See the Ordinary: Painting as Perceptual Practice (Workshop)
- jcsv4c1
- Jan 5
- 3 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Date: February 28, 2026 (Saturday) Time: 3 PM to 5:30 PM (including buffet time) Venue: College Hall JCSV IV By registration only; first-come, first-served. Priority given to College 1 residents.
See the Ordinary: Painting as Perceptual (Wellbeing Workshop Series)
This perceptual activity is a research-based project that explores how representational art practices can function as an enhancement of seeing rather than as a means of expression or escape. Once a form, material, or texture has been worked through with care, it is never encountered in the same way again; ordinary appearances acq uire depth, intensity, and presence, making even the banal capable of producing perceptual exhilaration. Against the common reflex to deny the given world in favor of fictional or distant elsewhere, the project focuses on unpacking the richness that arises from the capability of the mind and senses to see, that which simply is. Well-being here, is approached as a by-product of perceptual fulfillment: the cultivated ability to experience richness, presence, and meaning within everyday life in the act of perception. One can feel an immense satisfaction and pleasure in contemplation after such practices. It is not enough to simply observe, after one passes the seen through the physical act of representing it through gesture, it forever stays with one’s memory and attitude to the world.
The workshop translates this framework into a focused, hands-on perceptual exercise. To make it accessible for everyone, it will be centered on representing a single ordinary object. Participants will work from a pre-drawn outline and a limited, premixed oil color palette, reducing technical pressure in order to concentrate on perception, subtle shifts in color value and tonality, textures, reflections, light and shadow. Through this simple yet fun exercise, participants are invited to discover how an apparently simple object contains a surprising range of chromatic and tonal variation. The exercise is designed not to teach representational skill as an end in itself, it hopes to demonstrate, how perception can quickly change after rigorous looking and mimesis. By working slowly, with assistance from instructors, and with a shared motif, the workshop makes visible how painting can intensify awareness of ordinary reality. It aims to bring the a posteriori joy of simply looking around, to all the participants. Reflection and group discussion follow the painting session, allowing participants to articulate perceptual discoveries and to consider how such attentiveness might extend beyond the studio into everyday experience.
About the speaker:
Tsotne Ivanishvili is currently an Art History and Philosophy student at the University of Hong Kong, newly appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the HKU Art History Student Journal, where he seeks to enrich his artistic practice with theoretical and historical inquiry. Ivanishvili is a figurative painter whose practice focuses on ordinary motifs, represented as sites where perception, attention, and material form are equally important. Trained in Florence and Paris, with extensive museum-based research and methodological grounding, his work attempts to demonstrate a mediating process in which reality passes from perception, through the mind, resulting in conscious and unconscious gesture, ultimately arriving at material presence.
Rather than treating painting as either mere imitation or expression, he understands it as a mode of translation in which appearances are slowly transformed through sustained looking, manual resistance, physical imperfections and time. His practice remains in active dialogue with philosophical questions concerning perception, mediation, and aesthetics, while insisting that understanding comes after making rather than from theory alone. As a young painter, he sees every work as a means to improve through failure, aiming to overcome previous mistakes and improve his skills. Seeing technique as a base, he is attempting to expand his paintings to broader subjects and ideas. Alongside his studio work, he conducts research on painting chemical longevity, investigating how traditional techniques and recipes can be rethought with contemporary science and conservation advances; this research has led to a published academic article. In studio he uses painting itself to test new questions, subjects and material strategies. Through the glens of an albino, his paintings question light, shadow, and subtle tonal variation, informed by a heightened attentiveness to the visible world and its fragilities. He approaches figurative painting as a means of intensifying that which is often overlooked, like the translucency of skin, the air between objects, the quiet presence of homogenous forms, and argues that such practices acquire renewed relevance in the contemporary, AI-saturated visual landscape, precisely because of their material, chemical, and temporal specificity.
Tsotne Ivanishvili invites you to this adventure, which emerges with a slow accumulation of understanding. Join us on Saturday, February 28, from 15:00 to 17:30 in Jockey Club Student Village IV, College Hall.
Event facilitator College 1 Wellbeing RT, Anna-Maria Kutateladze, inquiries at anna37@hku.hk
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