Hmmm, how do I blog this art retreat? Because I can’t find words to fit the experience. It was a particularly successful and inspirational trip for me. All of my classes were amazing and I would take classes again from any of these teachers in a heartbeat! One day at a time, I suppose.
Thursday, my first class, “Junk Mail Artist’s Book,” was with Carla Sonheim. The concept was simple – take pieces of junk mail, roll them with thick gesso, paint a watercolor wash over the gesso, make pages of irregular sizes, and bind them. Then doodle over them in “Exquisite Corpse” style. In the Dada game “Exquisite Corpse,” one person would start a sentence, the next would add a word or phrase building on it, repeating until you have a complete, nonsensical sentence. When playing with drawing, the drawing would cross two or more pages, and then the page with the partial drawing would be completed. Oh well, it is simpler done than said. We did drawing exercises to loosen up our whimsy and our penstrokes.
This was some serious, inner child channeling fun. Here are some photos from the class. I didn’t finish mine, so most of the artwork here is by my fabulous classmates. But I have almost finished mine, I promise!
Check out Carla Sonheim’s blog. What a lovely woman.
Update: here is my book, perhaps infinitely in progress. It is just too much fun to play with abandon in this book.
slowly she turned 
I’ve done Carla’s imaginary animals from side walk cracks and I wanted to put them scenes. I was hoping this class would help me but it sounds not like “pull” art out of the background kind of class. Where do the sketches initially come from?
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Imagination and the background – as you can see, there were many different ways of doing it. I liked the textured backgrounds, and tried to pull my sketches out of the abstract shapes.
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