Still Life as Landscape with Gillian Wainwright

Gillian Wainwright is leading a painting workshop in Philadelphia on Saturday, October 24, and Sunday, October 25, 2026. It runs all day both days, so you'll want to clear your weekend for it. The whole thing is built around a single, specific idea: painting the still life as if it were a landscape.

If you've spent any time with still life, you know the usual approach—you set up a few objects, you look at them, and you try to describe them as accurately as possible. Wainwright flips that. She doesn't treat the still life as a collection of things to be cataloged, but as a landscape to be moved through. The focus shifts away from describing the objects themselves and toward the spatial relationships between them, the atmosphere that fills the gaps, the movement across the surface, and the underlying structure that holds it all together. It's less about what is on the table and more about how the space around and between those things actually works.

She's clear that the goal isn't to disguise the still life as a landscape—you aren't pretending a bowl of fruit is a hill. Instead, the workshop uses the visual language of landscape painting to deepen how you engage with whatever is right in front of you. By treating the arrangement like a terrain, you find new ways to observe and interpret a subject that might otherwise feel static or familiar. It's a way of looking at the small scale with the same eye you'd bring to a wide horizon.

The sessions are designed for oil and acrylic painters with some experience, so you'll want to be comfortable with your medium before you sign up. It runs Saturday, October 24, and Sunday, October 25, all day in Philadelphia.