Painting in the Wissahickon (five sessions)

Adult Class | Available

All levels welcome.

4/22/2024-5/27/2024

9:00 AM-12:00 PM EDT on Mon

Download iCalendar

$195.00

$175.00

$20.00

On-site locations in Wissahickon Park will inspire you to paint in the open air. Bring your portable easel and be ready to explore some of the practices that lead to comfort and command of your medium, be it oil paint, acrylics, watercolor, or cray-pas. A useful class for students with painting experience who want to enjoy community and our inspiring natural environment.

Your best preparation before taking this course is to walk in the park. If you already enjoy spending time there, you are more prepared to paint. This daunting natural wonder in our city shows both its antiquity and resilience after having been deforested and quarried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then restored by concerted human effort. It is the oldest geologic wonder in the country, and it maintains lines of flora that extend back several million years.

Some hiking will be required, so lighten your painting kits accordingly. Access will vary among Kitchens Lane, Bells Mill Road, and the Valley Green Inn parking lots. All of these access points require car transport. Consider Lyft, if you don’t have a car.


  • • Portable easel
    • Acrylic, oils, watercolor, cray-pas. Select a medium of your choice.
    • Hat
    • Sunscreen
    • Water bottle
    • Comfortable shoes you can go for short hikes in
    • Bathroom access available

Michelle Oosterbaan is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Recently she held several residencies across Northern Europe including the Cite des Arts International in Paris. Oosterbaan’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that include The Drawing Center New York, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Delaware Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka. She is a Great Rivers Biennial winner (2008 St. Louis, MO) and published in FUKT, A Drawing Journal (2009, Berlin). She has also has received grants from Center for Emerging Arts (2014), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2004), and the Leeway Foundation (2001) among others. Oosterbaan was awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2004) and Yaddo (2005, 2003), as a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur fellow, in addition to invitations to VCCA, (2009, 2006). Her work investigates signs and symbols of time and spirit and the theatre of space and color. She earned a BFA from Washington University as a Fred Conway Scholar in painting / printmaking and an MFA from Indiana University and studied painting at SACI at Cleveland Institute of Art in Florence Italy. Last summer, she collaborated with The Mural Arts Program to design and install a site-specific color-based mural in Germantown titled Kalpavriksha: The Tree of Life. She is returning to Philadelphia after teaching painting and drawing at Bowdoin College and Bucknell University as a visiting professor. This spring she is teaching a drawing course Natural Forms and the Human Body in the University of the Arts Undergraduate CORE Program.