Marc Dalessio

Plein air painting of Volpaia (70 x 100 cm), one of my workshop painting spots.

I’ve posted the summer plein air workshop schedule on the ‘courses’ page on my website.  Every year I take three students on weekends in June and July. We stay in a small Tuscan farmhouse about 40 minutes from Florence near Tavarnelle val di Pesa. Places are already filling up, so if you know you’ll be in Tuscany and would like to take an intensive plein air landscape painting workshop, shoot me an email and I’ll save you a spot. The house is charming but not luxurious (there is often a young family with us), and the focus of the weekend is on painting. You can click forward on the calendar below to see the dates.

There is also the possibility of using a house by the beach in Maremma in June if I get enough interest.

As a working painter, I have always tried to avoid teaching. When I taught in the past I always had too many students, inconvenient schedules, and found my own work suffering to the point where I was having trouble meeting my commitments with galleries. This year however, after getting married, I decided the stable income wasn’t such a bad idea and I began taking students again.

The difference this time however is that, working for myself, I have taken them in very small numbers. From 1 to 3 students at a time, and I work alongside them. This summer I tried it out in the countryside with landscape painting and just basically dragged the students to the spots where I was already working and let them set up alongside. I would do demonstrations and give regular critiques, but I found that it didn’t affect my work at all. In fact I ended up painting more this summer than I have in the last few years. More importantly though, the steady (though small) income took off some of the pressure of the gallery production grind, so I was able to work at a much slower pace. In the end I think my work actually improved due to the teaching. The students, of course, appreciate the small class size and get a lot of information in a short period of time.

This winter I intend on continuing with small numbers of students in the studio. At the moment I’ve begun portrait projects with one student at a time, sharing a model.