I am just back from an enjoyable weekend teaching my workshop, Watercolor: a Fresh Start, at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed  Wyoming Valley School Cultural Art Center to a wonderful group of creative learners.  The WVS is just 40 miles west of Madison and six miles from Spring Green, Wisconsin in the heart of the Wisconsin River Valley where I grew up.

The workshop was billed as being for absolute beginners and for those who needed a refresher after time away from watercolor.  I had a fabulous group of 13 participants that braved trying out a new medium and making it their own.  Workshop participants will recognize the small painting above as my final demo of the workshop, created to show how to use the wet-into-wet techniques they had learned  to paint flower pedals (I send a special thank you to photographer Jamie Wilson Carroll for lending her wonderful dahlia photograph to the cause).

Instruction introduced participants to basic wet-into-wet watercolor techniques, and began to suggest how to use the techniques in paintings.  (Some participants were especially excited by an approach to painting Queens Ann Lace, recorded here on Youtube for me by Akeem Torres).  Most importantly, the workshop promoted the perspective that art is an ongoing process that our paintings or other artworks simply document.  Meaning, the larger process is far more important than any individual work of art, so relax, and have serious fun while exploring new ideas, techniques and mediums, whatever they may be.  Our class motto is “Exactly how much fun CAN we have painting with watercolor?”

This was the first of three workshops I’m teaching at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed school this summer.  My workshop is being offered along with other art, creativity and environmental workshops being offered by Liese Pfiefer, Bev Gordon, Marian Farrier and Amy Jo Dusick.  There is still time to sign up.   Most of the workshops are limited to 15 participants but there is still room for a few more participants.

Having the opportunity to spend a length of time teaching and learning in this lovely space is a real treat (and its air conditioned).

Our upcoming summer workshops include:

Watercolor From the Center with Helen Klebesadel, Monday-Friday, July 16-20, 2012, 5 days of workshop,  10:00-4:00 daily, (mixed media artists welcome).

Watercolor: The Expressive Medium with Helen Klebesadel, August 17-19, 2012 (2.5 days), Friday afternoon (4-8), all day Saturday (10-4), and Sunday (10-4).

Introduction to SoulCollage®: Intuition Through Imagery with Subanna Nur (Beverly Gordon), Sunday, July 15 2012, Sunday 10:00-4:00

Patterns In Nature Workshop with Marian Farrior and Amy Jo Dusick, Monday, Monday, July 16, 2012, 10:00 am to 3:00 pm

Give Meaning and Memory through Mixed Media, with Liese Pfeifer. August 17-19, 2012 (2.5 days),  Friday afternoon (4-8), all day Saturday (10-4), and Sunday (10-4).  Participants can sign up for each day separately with the following focus:   Friday  Perception and Intention in Art;  Saturday,  Found Object Dilemma/Breaking the Rut; Sunday, Mixed media collage as purveyors of meaning.

For longer descriptions, schedules, and registration information of the workshops being offered this summer go here.

More about the Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center

The Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center is worth a visit just to see how Frank Lloyd Wright imagined the space in which education should take place for elementary aged children.  The school hold a special place in my heart because its where I went to grade school.   I grew up on a farm about a mile away and went there for first through sixth grade.

The school was built in 1957.  I remember as a small child being taken by my father to see the construction underway of the building that would be my first school.  While there we had a chance meeting Frank Lloyd Wright who had stopped by to observe the construction himself.  It speaks to how old I was that I remember him as a tall man, though he was not.

Mr. Wright donated his design and 2 acres of land to the Wyoming School District in honor of his mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones Wright.  She had been a kindergarten teacher and encouraged his lifelong love of learning.  The school opened in 1958 with 46 students in grades 1 through 8,  and later in grades  1 through 6.  Children from the Taliesin Fellowship, just down the road, attended the school as well.

As the only two class-room school (with an additional large lunchroom/gym) designed by the foremost American architect, the school was a wonderful place to start your education and develop a life long love of learning.   Like the old one-room school house it replaced, students in several grades took instruction together in the same room.  Younger students listened to the lessons of those ahead of them, and it was not hard to insert an advanced or slower learner in exercises appropriate to their learning level despite their official grade.

I have many memories of my six years as a student at the Wyoming Valley School, including being invited to Taliesin‘s small theater as a first grader with the rest of the school’s children to watch animated  films from Japan.   It has been an extreme pleasure to return there to teach and share my own passion for the arts, carrying on the tradition the school was designed for.