Painting from life outside can be overwhelming. There is so much information and stimulation from all the elements. But, as a landscape painter, nature is the best teacher we can find. We will venture outside during this workshop and focus on finding simplified compositions. We will be working with sketchbooks first and then in oil paints.

We will practice working quickly, finding the main idea for our compositions, and simplifying the landscape elements to support that idea. We will discuss color palette and how to create color harmony and mood in our paintings. I hope to give each artist new tools to use when they work from nature. Our exact location is still to be determined, but there are so many possibilities from Sandy Beach in Portsmouth to Sachuest Wildlife Refuge in Middletown.

About Erin Spencer

Erin Spencer is a landscape oil painter living in Rhode Island. She is constantly drawn to the shapes in nature and how they interact with each other.

Her paintings are expressions of place rather than exact representations. She hopes to create poetry in her work that allows the viewer to step into a different world, to experience a moment in time and place.

Erin has been painting and showing her work for close to 16 years, and her paintings can be found in private collections around the world. She has the amazing support of her husband and three children as she continues to navigate her love for art.