Master Class with Stuart Shils: Emphasizing Abstraction

These two carefully guided, immersive days in the studio will focus on nurturing perceptual discrimination and clarifying observation, asking questions about not what we see, but more importantly, how we see, within the experience of visual encounter.  Working both the from the model and from reproductions (including older and 20th century masters,) we’ll paint our way through a sequence of playful visual exercises and explorations, to understand that abstraction – composition/design with color and shape – is THE foundation, the great engine behind all painting. Emphasis will also be placed on developing a deeper familiarity with drawing as a concise, diagrammatic graphic language and to think of painting as drawing. The take away from this class is playfully experiential and muscle building, not oriented toward ‘finished’ paintings or to making pretty pictures, but rather, on acquiring a more comprehensive awareness of how you see and think visually. The goal here is not to imitate the teacher, but rather, how to explore deeper into yourself in ways that might be risky. . 

View/download the Materials List
View/download the Cerulean Arts Class Registration & Policy Guide 

Date:  Saturday and Sunday, March 21 & 22, 2026
Time:  10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Fee:  $395 
Register by: March 6 (space is limited)

I'm native to the northwest corner of Philadelphia.  Passion for the visual world was shaped while looking out the train windows riding the Chestnut Local through Germantown and North Philadelphia in and out of Center City as a regular activity beginning quite early in childhood around 1959. The way that windows condensed light into magical surfaces was theological and that visual presence was the seed that later influenced and fueled a lifetime of observation. 
 
But the origins of my visual curiosity are also located within other mysteries of even earlier childhood. As a very young boy I took naps after lunch. My mother darkened my bedroom by closing the long, lined curtains and on sunny days a thin sliver of sunlight would pass through the vertical crack between the curtains, piercing the darkness, illuminating the tiny pieces of dust floating in air, planetarium like. Early on, the hypnotic spell of light, dark and pattern, emerged as presiding and compelling motifs, almost a nascent visual theology. Now, having crossed 70, I can say that in studio life I've become someone I could never have imagined being, and for that I'm very grateful.
 
More info about me at my website: stuartshils.com