I’m offering a series of online, hybrid and live painting workshops this summer. In addition to these workshops, I work as an art coach with individuals and small groups (emails me for details — phocking @ gmail). I’m really excited about these particular workshops, because they’re designed not only to learn about painting, but also to explore the nature of an art practice.
ONLINE: Identity & Experience: Painting our Lives at Provincetown Art Association and Museum
May 29th & June 5th 2021
From time to time, every artist wonders what their work is about. Evocative paintings often imbue the essence of the artist in the paint — whether through choice of content or the rhythms of paint application. This workshop will explore the nature of identity in painting, starting with our individual preoccupations and moving into personal explorations of landscape, portraiture, and still life. The goal of the workshop is to create a small body of work focused on a theme, an archive of source materials, and to establish a sense of trajectory that will allow each of us to continue working after the workshop. Prompts for getting started with our explorations will be offered, but participants will be encouraged to pursue ideas that are important to them regardless of the prompts.
This workshop will use Zoom for two six-hour Saturday sessions. The first Saturday is focused on learning from several artists working in dialogue with the workshop’s theme. Using prompts drawn from these artists’ work, we’ll engage their thinking in our picture making. During the week, participants will be encouraged to continue working on their own (as time allows) and everyone will schedule an individual consultation with the instructor. The following Saturday is focused on more consideration of artists relevant to the workshop, continued studio work, and a final group review.
Register: https://www.paam.org/event/online-workshop-identity-experience-painting-our-lives-with-pete-hocking/
ONLINE: Painting As Memoir at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
June 7th – June 11th 2021
The art of memory is not documentary. Rather, it’s a process of allowing experience to filter through our bodies and manifest in stories and images. The truth of memoir is always a personal truth. It’s the honesty of memory, not veracity of detail, that provides the hook for others to connect with us. We think about memoir as a literary process, but the archive of a painter’s images, a commitment to relating feeling and perspective in a painting creates the fragments that build a memoir over time. This workshop is about remembering, relating, and developing fragments of memory in visual form. Focusing on place and relationship, drawing from photo albums and experience, and thinking about the way that objects and material culture hold our history, we’ll build a body of paintings or drawings that are facets of a larger narrative. We’ll look at the work of contemporary painters, like Elizabeth Peyton, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Castle, Hernan Bas, and Doron Langberg, and consider the ways they are painting their worlds and their lives. We’ll also consider and discuss memoir in literature and film. This workshop will be conducted on Zoom. We will meet in the morning for two hours, 10-noon ET, and in the afternoon, 4-5 PM ET, for an hour to discuss the day’s work.The workshop is designed for painters of any level, with the focus being on supporting participants individually to develop their voice and idiom as painters.
Register: https://web.fawc.org/summer-program/painting-memoir
HYBRID: Walking & Painting with Pete Hocking at Provincetown Art Association and Museum
June 28 – July 2
Immersion in the landscape is an important part of my painting practice. Observing the world is critical, but so are smelling, touching, and feeling a place. This workshop is designed to be immersive — utilizing both virtual and in-person experience. It has three aspects every day:
1.) morning walks either in your home community or as a group on the Outer Cape
2.) painting / drawing on our own during the day
3.) two-hour group sessions via Zoom at the end of the day — to both look at landscape art and to discuss the work we’re creating. The goal of the workshop is to develop a small body of work that’s in dialogue with a landscape.
For those choosing the in-person option on the Outer Cape, because we’ll be walking at different locations each morning, participants must have the ability to travel to and from locations in Provincetown and Truro. Walking locations will include trails off Race Point Road, in Pamet Valley, at High Head, and in town. Each walk will be designed to be between 2-3 miles from 9-11 AM, which we’ll take at a leisurely pace. For those participating remotely, I encourage you to choose a series of 2-3 mile walks you can take each morning. The walks are a time for us to experience the landscape and prepare to make artworks. Between noon and 5 PM, participants will work independently en plein air or in an indoor workspace to which they have access. Our group discussions will be by Zoom from 5-7 PM.
Participants are encouraged to use the two-dimensional media of their choice — including oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, drawing media, etc. I will be using oil paint and my iPhone (for visual research during the walks). I can provide material lists as needed.
LIVE: Making Pictures
August 2 – 5
In a conversation about making pictures, David Hockney has said, “Every picture ever made has its rules, even the ones made by surveillance camera in a car park. There’s a limit to what it can see. Someone has to put it there, arrange that it would cover a certain area. There is nothing automatic about it: someone has to choose it’s point of view.” (A History of Pictures). This workshop is about developing one’s point of view, exploring and expanding one’s compositional agility, and building one’s vocabulary of depiction. It’s intended for painters and picture makers of all experience levels. While the instructor will work with oil paint, participants are invited to bring their preferred painting medium (oil, acrylic, watercolor, etc.) or two-dimensional mixed media supplies. Those who want to work in the field will be invited to explore the grounds around the studio, and those who prefer to work in studio are encouraged to bring source material (still life objects, mirrors for self-portraits, photographs, drawings, etc.) to prompt their paintings.
Register: https://www.castlehill.org/2021-summerfall/peter-hocking
HYBRID: Walking & Painting with Pete Hocking at Provincetown Art Association and Museum
September 6 – September 10
Immersion in the landscape is an important part of my painting practice. Observing the world is critical, but so are smelling, touching, and feeling a place. This workshop is designed to be immersive — utilizing both virtual and in-person experience. It has three aspects every day:
1.) morning walks either in your home community or as a group on the Outer Cape
2.) painting / drawing on our own during the day
3.) two-hour group sessions via Zoom at the end of the day — to both look at landscape art and to discuss the work we’re creating. The goal of the workshop is to develop a small body of work that’s in dialogue with a landscape.
For those choosing the in-person option on the Outer Cape, because we’ll be walking at different locations each morning, participants must have the ability to travel to and from locations in Provincetown and Truro. Walking locations will include trails off Race Point Road, in Pamet Valley, at High Head, and in town. Each walk will be designed to be between 2-3 miles from 9-11 AM, which we’ll take at a leisurely pace. For those participating remotely, I encourage you to choose a series of 2-3 mile walks you can take each morning. The walks are a time for us to experience the landscape and prepare to make artworks. Between noon and 5 PM, participants will work independently en plein air or in an indoor workspace to which they have access. Our group discussions will be by Zoom from 5-7 PM.
Participants are encouraged to use the two-dimensional media of their choice — including oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, drawing media, etc. I will be using oil paint and my iPhone (for visual research during the walks). I can provide material lists as needed.
pete hocking 