ONLINE: Paintings of food by pre-1900 still life painters such as Rachel Ruysch, Clara Peeters, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Anne Vallayer Coster, Jean Siméon Chardin, and others, will be the source for a deep dive into color. A series of exercises will invite you to pare your chosen source image down to the essential. We will begin with a drawing method that involves mapping the relationships between objects and the rectangle. Shape will be central to our approach — reducing the complex motif to 10-15 shapes will bring the focus to color mixing and value structure. You will use several complementary-pair mixtures to make beautiful mud as a way of taking liberties with the colors in your source image. In doing so, you will discover the nature of a few paint colors at a time, in terms of opacity, transparency, and relative tinting strength. This rigorous and wide-ranging analysis of images from our painting ancestors will feed your own work and imagination as you engage with images that speak to us still. Suggested medium: oil paint.