Elisa Anfuso

Alessandra Pagliuca
Jun 10
5 min read

Updated: Jul 17

19/20/21 September 2025

⚠️ LAST SPOTS!

Between Face and Veil: The Oil Portrait and the Material of Lace

A pictorial immersion between figure and transparencies

For the first time ever as a teacher, Elisa Anfuso, a Sicilian artist, brings her oil painting technique to the educational field with a focus on portraiture and lace texture. An intensive three-day workshop, to discover the artist's secrets and understand how to render realistic details.

Workshop details

Dates: Friday 19, Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 September 2025

Duration: 21-hour full immersion (two days of 7 hours each)

Times: 09:30 - 13:00 / 14:30 - 18:00

Workshop price: € 490 per person

Technique: oil painting

Minimum number of participants: 10

Maximum number of participants: 18

Level: for everyone

Language: Italian (with the possibility of translation into English at an additional cost of € 70 per person)

*Materials excluded

Description

What you will learn

This three-day intensive workshop is designed for artists who wish to delve deeper into the art of oil portraiture, with a focus on rendering complex textures—particularly lace. Participants will be guided step by step through the creation of a female portrait, partially concealed by a veil or lace fabric, to practice rendering materials and the dialogue between figure and ornament.

One of the main objectives will be to achieve a sensitive and atmospheric realism, which allows the solid structure of the human face to be fused with the lightness and complexity of fabrics. Students will learn to build an effective pictorial base, working on volumes and lights to give life to credible and vibrant complexions. Ample space will also be dedicated to the management of drapery, the rendering of folds, transparencies and overlaps between fabric and skin.

A key part of the workshop will be dedicated to lace: participants will explore how to suggest its texture, luminosity, delicacy and visual effect on the body underneath. Through targeted exercises and live demonstrations you will learn how to transform an intricate visual network into a coherent and fascinating pictorial material, integrating it into the language of oil.

Reference image

The reference photo will be provided by the teacher and specifically designed to cover all the technical aspects of the workshop: face, drapery, lace and light. This will allow students to fully concentrate on the pictorial rendering, without worrying about the compositional choice.

In addition to the technical aspect, the workshop will accompany students in the exploration of the expressiveness of the face, finding a subtle balance between formal concreteness and poetic evocation. Particular attention will be paid to the use of glazes, essential for building the complexion with depth, vibration and transparency.

Whether you want to refine your technique in realistic portraiture, or explore the material and poetic painting of fabric, this workshop will provide you with solid tools and inspiration to bring new awareness to your art.

Detailed program

DAY 1: Structure, setup and first drafts

Welcome to participants, introduction to the workshop and presentation of the technical and expressive objectives.
Overview of materials: canvases, mediums, brushes, solvents and pigments. Choice of palette and approach to oil painting in layers.
Compositional study: analysis of the reference image, setting up the drawing and transferring it to the canvas.
Beginning of practical work: grisaille, construction of volumes, first drafts of the face and definition of the light/shadow areas.

Instructions will be provided both in groups and individually, to ensure personalized guidance calibrated to the level of each participant.

DAY 2: Face modelling and drapery study

Theoretical study: skin tone, color temperature, tonal transitions
Continuation of the portrait: glazes, highlights, maximum shadows, halftones
Introduction to drapery: study of folds, transparencies and the interaction between skin and fabric.
Practical demonstration: techniques to suggest volume and light in drapery, use of glazes and contrast.
Guided work on your own painting: development of the figure and integration of textile elements.

Constant support from the teacher with targeted corrections and individual suggestions to solve the specific challenges of each work.

DAY 3: Lace – texture, details and finishing

Technical approach to lace rendering: how to suggest a complex texture without falling into hyper-description.
Finishing session: harmonization of the entire image, review of details, final corrections, toning
Option of question and answer session (optional): free discussion of painting techniques, development of one's own style, professional advice and management of artistic work.

At the end of the workshop each participant will have created a complete, in-depth painting full of technical stimuli — bringing with them new skills and tools to tackle future works independently.

The teacher

Elisa Anfuso

Elisa Anfuso was born in Catania in 1982, in a land where light has the weight of ancient things and silence tells fantastic stories. Since she was a child, she has drawn as if it were her natural way of speaking to the world, searching for a passage towards the invisible between lines and colors. That need to tell inner worlds leads her to graduate in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in her city, where she refines a rigorous technique, nourished both by the Flemish and Renaissance tradition and by a restless, stratified, poetic personal imagination.

Her painting is a threshold: a thin border between dream and reality, between what is seen and what is barely sensed. Female figures float in suspended atmospheres, seraphic girls inhabited by symbols, omens, restlessness. Elisa constructs images as if they were subtle fables, but full of questions: every detail is full of meaning, every drapery, every gesture, every flower carries with it an untold story. Her mark is born soft as a whisper, but it is stratified with the oil material, glaze after glaze.

She has developed a personal and recognizable language, which has opened the doors to international prizes and exhibitions: from the Arte Laguna Prize to the ModPortrait, in which in 2024 she received an honorable mention for the Surreal and Fantastic Portrait section. Her works enter public and private collections, and are exhibited in institutions such as the MART in Rovereto, the MacS in Catania and the Meam in Barcelona. Since 2013 she has been represented by Liquid Art System, with which she regularly exhibits in Italy and abroad, consolidating a recognized presence in the contemporary art scene.

But beyond the awards, Elisa's work remains first and foremost an act of vision: a way to question reality and offer another version of it — sweeter, crueler, truer. In her paintings, childhood is never just innocence, but an ambiguous, fertile, magical territory. And the feminine becomes a symbol, a mirror, a spell.

Elisa lives and works in Catania, where she continues her research between pictorial gesture and imagination, giving shape to images that seem like dreams stuck on the threshold and voice to figures that emerge like apparitions: fragile, enigmatic, timeless.

Discover more about the artist