Masterstrokes

In this three-week class, students will learn about the lives and studio practices of three dynamic artists, Hung Lui, Janet Fish and Marisol Escobar. These artists carved out acclaimed careers, and distinctive creative styles that resonate and influence artists today. Instructor Sarajane Fellini will use one of the artists' signature artworks as a starting point for the class and help guide each student toward their own unique interpretation. Students will be painting with acrylic on canvas and using mixed-media. This class is open to all levels.

Class minimum: 4

Class maximum: 8

Hung Lui – (1948-2021) was a Chinese-born American artist who studied painting during the Maoist regime in China. She immigrated to the United States in 1984 to attend grad school at UC San Diego where she merged her Eastern and Western influences. Lui expanded her painted portraits of people by using multilayered imagery of birds and flowers combined with loose gestural brush work and her signature linseed oil drips. Students will study Hung Lui’s distinctive painting style and create their own painted portrait with birds and flowers behind a veil of linseed oil drips.

Janet Fish – (1938 -) is a leading American realist artist known for her exquisite still life paintings of glass objects. Ms. Fish has spent her career chasing how to capture the illusion and refraction of light via paint on canvas. The oversized scale of the objects in her compositional relationships gives them a very abstract quality. Using one of Janet Fish’s paintings as inspiration – students will paint their own abstract background and learn how to paint glass objects in the foreground.

Marisol Escobar – (1930-2016) was a Venezuelan American sculptor born in Paris. The artist known simply as Marisol studied art in Paris and New York and was part of Pop artist Andy Warhol’s entourage, she appeared in two of his films. Marisol is known for her mixed media sculpture and relief forms using figurative motifs. In the class students will insert a paper mask form through a canvas to create a bas-relief mixed media painting. The students will also use collage and paint to personalize their artwork.

About the Instructor:

Sarajane Fellini is an Artist Member of the ACWL-Nuveen where she sells her whimsical, colorful paintings and shares her vast teaching experience that she gained while running the art program at Rivermont Collegiate, in Bettendorf, Iowa. Sarajane is a regular art instructor at the ACWL-Nuveen teaching a variety of themed youth and adult classes.

ACWL-Nuveen classes are supported in part by CatchMark Technologies, Michigan Arts & Culture Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nuveen Benevolent Trust.