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Imagine With Art Newsletter
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Issue No. 2
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September, 2009
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I welcome your comments!
susan@imaginewithart.com
707-824-8163
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Dear Friends,
Happy Equinox! And may your harvests be bountiful.
On the way out to Salmon Creek beach yesterday Bob and I stopped at the Rose and Thorn Gift Shop to say hi to our friend Carole. (Those of you familiar with The Artists Way by Julia Cameron would recognize this gift shop/country garden as the quintessential destination for an "artist date").
From Carole we heard the story of the bobcat that ravaged the hen house, and heard her plans for the new safer chicken coop which is underway. It sounds more like a chicken palace with all the security of a Buckingham Palace. So I have hatched a plan! A chicken sketching workshop next spring at the new Rose and Thorn Cluckingham Palace, aptly named since these hens are of the royal plumage variety.
Meanwhile the Muse groups are in full swing and seem to have a life of their own. The Saturday Muses have started work on their Traveling Muse Journals which will be passed on each month to another member to fill a spread of pages with artwork related to the theme chosen. The Tuesday Muses meet weekly, starting with a new art play technique each week and homework assignments in between.
And our annual preparation for ARTrails Open Studios next month has begun. . .more on that later.
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Imagine With Art Workshops
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Layering with Acrylic Textures
Do
you want to charge your paintings with a fresh expressiveness? In
this workshop you will learn how to paint, comb, slather and scrape acrylic textures to create rich painting surfaces. . . then let the flow of acrylic paints lead you into some
surprising new creative territories. We'll be working with paint,
textures and collage, combined with meditation and written word to make
uniquely personal art expressions. Each day features a different technique.
When: November 15, 16
Time: 10am-4:30pm
Where: The Studio in the Orchard, North Sebastopol
Cost: $160
Limited to 7 participants. If you can only take one day of the workshop, please ask, and I may be able to pair you with someone taking the other day.
A new six-week session of the Tuesday Evening Muse Group
starts October 20. The Muse group is a laboratory to
spark creative
expression, an opportunity to treat yourself to a regular infusion of
art play in a supportive group setting. Each session features a
different painting or art technique which you can add to your
repertoire - from textured collage to a variety of wet media painting
techniques.
When: October 20-November 24, 6:30-9:30pm
Cost: $180
To register for a workshop contact me at susan@imaginewithart.com
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Sketchbooking/Figure drawing/Book Arts
If you want to do some figure drawing, regardless of your experience, you are welcome to come to the Thursday night drawing group in Santa Rosa, 6-9pm. I plan to get there as often as possible. A great group of people, in a new spot, in a studio in a small alleyway
to
the right of A Street Gallery, 312 A Street, Santa Rosa. Someone is sure to be around to direct you if you can't find it!
The
next Bay Area Models Guild's drawing marathon is November 8
at Merritt College in Oakland
This is the
absolute coolest setting for figure drawing/painting! I attended the one a couple weeks ago and to get an idea of the poses they do, check out my blog postings from the day, also these.
And if you want to join up with a rural sketchbooking group in Sonoma County that meets twice a month, you can join a new yahoo group and get all the details or email Wakar.
I went to one of the meetings of the Book Arts Guild in Sebastopol and it was pure fun! They meet the last Saturday of the month 10-12 at Sebastopol Center for the Arts and for a nominal fee you can learn things like how to make an accordian style book. Contact Dena Bliss for more info.
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Etymological Inspiration
This month's word is Rasa, a Sanskrit word (although it's also found in other languages) which means many things. In a spiritual sense it means divine nectar or the taste of enlightenment. But it's also the appetite for life, the juiciness of it all, the sap, the marrow, the elixir. It is delight in existence. It is also the essence of flavor, as in sweet or salty rasa. And there are nine different types of Rasa as variations on emotional charge, such as love, rage, heroism and even disgust. These can all lead us to a state of climax of the subtle fanciful imagination.
But for the artist, the word Rasa means that ability to touch the inner soul of creation. One of the Muses in our group said that when she found this word, it came to mean that feeling she gets when she has the emotion, the excitement to create something.
I ran across this word while watching one of the lectures in a series of 100 Awesome Lectures for Art Enthusiasts titled "Neurology and the Passion for Art". You need some time to watch these videos - they are university lectures, but well worth the time. This professor defined Rasa is art as capturing the very essense of something to evoke emotion in the viewer's brain (brain neurology being his specialty). Clearly to evoke Rasa in your art, you first have to have it!
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ARTrails Open Studios, October 10-11 and 17-18
. . .voted Sonoma County's Best Outdoor Art Event
Plan
your route to visit the artists' studios and make sure the
Cornelis studios are on it! We are #96 and #97 on the map this year. We're already busy framing a whole new body of work to show you and placing examples of our art in the various venues around town. You're invited to see a piece by each of the ARTrails artists at the Sonoma Arts gallery:
Opening Reception, Friday Sept. 25, 6-8pm ArtSpace 404 404 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa the ARTrails preview show is open from Sept 26-Oct. 23.
This and lots more information about ARTrails and downloadable maps is available here. And if you're on Facebook you can preview new work by the artists.
This is the chance to enjoy the setting
for our art making, to collect art and learn something about our
processes and techniques. And our chance to meet you! Let us know your address if you'd like us to send you a picture postcard of our images. Bob's is on the cover of the catalogue this year!
Watercolor Artists of Sonoma County meeting, November 11: I'll be demonstrating layering with acrylic textures.
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Art Play Technique
Try
playing with this. . .go to your local library's book sale and find some interesting antique book that is falling apart (so you won't feel bad about cutting it up). Pick out some passages that intrigue and cut them out to use as collage pieces. To add them as the underlayer for your acrylic painting, paint the paper with a layer of matte medium, arrange the text pieces on it while it's wet, and then paint over them with the medium. When it's dry, begin your painting and let some words peak through transparent passages. People may stay longer to look at what's mysteriously underneath your painting, and you may also find some hidden meanings your hadn't considered. . . hmmmm.
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Hot Blog!
Myrna Wacknov's Creativity Journey blog has become a real favorite. If you are a figure painter/sketcher, if you enjoy collage, mixed media painting, or are just fascinated by the creative process, you will love this blog. Myrna is just wacky enough (like her name) to make for fun reading and she's working on a book, so she's trying out lots of things and describing them in enough detail that you can try them out yourself.
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That's it for now. You can visit me on my Art and Sketchbook blog for my latest images and art/life ramblings, and now you can subscribe and get it in email (there's a new link for this on the blog).
Thanks for your visits and inspiring comments, and for sending lots of resources to me so I can share them with others here.
Hope to see you at ARTrails next month!
Cheers,
Susan Cornelis
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