Barbara Fugate – Compassionate and Unbridled Color: Van Gogh, Kandinsky, The Fauves (Online); Wednesdays, September 9-23, 2026

This class is part of Barbara Fugate’s Color Explorations, Artist by Artist series. Supply List Medium: Applicable to artists working in all mediums Level: All levels welcome Class Dates: Wednesdays, September 9-23, 2026 Class Times: • 11:00 am-1:30 pm Pacific time • 2:00 pm-4:30 pm Eastern time • 7:00 pm-9:30 pm UK time This three-session class explores the emotive power of color. Practice inventing color combinations (rather than choosing local colors) based on three different concepts: personal expression, imagination, and raw emotion. You’ll make sketchbook color studies in the manner of each artist using a variety of media, including gouache, watercolor, artist crayons, and color pencils. Your subject matter will vary depending on the artist being studied, including still life, landscape, and abstraction. A brief description of the focus for each session’s color experiments: 1. Van Gogh: Color as Personal Expression. Colors held specific meaning to Van Gogh, as he noted in frequent letters to his brother, Theo. Van Gogh juxtaposed his expressive colors in ways that amplified their visual and emotional impact, which still captivates and moves us today. 2. Kandinsky: Color without Rules. Kandinsky sought to paint the sounds of music, and the deep emotions music can evoke. Kandinsky rejected color rules, freeing his color choices to be guided only by how the colors “sound” and “feel” together. In this way, Kandinsky made some of the earliest pure abstractions. As he wrote in his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, “Color is a means of exerting direct influence upon the soul, …Color is a keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.” 3. Fauves: Color that Excites & Delights. In 1905, Matisse and Derain painted together at a seaside village on the Mediterranean coast. They explored a new way to make paintings with wild colors that electrified future Modernist painters. Matisse and Derain chose pure colors applied with energetic brushstrokes which imaginatively convey the dazzling light and joyful colors of their surroundings.