Your Creative Journey

With wit and whimsy, filled with a passionate knowledge of the history of watercolor painting, Timothy James Standring will hold your attention during this workshop in which you’ll cover all the basics. Fundamentally, you’ll learn with hands-on exercises that watercolor techniques are closely aligned with paper surfaces, brushes, and even the pigments themselves. All of these have interesting properties that lead to the final painting. Classes will take place both indoors and outdoors. You’ll experiment with cold and hot press papers, natural and artificial brushes, different brands of watercolor pigments, learn how to stretch paper, and set up your portable kit for painting on site while traveling for pleasure or for work. And most of all, you’ll learn how to discern what constitutes a true watercolor painting.

Your Wellness Journey

As we enter the early stages of Fall, we will emphasize grounding practices designed to remind you of your own inner guidance and authentic expression—led by the core elements of water and earth. With an abundance of beauty present in every direction, these sessions will maximize the proximity of nature’s wisdom and wonder. Practices will include a range of modalities and experiences, including Restorative Yoga, Asana and Sound Meditation - using crystal bowls and other vibrationally-tuned instruments.  

Meet Your Watercolor Instructor

Timothy James Standring

Artist and Curator Emeritus, Denver Art Museum

Though small in scale, Timothy James Standring’s watercolors pierce the assumed poetics that the media aspires to express. Over the past decade, Standring has brought a gimlet-eyed attention to a painterly parity of close observation and delight in his material. Deft material sensitivity and technique, both traditional and radical, register in the recurring themes he paints.  Moreover, Standring’s influences stem from in a line of artists extending from Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent to Joaquìn Sorolla, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and JMW Turner. 

His recent watercolor works reflect a preference for painting with the pigment-loaded sable belly instead of the brush’s tight point which results, surprisingly, in marks and images reminiscent of dry brush oils on unprepared paper. Such heavily pigmented watercolors enliven the poetic statements his compositions sustain. Similarly, his plein air oil sketches betray watercolor techniques. Indeed, these paradoxes of approach underscore Standring’s radical authenticity in both media. Standring conveys in his meditative observation of intimate scenes and settings a challenge to the fickle attributes that watercolor and oils encompass.  

Standring’s watercolor practice has benefitted greatly from his work as a museum curator, who has curated over eighteen exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum—most notably Becoming Van Gogh.  He has also published widely in the Burlington Magazine, Apollo, Master Drawings, Print Quarterly, Artibus et Historiae, and Renaissance Quarterly. His writings reflect a wide range of interests that include 17th-century Roman patrons, monographic studies on European artists, British watercolor sketching, Poussin’s early works, Van Gogh’s drawings, Degas’s monotypes, the works of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, Rembrandt’s prints, and commentary on contemporary realist artists such as Daniel Sprick, T. Allen Lawson, Scott Fraser, Pere and Josep Santilari.  His swan song exhibition at the DAM—Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France—received wide acclaim in Denver as well in Richmond, Virginia where it was also shown.  Prior to his curatorial work, Standring served as Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver and held faculty appointments at Pomona College, Lawrence University, and Loyola University of Chicago. He has been a Fellow at The Clark Art Institute, a Guest Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, in addition to receiving other grants. He received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He now works as a professional artist.