ARTIST'S BIO

Dan Whiteson is a young portrait/figurative painter from London. Living and working out of his studio in Tottenham, in a little over five years since graduating from Central Saint Martins he has built a practise based on his fascination with the human condition, culminating in his first solo show of portraits in March 2012. His work has since been shown in numerous group and solo shows across the UK, and can be found in private collections all over the world.
His newer work deals with the impact of the digital age on human physicality, and through a range of different mediums he is currently building a language and a body of work attempting to visualise what he sees as a 'disintegration' of the self. He is planning to show his abstract figurative paintings and drawings on this theme by the end of 2016.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I created my life drawing classes primarily as means to translate my passion for creativity and drawing to others but also in response to my own, negative experiences of life classes & creative education in general. I didn't want to focus on technique, or 'right' or 'wrong', but instead to encourage, through an informal approach to teaching and an emphasis on experimental techniques and exercises, an environment in which students ,regardless of ability, could feel relaxed and inspired, and thus be able to fully (re-)engage in the joy of creativity. Whereas I had often felt, even as a confident draughtsman, that an emphasis on realism and 'copying' our observations had caused my enjoyment of drawing to diminish, I wanted to give people the opportunity to create real, genuine and personal figurative art, by using the human form as an inspiration or a starting point for creation, as opposed to a constraint.