Portrait Workshop July 16-20, 2001

Release Date: 6/1/2001. Expired: 7/20/2001

The Renaissance Center’s July Portrait Workshop with Connie Erickson is sure to put a smile on every face as students will receive 5 days of instruction on the many aspects of portraiture. This 5-day workshop is 9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, July 16-20 and is limited to 12 students. Tuition is $160 and registration deadline is July 9. A 3-hour demonstration will be provided 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Monday, July 16 at a cost of $25. There is no student limit for this demonstration and registration deadline is also July 9.

Beginning with the 3-hour demonstration on Monday morning, Erickson will instruct on surfaces, paints, brushes, how to accurately draw the head and figure, toning the canvas, blocking in, mixing skin tones, edges, and posing and lighting the model. The remainder of the workshop will focus on the fundamentals of size/placement, composition, form, value, color and anatomy. Demonstrations and individual attention are given generously throughout the week with students having the opportunity to work on two extended paintings over the five days.

Erickson is an award winner in several American Society of Portrait Artists Competitions, and a well recognized and collected classical painter from Franklin. She began her professional portrait painting career in 1987 after leaving a Nuclear Medicine Chief Technologist position and a period of extensive study with Daniel Greene and other well known artists.

She works in the classical realist style in oil and pastel and has exhibited in numerous juried exhibitions and solo shows and has received many awards for her portrait, still life, and landscape paintings. In 2000, she won the Juanita Greene Parks Memorial Award at the Central South Exhibition at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. She has had portraits in numerous exhibits and galleries in the mid-south region and been juried into two Pastel Society of America Exhibitions at the National Arts Club. She has been a finalist in The Artist Magazine national contest in the portrait division in 1994 and won Honorable Mention in the American Society of Portrait Artists competitions in 1996 in Montgomery, AL.

In June 2000, she won Honorable Mention in the American Society of Portrait Artists Festival at the National Academy of Design and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This honor placed Erickson eighth among over 400 international entries. She was also the only woman to receive an award at the Award Ceremony at the New York Athletic Club.

Erickson has taught at Watkins Institute College of Art, Cheekwood Fine Arts Center in Nashville, gives workshops and teaches privately. She is a former President of the Nashville Artists Guild. She is a member of the American Society of Portrait Artists, the Portrait Society of America, the Atlanta Portrait Society, the Copley Society and the American Society of Classical Realism. Her work includes academic, corporation and private commissions. Some of note are six portraits of the founders of the Grand Ole Opry installed at the Ryman Auditorium, five college presidents of local universities, “Albert Schweitzer and Bach” reproductions of which are being used worldwide to promote “peace through reverence for life” in a theatrical production, and an international conference, the Symposium 2000 at Vanderbilt University in October 2000.

To register for the Portrait Workshop, call (615)740-5600 or come by The Renaissance Center at 855 Hwy. 46 S. in Dickson.