Summer School 2025 Drawing

Summer School 2025 | Drawing

SOUTH BANK BRISBANE 9th & 10th APRIL 2025

Discover how drawing can be a powerful tool for exploration, expression, and innovation. Whether you're interested in expanding your traditional drawing practice or experimenting with mixed media techniques, these workshops offer a rare opportunity to learn from two renowned artists.

Join artists Laith McGregor and Nic Plowman for two unique workshops that delve into experimentation and play, with drawing at their core.

Through hands-on exercises, demonstrations, and discussions, Laith and Nic will guide you in pushing the boundaries of traditional drawing methods. Explore new ways of working, experiment with collage and mixed media techniques, and develop your skills.

Damien Shen

Embrace the power of portraiture to tell stories and assist your students to become storytellers through the art that they make. Master new rendering techniques and learn how to create a dynamic sense of light and dark in this in-depth all-day portrait drawing workshop with South Australian artist Damien Shen.

One of Australia’s most exciting contemporary visual artists, Damien will work with you to develop your drawings skills and techniques, discuss his way of working and demonstrate his methods with a focus on linear and tonal approaches. For those wanting to improve their technical rendering skills, this workshop is one not to miss.

Shen’s extraordinary command of tone and line has been recognised nationally, including finalist positions in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, and as winner of the 2016 Blake Prize (emerging artist category) and Prospect Portraiture Prize.

Damien Shen is a South Australian man of Ngarrindjeri (Aboriginal) and Chinese descent. His artistic practice is embedded in histories, revisiting the people, places and stories that shape the world he occupies.

From time consuming, labor intensive drawings to bleeding water colors and velvety smooth oil paintings, Shen is constantly constructing and deconstructing the world around him through his imagery to better understand his identity and the identity of those that help to shape the world he lives.

Laith McGregor

Cut / Copy is a full day visual art workshop involving collage, conversation and creation. The session will be based on McGregor's current practice which involves working on a collage a day to get into a flow state for further research and studio development. The collage practice helps facilitate ideas and momentum for ongoing work, context and inspiration. This workshop will be split into two sessions involving a cut and paste morning, where participants create collages while engaging in a conversation on art, life and the in-between. The second half of the day will involve making further artworks by using the collages as a point of reference for further drawings and/or paintings. This workshop will help generate alternate and inspiring approaches to art and varied practices, by using the subconscious as a tool for creative potential and a constructive starting point for art making.

Let us cut, copy, paste, make, create and think together...

Working across drawing, painting and sculpture, Laith McGregor’s multi-disciplinary practice reflects an ongoing inquiry into contemporary portraiture, semiotics of image making and notions of the self. With pieces incorporating laborious, hyper-realistic illustration, accumulations of pencil and eraser shavings, and other processes that form a meditative daily ritual, his practice is resolutely underpinned by a commitment to physical studio work and the marking of time. McGregor’s works wrestle with the grey area that exists between fiction and non-fiction, negative and positive, black and white, two- and three- dimensions, serving an ongoing inquiry into the complexities of what it means to be human.

McGregor achieved success early in his career for his intricately drawn works, using ballpoint pen and pencil, winning the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize (2008), the Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), and the Emerging New Work Grant by The Australia Council for the Arts (2009). Since then, he has been the winner of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2018), National Works on Paper Prize (2012), and the Paul Guest Memorial Prize (2018), and a finalist in many other prizes. He has participated in numerous residencies including Art Omi New York, HIAP Helsinki and the Barcelona Studio residency through the Australian Council for the Arts. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, and is represented in significant institutional collections. McGregor was included in the recent Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2022: FREE STATE, at the Art Gallery of South Australia.