Workshop | Landscape Painting with Chuck Close (Grid) Method

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 2004-05

Join Resident Artist and instructor, Ma Nong, for a workshop to create an abstract landscape painting using the Chuck Close method.

Chuck Close works with ideas of color, scale and form in his paintings in a gridded manner that looks like an abstract painting.

In this class, the Chuck Close method will be used to work on landscape paintings or nature photos that can create abstract landscape paintings.

This workshop is great for practicing mixing paint colors to color match your inspiration photo. You will practice how to find the color and composition of each square in the grid to create your painting.

Materials provided: acrylic paint, canvas 8 x 10”, brushes, sharpie, ruler,…etc

Students will select an inspiration photo from one provided (whether printed or from a magazine), or have the option to print one out at the workshop. Students are welcome to bring their own photo or magazine cutout.

*Tips for the photo: Large areas of solid color, less details the better. Here are some examples:

Instructor Biography

Ma Nong

This is Ma Nong’s 4th workshop at Arts Warehouse! She is currently artist in Studio 4 at Arts Warehouse.

As a Taiwanese born in Korea, I moved to South Florida in 2013. We encountered strangeness and difference at every turn, but the sunlight, sky, and green nature of the subtropical culture always gave me warm inspiration. I have lived in South Florida for a decade now compressing and symbolizing this into color-rich cubes representing home, the strangeness of being different from my native country, and the process of adapting. Gradually, I developed a series of portraits exploring the signifiers of human nature. Humanoid figures are portrayed as children’s dolls with exaggerated heads and smaller torsos and are centered and anchored as if trying to root themselves into the frame. They reflect child-like vulnerability where the feelings of dread, loneliness, and weakness to the familiar/unfamiliar world are present. Dimensional crystalline shapes simultaneously create and break the form; symbolizing complex units that both comprise and undermine identity. Color is bold and convincing, resembling that of nationality, yet it doesn’t reveal the true origin of the figure. In this process of seeing and feeling all my surrounding environments, large puzzles are put together one by one, and these experiences are fused and harmonized in one complete work.