Photo By Sam English
Our city’s vast culture and arts scene provides an incredible array of immersive classes for both kids and adults. Here are just a few ways you can tap your creativity this fall.
Written by Gioia Patton/Arts Insider
Plein Air Painting with Pastels
Connect with Mother Nature and capture her beauty through the use of soft pastels, an immediate medium that allows you to translate onto paper what surrounds you in the Gardens. In this three-day series, students will work the first day in Studio learning fundamentals before rendering the late summer garden with its luminous variety of light and colors. The other two days will be spent outside, plein air painting with pastels. Students are responsible for bringing their own supplies.
Your instructor Rhonda Goodall is an artist and educator (and owner of Goodall Gallery located in Crescent Hill), whose techniques of watercolor and pastel are one of her many passions of creative expression. Rhonda has studied under some of the masters of pastels, such as Wolf Kahn and Albert Handel.
WHEN: August 4- 60, 1pm-4pm
WHERE: Waterfront Botanical Gardens, 1435 Frankfort Ave., 40206 (in the Leslie Botanical Classrooms)
COST: $75, $60 for WBG members
REGISTER: waterfrontgardens.org
Dance with the Louisville Ballet
Created in 2107, Louisville Ballet’s Mind Body Balance health and wellness initiative offers quality training in a variety of dance and fitness styles for adults and teens ages fifteen and up– from the true beginner to the professional dancer. All levels of ability are truly welcome– a fact that may surprise people. Their current number of offerings? Seventeen classes in ten different disciplines, including ballet, modern, jazz, tap, pilates, yoga, tai chi, feldenkrais and gyrokinesis.
Classes are offered morning and evening seven days a week. Lovers of all forms of dance and movement check out this impressive list of class opportunities.
WHEN: Ongoing
WHERE: The Louisville Ballet School, 4121 Shelbyville Road and at Louisville Ballet, 315 E. Main Street
REGISTER: www.louisvilleballet.org
Drawing and Painting at Speed Art Museum
Every first Thursday of the month, the Speed has late Thursdays where it offers a variety of programming. The museum typically hosts a Costumed Figure Drawing session with a different theme each month. For August, the theme will be a still life, with a live model set in a still life setting.
For the August Adult Workshop, the Speed has invited artist Vian Sora, a Great Meadows Foundation Artist grant recipient and a featured artist in the museum’s current special exhibition Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection. The workshop will focus on abstract painting using experimental materials.
WHEN: August 3, 5:30 pm-7:30 pm for costumed figure drawing. Walk-ins accepted. August 5, 10:30 am-12:00 noon for Vian Sora.
WHERE: Speed Art Museum, 2035 S. 3rd St., 40208
REGISTER: Adult Workshops at speedmuseum.org
Photo by Gioia Patton
Flamenco Dancing
Whether you’ve only dreamed of dancing Flamenco or you’ve dabbled a little, there’s a class for you at Flamenco Louisville. Advanced beginners and immediate students will enjoy their Dancing with Props class during which company member Paula Collins focuses on technique and creating choreography around the use of a fan or shawl.
For those familiar with basic Sevillanas choreography, they offer a Sevillanas and Castanets II class, which focuses on castanet technique and building skills with fundamental choreography. More experienced students will learn to add castanet accompaniment to the dances.
WHEN: Dancing with Props, Thursdays, August 3, 10 and 17, 6:30-8:00 pm; Sevillanas and Castanets II, Tuesdays, August 8, 15, 22 and 29, 6:30 to 8:00 pm.
WHERE: Flamenco Louisville, 2031 Frankfort Avenue
REGISTER: flamencolouisville.org
Immersive Exhibition
When visiting a museum, there are many rules on display to protect the objects shared with the public. However, in this exhibition, the Carnegie Center invites guests of all ages to break the rules and draw on the walls, as its East and West galleries will be covered in wall-sized sheets of drawing paper where patrons may create a mural, sketch full body outlines, or draw anything they may imagine. They have just one request, and that is for patrons to only use art supplies provided by the gallery for this interactive exhibit, and to focus on imagery for their work, refraining from words or recognizable letters.
WHEN: August 1- August 19
WHERE: Carnegie Center for Art and History, 201 E. Spring Street, New Albany
COST: Free
REGISTER: cargeniecenter.org
