Westwood artist Thomas R. Dunlay Offering Youth Drawing Class

Westwood painter Thomas R. Dunlay will hold a charcoal and pencil drawing class for local middle and high school students on April 17, 18 , 19 from 9am to 3pm. The class is for “the child who is always drawing and interested in learning about art,” according to Dunlay. It will be at his teaching studio at the Winnsmith Mills in Norwood.

Dunlay’s work focuses on seascapes and portraits. His artistic training and art come from the Boston School of Painting and atlier-style painting. Dunlay’s Norwood teaching studio’s northern light is ideal for drawing, echoing the light used by the artists in nineteenth-century Paris, France. Music Drives Us selected Dunlay as one of its artists to create a guitar for its first public art installation last year.

He studied under R. H. Ives Gammell, who praised painters including John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent. Gammell dedicated his book Twilight of Painting, to “the painter, born or unborn, who shall lift the art of painting from the low estate to which it has fallen, this book is hopefully dedicated.” Dunlay plans to paint this quote above his teaching studio in Norwood, substituting “studio” for “book.”

“I’m modelling this class exactly after how [Gammell] taught me,” Dunlay says of the upcoming class. When asked to contrast this class with an art class a middle-school or high-school aged student might take elsewhere, Dunlay says that his course is different from other courses because his course is based in what he learned from Gammel; whereas most secondary schools and art schools teach from a Modernist perspective. Dunlay’s students will draw in pencil and charcoal from casts to learn these skills.

The art class is on April 17, 18, and 19 from 9am to 3pm, with a half-hour lunch break. Students should bring a bag lunch Wednesday and Thursday, lunch will be provided on Friday. The class is capped at ten students, and the fee for all three days is $300, which includes materials. To enroll a student, Dunlay may be emailed at trdunlay@gmail.com or reached by phone at 617-838-9181.