About the Demo:

This demo will provide an overviw on the benefits of using toned paper for academic figure drawings, which will be covered in detail in the workshop on Saturday, March 11. Drawings will begin with a block-in of the figure using geometric forms, a two-value simplification of lighting, and then careful development of the full-value range. Gesture, proportions, composition, and artistic anatomy will also be addressed.

Kevin will be working from a live model.

The demonstration will be at the Gallery at 705 W. Swann Ave., Tampa, and will also be available on Zoom.

Zoom Link

Time: Mar 7, 2023 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7409862189

Meeting ID: 740 986 2189

About the Instructor

As a young boy, Kevin Grass was intently painting at the kitchen table in his family’s small home in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, when his mom rushed in, asking: “Didn’t you see all the smoke?” He was so engrossed in his work that he never noticed the sneakers that his mother had placed in the oven to dry were beginning to smoke. That persistent dedication to his art has never left him, and it is why Grass now spends hundreds of hours perfecting each painting until it conforms to his vision. It was never a given that Grass would become an artist. His dad worked as a grocery store clerk and his mom as a school cafeteria worker when he was growing up in the small Midwestern community an hour south of St. Louis. Neither of his parents were interested in art and never took him to visit an art museum.

In high school, Grass created a wide variety of commissioned works, ranging from portraits and landscapes to campaign signs and car decorations. One of the murals he assisted with in downtown Ste. Genevieve still exists today. It has faded, but shows that Grass had promise as a figurative artist from an early age.

After becoming valedictorian of Ste. Genevieve High School, Grass began his formal art education at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He started as an architecture student, but his obsession with painting was so strong that he changed his major at the beginning of the second semester of his sophomore year. He received his undergraduate degree in drawing and painting in 1990 from Washington University on a full academic scholarship.

At the University of Georgia, he met his future wife, Michaela Oberlaender, in a Northern Renaissance art class. That course had a extensive impact on his life because it also introduced him to the allegorical realism and the meticulous techniques of the Flemish masters that influence his work today. In his studio classes, Grass was encouraged to paint loosely and use oil paint, neither of which felt right to him, but it was an important stage in earning his masters of fine art degree.

Upon graduation, Grass spent a few months painting replicas of famous artworks onto furniture for Habersham Plantation in Toccoa, Georgia. During this period, he came home energized to paint his own works at night.

The fall after receiving his graduate degree, Grass began teaching art full-time at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia. In addition to teaching, he pursued corporate art commissions, regional juried shows, and had his first solo museum exhibition. While teaching was new and exciting, it was always a means for him to be able to paint.

In August 1997, while his wife was expecting their son, Grass moved his family to the Tampa Bay region to accept a teaching post at St. Petersburg College in Florida. He still teaches full-time as an Associate Professor of Art on the Clearwater campus.