Mixed Media Acrylic Painting: Material Experimentation

In this workshop, students have the opportunity to develop unique paintings from handmade watercolor paints while exploring the vibrant, seasonal plant life of Snowmass Village. Through foraging and working with cultivated dye plants, students learn to extract, process, and bind botanical pigments into rich, archival-quality paints. The class includes daily painting sessions focused on plant illustration, color swatching, and cataloging. Participants leave with their own custom watercolor set, a collection of painted studies, and a printed booklet of recipes and techniques to support the continued exploration of place-based, sustainable artmaking.

This course explores observational painting and provides the foundation necessary to understand the relationship of oil painting to color and culture and how they inform one another. Emphasis is on the development of skills while painting from a still life: seeing and composing in relationship to color and surface while evoking light/value and the illusion of space with color and texture. Demonstrations on best practices with oil materials and techniques in alla prima, dry brush, scumbling, impasto, and expressive brushwork are shared, practiced, and discussed.

This workshop asks students to engage in close readings of image, sound, and text in order to develop their own creative practice. Authors and artists examined include Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Dawoud Bey, Tina Campt, Baldwin Lee, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Endia Beal, and Joni Mitchell. Students will explore questions such as, How are history, region, identity, social location, sound, and disposition communicated through image? How can narrative be a co-creative endeavor alongside image? How does the body of the photographer figure in images even when not visible? What ethical principles ought to guide visual and narrative storytelling? Class sessions will include writing exercises and peer critiques.