Catherine Prescott
Bio
Catherine Prescott is a prize-winning portrait painter from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Most recently her work was one of 51 finalists chosen from over 4,000 entries for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. She has won awards in national and state juried shows since 1979 and has lectured and written on the subject of portraits as art. Recent one-person exhibits were at the Phillips Museum in Lancaster, PA, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. In 2005 she was in a two-person exhibit at the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana, and a 4-person show entitled “New Philadelphia Realists” at the Seraphin Gallery in Philadelphia. Her work has been featured in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, and American Arts Quarterly. She taught painting and drawing at Messiah College for 20 years, and taught portrait painting for Gordon College’s Orvieto, Italy program in ’98, ’03, and ’05 as well as for The Glen workshop, Image Summer Institute, Santa Fe, in ’01 and ‘02. Her exhibition portraits as well as commissioned portraits have been widely collected. Catherine’s portraits are known for their psychological insight and depth of character.
Classes taught by Catherine Prescott
The Dramatic Portrait: Working on a Dark Ground
The Italian word “chiaroscuro” means light/dark and is employed most strongly in the work of Caravaggio. The Dutch Baroque painters used it as seen in the paintings of Rembrandt. In Spain it was called “tenebrism,” and is exemplified by de Ribera. The American painter, Thomas Eakins, used similar contrast in the 19th C. How can we approach such an idea in our own work? Was there a technique we can employ which would put us in touch with their vision? How can one move from strong light to strong dark across a flat surface or, more impossibly, across a complicated form like the human head? This course will approach some answers to these questions starting with working on a dark ground and maintaining ten values or tones while moving into full color.
The primary goal of this five-day workshop will be to develop an oil portrait of a strongly illuminated figure. We will look at slides, and have one or two brief demonstrations. We will work from the model on either a head and shoulders, or half-length image, depending on your previous experience.
The first two days we will do a series of oil studies, first in black and white, then in color, to learn to push the contrast and develop structure with value and color. The last three days we will work full time with one model. We will study proportion and color relationships, with the main emphasis on composing the light and dark areas and developing form.
This course is meant for artists who have worked in oils before and have had at least one figure drawing class.