THE LIVING FIGURE: PAINTING LIGHT & SOUL | CHARLES MIANO
Dates: Monday 2nd - Friday 6th August 2027
Times: 10am-4.30pm
Location: Enniskerry
Skill Level: understanding of oil painting
Please see detailed workshop information below
If this course is fully booked or not currently scheduled, go ahead add your name to the waiting list HERE
Payment plans available contact us directly
aBOUT THE WORKSHOP
From classical antiquity through the great workshops of the Renaissance, the human figure has held a central place in the artist’s education. Within its living architecture, we encounter the rhythms, proportions, and harmonies of the natural world. To study the figure is to deepen our understanding of nature herself, cultivating a sensitivity to form, movement, and light that enriches everything we paint.
Yet the figure is more than an arrangement of anatomical parts. It breathes, carries weight, and expresses an inward life. A human beings gesture can reveal feeling and suggest a story. In his own work, Charles Miano explores this union of observation and poetic expression through moti dell’animo, the movements of the soul, where inner feeling finds expression in the visible world.
Join Charles in Ireland for five days devoted to painting the living figure. Working directly from live models, students will learn to break down the complexities of the human form into simple, purposeful exercises, progressing from quick painted sketches and abstractions toward a fully rendered figure painting. Throughout, the emphasis will be on preserving the vitality of the pose, allowing structure and anatomy to support a figure alive with motion and emotion.
Using the Miano Foundation Palette within his holistic approach to painting, students will explore how color, value, and edges unite under the sovereignty of light. Beginning with clear, economical block-ins, students will advance to duotone exercises, learning a simple yet effective abbreviation of values that captures the essential light and shadow relationships.
Special attention will be given to the arabesque, the flowing rhythms that carry the eye through the figure and connect its parts into a living whole. Students will learn to recognise these rhythms in each pose and compose them in harmony with the light effect.
Through demonstrations, guided exercises, and individual instruction, Charles will help students carry the life of the first sketch into the developing paintings. Even in a sustained pose, the figure possesses an inner movement. Learning to preserve that movement as the painting becomes more resolved is essential to avoiding stiffness and giving the work a convincing sense of life.
This workshop invites students to see more clearly, paint with greater purpose, and discover how the observed figure can become a vessel for feeling and story.
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Study will include:
• Quick figure sketches and painted gestures conveying balance, weight, movement, and feeling
• Artistic anatomy as a foundation for understanding and expression
• Understanding the "Secret Figure" and the movable masses, their connections, and their coordinated rhythms
• Capturing “correct” proportion while preserving the character and vitality of the pose
• Simple, effective block-ins establishing placement, proportion
• Duotone exercises that abbreviate values and clarify the essential light effect
• Grisaille and brunaille studies for developing our simplified value and edge relationships
• The sovereignty of light in a picture, governing its visual order
• Simple and effective Old Master skin tone variations using the Miano Foundation Palette
• Idealization of forms, moving beyond literal copying toward thoughtful selection and interpretation
• A sustained pose, developing toward a "finish" while retaining the life of the initial gesture
• Telling a story through the figure, giving visible expression to mood and the movements of the soul -
List will be sent upon registration.
