Outdoor Painting Workshop with Nathanael Gray
Bring your watercolors, acrylic or oil paint for this explorative workshop at Cura Contemporary and Uvas Reservoir County Park! This course will focus on freeing you up to create, tapping into the childlike creativity that is too often lost. In this workshop students will focus on the process rather than the result, using plein air as a tool to help aid in this. Whether you are already a plein air painter or not, there is no better teacher for forcing artists to capture color, light, and composition quickly than working outdoors. This course is open to anyone but ideal for artists who have been painting for a while and want to loosen up their style or remove creative blocks.
Day one will be spent in the classroom engaging in a series of exercises focused on painting fast and large. The aim of the exercise will be to loosen up and quickly form visual ideas. Day two will begin by painting outdoors in the landscape at the Uvas Reservoir County Park, and we will incorporate the exercises from the previous day. At the end of the day we will return to the classroom for an uplifting discussion about the work created.
* All participants of the workshop receive 10% off at our restaurant Véra. Discount can only be applied on day of workshop (excludes alcohol).
When: Saturday June 7th, 2025 + Sunday Jun 8th, 2025 from 10 AM to 5 PM each day.
Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Early Bird Rate: $350
*Register by May 21st, 2025 to take advantage of this discount.
Price after May 21: $400
Location: Cura Contemporary in the Edes Building | 17395 Monterey Road, Morgan Hill CA, 95037 + Uvas Reservoir County Park
Artist's Bio: Nathanael Gray works en plein air, creating large scale impasto paintings. His use of abstraction, mark making, and color takes influence from impressionism, post impressionism, and abstract expressionism. Nathanael has become known for his spontaneous interpretation of the California coast and mountains, often completing paintings in just over an hour. His work is featured at Kay Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM where he shows a mix of California and Southwest paintings. In September 2023 he had an exhibition with sculpture artist Kevin Box titled Nature’s Architecture. His work is also represented at Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, CA where he has been featured in multiple group exhibitions and had three solo exhibitions: A Year in Tahoe, 2020, I Only Went Out for a Walk, 2021, and From the Delta to the Sea, 2022.
