Richard Hands

I am an experienced and qualified teacher in both AEFE Fine Art and TEFL, and I have taught both these subjects to adults and young learners throughout my 30-year teaching career. In regard to teaching Fine Art, the majority of my experience was at Kensington and Chelsea College, where I taught mainly painting and drawing to beginners for 8 years. At K&CC, I was also involved in the Fine Art Theory Seminar Programme, in which there was a unique integration of critical philosophy with arts education. Central to this was an understanding of perception, which gave me an insight into the psychology of beginner drawers, namely the vexed relationship between seeing and knowing. It took a long time of concerted effort to transfer this knowledge to the classroom but resulted in huge improvements in the students' ability to understand and translate the 3-D world onto a 2-D surface. The approach to painting was similar and introduced the students to the largely untaught optical colour skills of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Fortunately, a close colleague of mine and lead tutor on the Theory Seminar Programme helped me develop the painting course based upon his own education at the Royal College of Art under the tutelage of, I believe, Fred Dubery A.R.C.A, HON. N.E.A.C. This was described to me as the modern approach to painting as opposed to, say, a Chiaroscuro approach. I kept visual records of student work and testimonials as to the quality of the teaching and put them onto a website. Feel free to get in touch.