Jon Doran

Artist Jon Doran teaches our Painting with Oils, The Portrait and The Realist Landscape, all of which are four-day short courses. Jon is also a tutor on a number of our Online Life Drawing Sessions.

Jon says of his work "I explore classical subjects such as still life, landscape and portrait through a slightly digitally influenced and fragmented approach to painting."

These themes have a weight of history behind them and I enjoy drawing from and contributing my small part to them. 

Still life is interesting for the opportunities they provide of exploring light on 3D form, and florals in particular are a great way to explore colour. They often have a Mondrian- like quietness to them, which for me is a meditation on the transient nature of things.

The Landscape is a fascinating subject for exploring things such as space, temperature and the sense of place. Cornwall offers such a wide array of locations to paint at, be that the cosy quays of the South Coast, or the imposing cliffs of the North. 

And finally, the Portrait is maybe the most difficult yet profound, given how abstract brushwork slowly starts to reveal the sense of a person and identity. 

When I am painting, I am often trying to find a balance of many opposites, and I find that the harmonisation of polarities such as dark and light, bright and dull, soft and sharp, chaos and control, logic and intuition has the ability to lift the work into something more timeless. Ultimately the aim for my works is to try and make work that lifts the viewer, that edges towards something meaningful and beautiful. Such big themes are embarrassingly high and raise the measure to which the work is judged, but maybe that is a good thing.