulling out the images i begin to see. This is what I will aim to instill in all of you: the excitement of the unexpected, creating in ways that don't seem logical. This is a key step towards understanding intuitions.
Here is a link to a recent feature on my teaching ideas and techniques from Oregon Artbeat

https://www.opb.org/video/2018/01/24/jesse-reno/

Materials fee $25 paid directly to instructor at beginning of class includes:

non toxic acrylic paint primary colors, white and black. black colored pencils as marking tools, and heavy wieght 100lb bristol paper as our surface, so we can roll our pieces up for easy transport home.

Supplies You Need to Bring to Class in addition to materials provided by instructor:

- small brush for details
- 1 inch flat brush
- 1 2 inch chip brushe
- fan brush
- additional brushes are fine, the sizes dont need to be exact, old or worn brushes are also fine. Basically you want a few brushes to experiment with of different sizes and styles.
Oil pastels – I use craypas they are very affordable and have a nice level of oil not to oily not to dry, but any oil pastels will work.
- 1 blue pastel
- 1 white pastel
- 1 red pastel
- 1 yellow pastel