Ashley Hold

I have taught drawing and painting at Degree and Post Graduate level at Falmouth University and am a tutor at St Ives School of Painting in UK. I am an Academician at the Royal West of England Academy.

I recently moved to Spain to join my wife in Madrid and want to teach drawing and painting here.

In my years of teaching I have identified the key difficulties and issues students face and have developed strategies to help them deal with those. I take a fairly rigorous approach, to working from observation, always keeping an open and questioning mind about the nature of what we see, and how to translate that into the language drawing and painting. This subject has a philosophical element in that when we really look hard, as is necessary to draw well, we begin to realise that we don't really know what we see, from this point we can really begin to learn and grow as visual thinkers/creatives.

I don't consider subject matter important in terms of practicing and learning, of course it is important when it comes to making work, but the essentials can be learned working from a life model, or equally, from any other subject, so long as it is done from direct observation.

The essential thing in learning to draw is to understand and be able to deal with line, shape, proportion, composition, form, tonal relationship and colour relationship
I want to give students the tools, and the language to help them find their own creative voice.