Passion
Every lesson starts with what moves you: a colour, a memory, a feeling you can’t name yet. Technique matters, but it serves the feeling, never the other way round.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 191301 — Why we paint
A painting is a person, made visible.
People were painting on cave walls tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote a word. Making images isn’t a pastime we picked up along the way; it is part of how humans think, remember and reach one another. At Art Valley we teach painting as exactly that: a way of saying what words can’t.
Meaning
Behind every brushstroke is a decision. We slow down to ask why: what you’re really looking at, what you want someone else to feel, and what to leave out.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818
Perspective
No two people see the same lake. Painting is how you show yours. We won’t teach you to paint like us; we’ll help you paint like you.
Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888“We don’t teach you to copy what you see. We teach you to show how you see it.”The Art Valley approach
Art is human nature
Children paint before they can read.
Art is how we make sense of ourselves and show others who we are: joy, grief, wonder, anger, love. A painting holds a point of view that no photograph can, because it passes through a person first.
You don’t need talent to begin. You need something to say, and someone beside you who can help you find the means to say it.
02 — Private lessons
One teacher. One student. One easel.
Every Art Valley lesson is private and built around you, whether you’ve never held a brush or you’re preparing a portfolio. Our instructors are practising painters, and lessons are taught in English, German or French.
The Atelier
Two-hour one-to-one sessions in our studio in Lucerne’s Old Town. Oil, acrylic, watercolour or drawing, at your own pace, with every material provided.
Plein Air on the Lake
Paint outdoors on the shores of Lake Lucerne with Pilatus and Rigi on the horizon. We bring the easels, paints and stools; you bring your eyes.
The Masterclass
Eight sessions studying how the masters handled light, colour and composition, then bringing it into a body of work that is yours. Ends with a private portfolio critique.
How it begins
- 01A conversation
A free twenty-minute call about what you’d like to paint, and why.
- 02Your first lesson
We paint together, see how you work and find your starting point.
- 03A path of your own
Your instructor plans each session around your goals, not a fixed syllabus.
- 04Show your work
Students are invited to exhibit at our end-of-season salon in Lucerne.
03 — Lucerne
Painting between the lake and the mountains.
Lucerne has drawn painters for centuries. J. M. W. Turner returned to its lake again and again, and the light still changes by the hour: mist on the water at dawn, Pilatus turning gold at dusk, the 14th-century Chapel Bridge reflected in the Reuss.
- Atelier
- Old Town, Lucerne
- Sessions
- By appointment, Tuesday to Saturday
- Languages
- English · Deutsch · Français
- Contact
- hello@artvalley.ch
Paint what only you see.
Tell us a little about yourself and what you’d like to paint. We reply within two working days.