ONLINE PAINTING CLASSES

Upcoming Online Classes

  • Rudolf Steiner’s 6 Essential Exercises

    In this online workshop we will explore each exercise for one week with drawing exercises. No experience is necessary, all exercises will be demonstrated and do not take drawing skill.

    11:30 AM or 5 PM EST on Wednesdays

    April 1 - May 13

    Sliding Scale $0-200

  • Color as a Way to the Spirit

    Current Block: Painting as Devotion

    This course will include written and video instruction as well as weekly group calls with participants from all over the world.

    10 AM EST on Wednesdays

    February 25 – April 29

    Sliding scale $0-200

  • Virtues in Many Media

    A new media and approach will be offered each week.

    1 PM EST on Wednesdays

    January 7 – April 8

    You can join at any time, all sessions are recorded.

    Sliding scale $0-280 or $20/session

  • Reading & Drawing with the Gospel of John

    1:30 PM EST on Mondays

    Beginning January 12, 2026 for 42 weeks

    Facilitated by Angela Foster.

    Sliding Scale $0-300

To register for a course, email Laura Summer

laurasummer@taconic.net

Ongoing Offering

Visual Art: Exercises in Painting and Color

An asynchronous online Educaredo course by Laura Summer 

This course is an overview of the work Laura has done with color. The student receives a lesson each month, work is done at home and Laura provides email support and mentoring.

Sign up is through Educaredo.


About Online Classes

Free Columbia began in 2009 as a year long program based in experiential two dimensional art: painting and drawing. Over the years Free Columbia expanded to include puppetry, Goethean science, social change, children’s classes and much more, but the base in experience runs through all of our programs. 

Now visual art at Free Columbia is taught in a variety of programs. Some years we have residential programs, some years short courses and low residency programs. We have online classes and we teach week long and weekend workshops in many places around the country. Through all of these programs runs the investigation into the realm of quality.  For example:  how is red different from blue on a feeling level; what does heaviness feel like as opposed to levity?

One of our students once said,  “I completed a four year BFA and they never used the word ‘experience’, you guys use it everyday”. 

To enter into the realm of quality is a lesson in slowing down and listening to locate a perceptive capacity in yourself that goes beyond sympathy and antipathy. All of Free Columbia’s work in the visual arts encourages this perspective. 

Reflections from students in previous courses:

“This course has helped me to break out of many narrow habits.   I see how my own artwork is subtly transformed. And how in looking out into the world, I see relationships of form and color that I’ve never noticed before.  They show themselves to me and I can imagine them saying, “Where have you been?”  I had the image around the time of our third session that I was riding on a train and that the course wasn’t putting me on a different track but that the track I was already on was climbing higher and through new territory.” Jo Valens

“If you want to know how color works, how it lives, how it walks, how it sits on a page - take this course. Color had always been a blind spot for me. I'd always been a black-white-gray, light-and-shadow artist. I hadn't learned about color theory beyond memorizing the color wheel, and the only way I knew about complimentary colors was by remembering to look across the wheel from one color to the other. Now I know how the color wheel works, why compliments exist, how they're useful, and how the individual colors themselves act. This course will require a lot of exertion at times, and will ask you to do things you've never done before, but it'll be worth it.” Andrew Madey

Contact Laura Summer with any questions or to sign up for a course.

Email: laurasummer@taconic.net

Phone: 518 653 2350