Painting the Figure: Narrative and Memory

This 8-week course invites intermediate to advanced painters to deepen their figure-painting practice while exploring how memory and storytelling can shape their work. Working in oils or acrylics, you’ll refine your ability to portray the human figure with accuracy, expression, and imagination, supported by ongoing mentoring and feedback.

The course begins with proportion, gesture, and the study of tone before moving into more advanced challenges such as dynamic poses, painting from live observation, and composing figures within an environment. Alongside these technical studies, you’ll draw on personal photographs, memory, and cultural references to develop paintings that connect lived experience with broader artistic traditions.

Chelsea Lehmann introduces you to palette layout, brush handling, colour mixing, and compositional structure, with options tailored to both oils and acrylics. She is responsive to each student’s needs, balancing practical mentoring with reinforcement of fundamentals through short studies and a sustained project.

Practical components include:

• Figure studies from life, photographs, or mirrors
• Short exercises to strengthen proportion, gesture, and tone
• Exploration of allegory, symbolism, and expressive use of colour
• Reimagining historical and contemporary figure paintings through your own lens
• A longer project that brings together memory, observation, and invention

Each week offers demonstrations, guided exercises, and mentoring by Chelsea in a supportive studio environment. By the end of the course, you will have strengthened your technical control of oils or acrylics and developed a clearer artistic voice, with works that are both expressive and narratively rich.

* Please note: There are two course breaks in Term Two due to public holidays. There will be NO class on: Saturday 25 April and Saturday 6 June.

* Short courses are open to students of ages 16 years and over. The NAS Art Club is open to students between 15 - 17 years of age.

* Drawing and painting short courses may be held in upstairs studios. If access to stairs is not suitable, please contact us at short.courses@nas.edu.au 

* What to bring? Please refer to the list of required materials in the Art Materials field below. 

Students must supply their own art materials, please refer to the list below.

Paints - oils or acrylics (artist-quality where possible)

• Titanium White
• Lemon Yellow
• Yellow Ochre
• Cadmium Red Light (or Vermilion)
• Alizarin Crimson (or Magenta)
• Ultramarine Blue
• Phthalo Blue
• Burnt Umber
• (Optional later additions: Burnt Sienna, Viridian/Phthalo Green, additional yellows or blues)

Mediums

• Acrylics: optional: Drying retarder, binder medium (small bottle) or just water
• Oils: Odourless solvent (500 ml) and small bottle of linseed oil
  Important note: NAS studios use odourless solvent only; no turpentine

Brushes

• Synthetic or hog bristle flats/filberts (#2, #6, #10)
• 1 large flat brush (5 cm) for grounds/tonal blocks

Supports

• Acrylic or oil painting paper pad (A3)
• 1–2 primed canvases/boards (≈40 × 50 cm)

Other materials

• Palette (tear-off pad, plastic, or wooden)
• Metal palette knife
• 2 × water containers (for acrylics) OR 2 × glass jars with lids (for oils)
• Rags or cloths, disposable gloves, apron
• Graphite pencil, eraser, masking tape, notebook/journal
• Enclosed footwear is essential in all studios on campus.
  

Enclosed footwear is essential in all studios on campus.

Chelsea Lehmann is a painter who lives and works on Gadigal land (Sydney). Lehmann has an exhibition history spanning two decades, and has received numerous awards, grants, and international residencies. Her current work explores the representation of the human body, specifically focusing on its fragmentation and evolving meanings in the 21st century. The surfaces of Lehmann’s painting frequently employ a palimpsest of painted layers, allowing earlier traces of work to remain visible. Utilising dramatic formal contrasts and painterly gesture, Lehmann emphasises the performativity and artifice of Baroque and surrealist bodies, echoing the way Western art has traditionally grafted constructs of feminine identity onto the illusions of representation itself. Lehmann’s work offers creative interventions which ‘undo’ these constructs by imaging the female form in conflict with painting’s weighty history and stable surfaces. Lehmann holds a PhD from UNSW Art & Design (2019).

https://www.chelseajlehmann.com/