Painting with a Plan with Jeff Thomsen

Tired with flat, lifeless paintings?  Dismayed by dull, pasty blobs of paint?  Want to stay as thin as you can for as long as you can while still maintaining that youthful glow?  Then try taking a walk on the slow side.  Explore building your paintings with thin transparencies, plotting ahead how the lower layers will affect and hopefully provide glow to the upper.  Play thin against thick, warm against cool, all with a variety of strokes and applications while still maintaining close attention to composition and values for creating depth and atmosphere.

Designed for oil painters with at least some experience, the course will try to accomodate others as well.  Work from projects you bring in (photographs, sketches, ideas) or the still life.  Think in terms of making studies rather than finished paintings since, no matter what your level, the goal is always to learn.  And maybe you'll find that the slow, thought-out and built-up approach to painting may get you to your goals all the more quickly.

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View/download the Cerulean Arts Information & Policy Guide

Dates:  6 weeks, Wednesdays, January 14 - February 18, 2026 
Time:  10 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Fee:  $250
Register by: January 9 (space is limited)
** Sign up with a friend and receive 10% off both registrations.  Use discount code ClassWinter26 at checkout. 

Jeff Thomsen is a member of the Cerulean Arts Collective: I representationally and mostly in oils, both scenes observed and those imagined. I am sometimes inspired by music, often by animals, and always by the atmospheric play of light falling throughout the day and drifting away at night. I like a sense of narrative and feeling of place and character, and so I attempt to manipulate my paint to realize these feelings. I often see the world in deep, vibrating layers, and I do my best to paint in a way that reflects this.