Visual Jazz: Experiments With Paint and Collage

September 8 - 10, 2017
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Hannon Barn, Arroyo Grande, CA
$400 (includes $100 non-refundable deposit)

3-Day Studio Art Workshop

Using jazz as a model, this workshop will focus on improvisation and the non-representational in visual art. We will execute a series of visual exercises that rely on techniques encouraging broad exploration, extensive risk-taking and collaboration.

Participants will discover ways to remember the fearless play of childhood while letting go of concerns for abiding by the rules or getting to the right answer / image. We will identify specific aspects of the creative process that produce joy and discuss ways to incorporate these more frequently in our own art making. Workshop participants with diverse subject interests will find ways to incorporate non-objective abstraction (visual jazz) into their art-making process and final artwork.

Long-time figure artist and California Emeritus Professor Joanne Beaule Ruggles, whose notable artworks range from heroic multi-figures narrative panels to intimate portraits of high emotion, will lead the workshop. Ruggles initiates the vast majority of her own drawings and paintings with non-representational compositions (she calls them “environments”). By starting her work in this way, Ruggles believes she can build into her process a period of visual play with paint and/or collage materials and thereby increase the opportunities for chance and accident to play a critical role in her artwork. She enjoys discovering and employing unorthodox tools as mark makers, saying they are not linked to the art tradition so there is no etiquette that dictates how they are employed. Accordingly they allow for personal invention and production of original mark.

Join us for lively sessions filled with ideas, creative fun, and encouragement.

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