A Half-Day Masterclass that explores five of the most important decisions artists make—and how learning to see them will change the way you look at art.
Rather than covering many works, we spend time with a small number of exceptional paintings, for an in-depth exploration of how great paintings are made.
Composition
Frans Snyders, 'Dogs Fighting in a Wooded Clearing', c.1620
Composition began in earnest in the 4th Century BCE when a man by the name of AristotélÄ“s NÄ«komakhou StageiritÄ“s started encouraging artists to focus on representing the essence of nature through order, symmetry, and proper proportion rather than mere copying.
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Since that remarkable man's insight, artists have organized their work through composition—arranging forms, lines, and gestures to guide the viewer’s eye and create balance or tension within the image.
Once you begin to notice this invisible framework, paintings stop looking like pictures and start revealing themselves as carefully constructed visual systems. A raised arm, a tilted head, or the direction of a gaze may quietly direct attention across the entire canvas. What first appears effortless is often the result of meticulous design.
Technique
Paintings are physical objects, built layer by layer through the movement of an artist’s hand. Brushwork, impasto, sfumato, glazing, scumbling, and texture all shape how light interacts with the surface. Most gallery goers only have a sense for the first and last words in that sentence. Our conversation will open up the rest of it and more besides.
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Looking closely reveals the decisions behind the work: where an artist worked quickly or slowly with brush, palette knife, squeegee or fingers; where precision mattered, and where energy was allowed to remain visible. These traces of process bring the painting to life, transforming pigment into gesture and surface into expression.
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It's one of my favorite moments in viewing a picture.
Vincent Van Gogh, detail from 'Green Wheat Fields, Auvers', 1890. You can spend hours lost in his brushwork.
Mark Rothko, 'Red, Blue, Orange', 1955.
Palette
Color rarely works alone. Great painters think in relationships—how one color vibrates beside another, how warm and cool tones balance, and how contrast directs attention.
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Understanding the palette of a painting reveals how artists build harmony, tension, and mood. What appears to be natural color is often carefully orchestrated to guide the eye and shape the emotional atmosphere of the work.
For Clyfford Still color made it possible for him to describe "life and death merging in fearful union", while Michelangelo, always the contrarian, saw it as secondary to drawing. One of them was right, and this stage of the experience is our opportunity to find out who. ​
Light
In 1860, a Scotsman by the name of James Clerk Maxwell revealed that light is born in the wobble between electricity and magnetism. For the Romantics it was an expression of the sublime. For Buddhists it is a veil beyond which lies Enlightenment. All the light we see is the result of the friction that surrounds and permeates us. To therefore try and capture it in paint is borderline quixotic.
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From the glow of candlelight by de la Tour to a shimmer of daylight by Sargent, artists use light to create drama, intimacy, or quiet presence. They manipulate it to convey form and tell a story.
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Light is the origin of an artist's conversation.
Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee', 1633
Leonardo da Vinci, 'Saint John the Baptist, c.1515
Intention
Every great painting begins with a tension, between the senses and the intellect. A sense of the divine, perhaps, or of the soul; the ego, or what lies beneath it. How vulnerable and open is the artist prepared to be in order to express that insight, that glimmer. How should figures be arranged? Where should the viewer’s eye travel? What emotion should the work convey? It drove Rothko and Van Gogh to the brink, that need to describe the sublime.
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By reconstructing the artist’s decisions—why this gesture, this color, this moment—we begin to see the painting not just as an image but as the outcome of a series of creative choices that reveal our species capacity for courage and awe.