Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

Renowned painter Thomas Cole was in awe of the beauty of the Catskill Mountains and created some of the most iconic landscape paintings in our country's history. In this workshop, our instructor, a Cole expert, will guide students through his images and methods as well as his journal entries, poems and essays. Students will then create paintings that stem from their own passions and responses. We will explore our magnificent mountain landscape, pause for Cole quotes and imagery, and capture the parts of nature that most excite, using both sketching and photography. Back at the studio we’ll create compositions on canvas using a method that Cole used: tracing. After a demonstration and exercise about color, we will begin painting onto the prepared canvas. Our goal will be to empower students to express the story and beauty that is inside them.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Jacks was the Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York, from 2003 to 2024, and previously worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York City and in the Hudson Valley, and her written work has been published by both academic and commercial Presses. Betsy is featured regularly in documentary films and radio programs and recently hosted a 10-part series by NPR on Thomas Cole, the foremost landscape painter of the 19th-century and founder of the art movement known as the Hudson River School. Jacks has Degrees in both Studio Art and Art History from Duke University.

Course Fee: $300 + $60 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee