The Visual Art School Basel is a place of study for painting. It was founded in September 2011 by two freelance artists, Charles Blockey and Fredy Buchwalder. They are the main lecturers and have previously taught at the Assenza Painting School. Guest lecturers and speakers contribute with their presentations to what the school offers.
Our art school with the generously renovated factory rooms is located in the Walzwerk area in Münchenstein, 5 km from the centre of Basel. There are several other studios, artists, workshops and interesting facilities in the immediate vicinity of the site.
As artists and art explorers, painting has always been the main interest of our school founders. We continue to regard painting as the supreme discipline of the arts.
Painting is particularly suited to elaborating and developing very nimbly and directly the fundamental questions of the artistic process.
It is important to go deeper with an art form. It is our conviction that in doing so doors and spaces are opened and that a foundation is developed for other artistic areas such as performance, installation and graphic reproduction.
With a well-trained, basic artistic attitude, new approaches to and a creative handling of fundamental questions of life are developed.
The Visual Art School Basel refers to methodological researches by the painter Beppe Assenza. He suggested exploring the objective aspects of colour and the relationship between colour and form through painting and compositional exercises.
Rudolf Steiner's works like "Colours" accompany the observation of the colour phenomena, the experience of colour dynamics and the differentiation of image colours and lustre colours.
Writings and achievements of many artists and philosophers help us to develop an awareness of the art-historical and cultural climate of the modern age. For example: Goethe, Schiller, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Kandinsky, Klee, Marc, Merleau-Ponty, Tàpies, Motherwell, Kirkeby and others.