Courses in Italy
Spannocchia in Italy
Since 2003 I have taught painting, drawing and art history courses once or twice a year at Castello di Spannocchia in Italy. I started with painting in 2003 and in 2008 I began teaching a drawing course in the spring and the painting course in the fall. Eventually, I taught the courses back-to-back, drawing followed by painting, always incorporating the relevant art history within each course. Now I alternate with drawing one year and painting the next.
Drawing to See
September 13 - 25, 2026
Registration and tuition due by February 1, 2026
Tuition: $4,000.00
Textbook: An Artist’s Handbook: Materials and Techniques, Margaret Krug
Observe the world more deeply by drawing what you see. Learn skills and ways to draw what you see in the natural and built environment. Discuss the roots of drawing and its changing and enduring function while viewing historical examples. Consider the broad definition of what a drawing can be. In response to the observation of the visual material presented, work with a variety of early techniques and materials as well as experimental materials and processes.
Each material has a unique identity and response to your motive and action. Working with silver point on paper prepared with China white can demand a slow, deliberate response to visual material, and it can result in great delicacy in the nuances of light and dark. Experimenting with iron gall ink (used by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt van Rijn), allows for exquisite precision as well as rapid, loosely expressive marks and planes to articulate the fluctuating environment.
Work in relationship with the materials by letting them inform you on how to use them to represent your experience of seeing. Create notes, sketches, studies, and preliminary cartoons for more finished works as well as exploring and expanding on doodles (taches) to produce a series of works with a conceptual framework. Experimenting with erasing, smudging, tearing, reassembling, and combining media and techniques or just by switching to a new, unfamiliar medium may lead to revelatory breakthroughs in your creative vision.
While working in grey, black, and white or monochromatically and then with handmade watercolor, incorporating color theory, to see color, you will explore the vocabulary of drawing, including line, delicate gradation, volume, composition, movement, perspective, light, the element of time, distillation, abstraction, and color. Line, color and light will translate into a universe of experience and thought.
Day trips with art historical discussions to sites such as San Galgano, San Gimignano, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, the Val d’Orcia and the Etruscan Guarnacci Museum in Volterra as well as observation of the natural surroundings at Spannocchia will encourage the blending of history with the present as you draw to see. Daily critiques, prompts and thematic assignments will encourage access to personal vision.
Enrollment is limited to 7 participants. Prior art instruction is required. For an application please contact Margaret Krug at margaret.krug@gmail.com or 646 232 6808. Registration and tuition due by February1, 2026.
Participants will reside in a private room with bath in the Villa of Spannocchia, about twelve miles southwest of Siena, Italy. The Villa is built into a massive castle that dates back to the early Middle Ages. The Villa is fully equipped with all the necessary facilities, including a library, studios, laboratory, museum and swimming pool.
Drawn animal imagery on the walls of caves in Lascaux, France; linear geometric designs decorating archaic Greek vases; and etched figures on Etruscan bronze mirrors represent some of the oldest surviving examples of material and artistic culture. Art was placed in the service of magic, ritual, and religion from the beginning of recorded history. Margaret Krug, An Artist’s Handbook, page 17
To paint is to bring inside—doubly: into the inhabited space around the image and into the frame. The paradox of painting is that it invites the spectator into its room to look at the world beyond. John Berger, An Artist’s Handbook, Margaret Krug, page 91
Painting on Panels
September 8 – 20, 2025
Registration and tuition due by February 1, 2025
Tuition: $3500.00
Textbook: An Artist’s Handbook: Materials and Techniques, Margaret Krug
Participants start with quick, loose sketching to slow down and immerse themselves in the place. Artists work from direct observation, from the flat, and from memory, visualization and imagination. Using exercises from An Artist’s Handbook: Materials and Techniques, artists explore ancient, medieval and early Renaissance approaches to painting and their contemporary application.
Artists prepare small poplar wood panels with traditional gesso ground and produce paint by combining dry pigments with beeswax, egg, milk glue, gum Arabic or oil. They work with encaustic used in the Fayum region of ancient Egypt, casein tempera, egg tempera used in early Renaissance Siena, distemper and the Venetian oil technique. They keep a sketchbook for quick sketches and detailed studies in preparation for painting and to record their experience. Throughout the workshop, they study color theory as related to the painting practice. There are two excursions to view primary resources related to the course, for art historical lectures and discussions, and for sketching.
Technical proficiency is encouraged through copying techniques employed in master paintings, while using exercise in An Artist’s Handbook to gain an understanding of color, composition and construction of a pictorial space, and through creating original work from observed reality using the same methods.
Some of the art concepts explored are local color, hue bias, construction of a pictorial space using the golden section and the rule of thirds, line, form, composition, tenebrism, sfumato, chiaroscuro, atmospheric perspective and the sublime. Artists engage in a hands-on exploration of the evolution of Western painting along with its incorporated non-Western visual traditions. They learn to abstract and distill from their experiences and to make paintings infused with their lived experience.
Enrollment is limited to 7 participants. Prior art instruction is required. For an application please contact Margaret Krug at margaret.krug@gmail.com or 646 232 6808. Registration and tuition due by February 1, 2025.
Participants reside in a private room with bath in the Villa of Spannocchia, about twelve miles southwest of Siena, Italy. The Villa is built into a massive castle that dates back to the Middle Ages. The Villa is fully equipped with all the necessary facilities, including a library, studios, laboratory, museum and swimming pool.
Studio: https://vimeo.com/876478646
View from a villa bedroom