Spring 2024
Teacher’s Professional Development Symposia

This May, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is offering art educators the opportunity to expand their knowledge base and get professional development credit at the same time. Join us for one (or both) of our upcoming Teachers’ Symposia by clicking the links below to register.
All VACNJ symposium events offer unique professional development opportunities for art educators to come together and learn new creative skills to bring back to their classrooms. The programs include:
  • Presentation by the leading contemporary artist
  • Hands-on artmaking workshop with the artist
  • Gallery exercises exploring ways to view and interpret contemporary art
  • Six professional development hours upon completion of the symposium
  • Lesson plans as a take-home

Registration fees are $75 and include a light breakfast and all materials.

PLEASE NOTE: For any questions, or if your school needs to be invoiced to pay for this program, please contact us. Call 908-273-9121 ext 213 and speak with Rachel Aponte or email raponte@artcenternj.org.

A Plein Air Painting of a house and a yard.
Throughout history, the dramatic potential of changing light and those expressive possibilities have captivated artists such as Whistler, Van Gogh, Ryder, and Turner. In this course, suitable for all levels, students explore oil painting techniques for quickly rendering light and atmosphere in the plein air landscape. The inherent simplicity of this approach offers unique opportunities for success with quick studies, as well as with more extended compositions. After mastering the basics of depicting form through value, students will explore the nuances of color palettes and paint applications to render the emotive qualities of the landscape. Outside assignments will challenge the student to explore different light situations throughout the day. The class will travel to various local painting sites to work outdoors.
Oil painting portrait sketch of a woman with dark hair.
Explore an oil painting approach that uses the power of suggestion to teach to success while refreshing your personal and professional painting practice. Attendees will use an earth-colored ground—an Imprimatura—to complete a one-off monochrome painting—a Grisaille—using doable steps with practical goals. Attendees will investigate a myriad of ways painting can be developed by focusing on the relationships of shapes as value, proportion, alignment, and texture, rather than by trying to paint things and objects. We will incorporate abstract thinking by using blocking and the tonal properties of the Imprimatura to build imagery from elements that suggest forms into more comprehensive details. The goal is to embed the practice of painting into actionable open-ended problem-solving skills that have application in your art room, as well as in your personal practice.

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