A studio for drawing and painting from life.
Pears Atelier is an art space for drawing and painting from observation. We value the classical disciplines (still life, portrait and figure) because they teach you to see, and seeing is where everything else starts.
It's Mike's personal studio, and it's also a place for other people to learn. Come for a structured class in drawing or painting. Come for a life or portrait session with a live model. Or come for a drop-in session if you simply need a good room to work on your own project.
The Atelier
An atelier is the old word for a workshop where an artist works and others learn alongside them. That's the idea here: a working studio first, with the teaching growing out of the work, not the other way round.
Meet Mike Pears
Mike Pears draws and paints from observation. He's fascinated by what goes into making a picture: looking, technical skill, composition, and the use of value and colour. For him, making art is a continual journey of learning, discovering, reflecting and thinking. He loves the balance of long hours alone in the studio and time spent with other creative people, in person or through books and other media.
After a lifelong love of drawing, Mike spent eight years in training and apprenticeship in realist drawing and painting at the Dutch Atelier of Realist Art (DARA) in Haarlem, the Netherlands, under his mentors Mischa Tranquilli and Thomas Langeveld. DARA's classical approach is a rigorous, skills-based training in still life, figure and portrait. Mike then worked at DARA for three years as a tutor in classical drawing, first as an assistant and then as a core instructor. Drawing on his background in education, he also successfully applied to have DARA accredited within the Dutch education system.
Mike comes to art with long experience of faith and spirituality, and of living and working in marginalised urban communities. Over the years he has developed practices of attentiveness and openness: different ways of seeing and knowing, which he finds as relevant to art as to the life of a city. For over forty years he has been teaching and researching how people learn in community and how they take part in creative processes.
Mike holds a doctorate in theology and spent seven years as director of an international research and learning institute in theology in Amsterdam. He finds a strong echo between the spiritual practices of paying attention and self-awareness and the artist's work of learning to see. He's still fascinated by how those ideas shape the making of art, and tries to bring them into his work every day.
Visit
Pears Atelier, Room 1.2,
Wellsprings House,
28-30 Belle Vue Terrace,
Malvern,
WR14 4PZ.
Go through the green door immediately next to the Arturo Lounge. Take the stairs or lift to the first floor.