New York Academy of Art

With multiple figures, the relationships between bodies, gestures, space, and environment become powerful tools for creating meaning. The goal is to build paintings that feel dynamic, intimate, psychologically charged, and story-driven. Working through a direct painting method, we will focus on painting flesh and form while developing compositions that balance multiple figures into a unified visual and emotional experience. You’ll practice mixing paint, making confident decisions, and translating what you see from life and photographs into stronger, more intentional figurative compositions. We will look at great painters of the past and present who have used the figure, composition, and human relationships to create paintings with emotional and conceptual depth. Throughout the workshop, we’ll investigate how technical and emotional considerations can inform the narrative of a painting and lead to a more authentic painting. We’ll explore how the placement, scale, pose, gesture, and interaction of multiple figures can create tension, intimacy, movement, mystery, or stillness. From closely cropped figures to more expansive, genre-inspired setups, we will design compositions that feel powerful, cohesive, and creatively alive. Along the way, students will refine their individual methods while asking what truly motivates a painting emotionally, technically, and soulfully.