Some impressions from students in the 2018-2019 course

"If you want to know how color works, how it lives, how it walks, how it sits on a page - take this course.
 
Color had always been a blind spot for me. I'd always been a black-white-gray, light-and-shadow artist. I hadn't learned about color theory beyond memorizing the color wheel, and the only way I knew about complimentary colors was by remembering to look across the wheel from one color to the other.
 
Now I know how the color wheel works, why compliments exist, how they're useful, and how the individual colors themselves act.
 
This course will require a lot of exertion at times, and will ask you to do things you've never done before, but it'll be worth it." Andrew Madey
 
            "This course has helped me to break out of many narrow habits.   I see how my own artwork is subtly transformed. And how in looking out into the world, I see relationships of form and color that I’ve never noticed before.  They show themselves to me and I can imagine them saying, “Where have you been?”  I had the image around the time of our third session that I was riding on a train and that the course wasn’t putting me on a different track but that the track I was already on was climbing higher and through new territory". Jo Valens

"I came to the Free Columbia low-residency course in September with a love of painting and color. I wanted to learn more about the feeling and mood of color and thought it would be advantageous to learn more about watercolors as a medium. I thought Laura might able to teach me these things. 
 
"What I learned has been far greater than the sum of these parts. Laura Summer led a group of us in a training so ripe for a personal encounter with the quality realm that I find myself with what feels like painting as a spiritual practice. Spiritual in that I am able to connect to and have a relationship with color that is immaterial. My time at Free Columbia helped me form this capacity to listen to and experience color and composition in this deep way. 
 
"The low-residency course at Free Columbia has been full of learning situations made for exploring and strengthening these color capacities.  

"One of the first exercises we did was an all blue painting built up through washes of Windsor blue. 
 
"The initial round of washes was barely perceptible. Paint dishes were filled mostly with water and just a swipe through of pigment. We alternated between laying down a wash and then drying the painting.  

"The process took time, it took patience, and it engaged with the unknown and was thoroughly a new experience for me.  Color in the past has always been something I enjoyed using but until now I never took this much time getting to know blue.

"I enjoyed bringing my large Masonite board with the beautiful paper attached over to the wood burning fireplace to dry between washes. Standing by the fireplace meant getting warm, admiring the progress on my own and others' paintings, and sharing the joys and struggles of getting to know blue in this way. 
 
"We spoke quietly to each other. Some of us made toast. We got to know each other and the color blue in this slow and steady way.  By the end of the first week of the low-residency I felt a deeper knowing of blue, a relationship that had built over the course of the week. I felt a capacity for learning and painting that is quieter and takes time. I also felt myself as part of a community of others. People who wanted to engage their sensitivity, who wanted to train, through painting, to encounter the deep, beautiful, and diverse qualities of the life we are part of." Alison Fox