Oil painting by Trevor Lucero. Courtesy/Fuller Lodge Art Center
Painting by Trevor Lucero. Courtesy/Fuller Lodge Art Center
Trevor Lucero
There’s something exotic about painting with oils. Many artists will tell you that no other medium compares to working with the same medium as the great masters of old.
Painting in oils is like painting with butter. Oil paint is thick and can be spread, pushed, troweled, brushed and scraped. Because oil paint dries slowly, paintings can evolve, with colors mixed on the canvas in order to create an effect.
Artist Trevor Lucero wants to help students share in the mysteries of getting the paint to reflect their vision, to capture reflected light so realistically it delights the viewer. Although he developed this class with intermediate students in mind, he welcomes raw beginners as well as more accomplished oil painters.
Lucero say, “The amazing light of our New Mexico landscapes gives artists a great excuse to mash colors together.”
In his class “Traditional Genres in Oil Painting”, Lucero will teach how to build a painting in the traditional way: constructing an underpainting and working toward a completed image using a succession of glazes to achieve luminosity. Students will work on portraits, still lifes or landscapes using photographs. The class meets 5:30-8:30 p.m., Thursday evenings April 16-30 at the Fuller Lodge Art Center.
Lucero grew up in Los Alamos and on a family farm in Villanueva, N.M. He credits the Los Alamos schools with nurturing his passion in art, and remembers that the Fuller Lodge Art Center awarded him a small college scholarship when he went off to art school. His artistic soul found art school too constraining and he chose instead to study art as an apprentice to Santa Fe artist Eli Levin. Lucero says Levin gave him a serious education in the fundamentals, some of which he hopes to pass on.
Lucero spent a number of years working as an artist in Santa Fe, before he went back to get an MFA at the University of New Mexico, where he stayed on as an adjunct professor for some time. He lives in Santa Fe where he opened Tathagata in Rancho Viejo, a coffee shop that brings people together for coffee and conversation surrounded by changing exhibitions of art.
To join Lucero’s class at the Fuller Lodge Art Center, call 505.662.1635 or stop by the Fuller Lodge Art Center at 2132 Central Ave., between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday. View a list of the wide variety of classes offered in April and May at fullerlodgeartcenter.com.
