arrowmont workshop

about a third of the students working, the encaustic station, marie's very cool picket encaustic painting and her daughter sara's encaustic/fiber painting, mindy's stitched collage, candace's cool stitched tyvek and encaustic painting, brooke's free motion stitched image, kirstin's imaginative encaustic painting on a terra cotta frying pan, valerie's highly textured painting, elizabeth's amazing marks, a collection of exquisite corpse, daphne's retro encaustic painting, michelle's skillful encaustic painting and betsy's stitched and branded rust print.

i just want to preface this post by stating that i love, love, love teaching at arrowmont school of arts and crafts! this june was my second time teaching in exciting gatlinburg, tn with 2008 being the first and it was even better the second time around. the workshop was entitled fiber, markmaking and encaustic-any one of these subjects could easily fill a 5 day workshop, so you can imagine how crazy this workshop is-crazy good! arrowmont is the only place i'll teach this workshop, as it's the only place i've taught so far that can accommodate all of the techniques and still leave space for the students to work. also, i'm always speechlessly impressed with how professional, knowledgeable and helpful the staff is there-if i have a need or a problem, it's taken care of asap. the atmosphere at arrowmont just teems with creativity and talent and my workshop class was loaded with it.
there were 14 students including my awesome assistant and friend, kirsten stingle, plus me, a branding station, encaustic station and ironing station, the room and it's outdoor area was tapped out for space. everyone worked fabulously well together, shared, helped and made some awesome work.
basically, the workshop was broken up into two segments with fiber surface design techniques in the morning and basic encaustic in the afternoon with some markmaking exercises sprinkled in there. surface design techniques included, but were not limited to, using hand and free machine embroidery embellishment with solvy, rust printing and composting, polythermal materials (tyvek, polyester, etc.) and fusibles. markmaking exercises such as response drawing, timed drawing, blind hand stitching and exquisite corpse were also taught and combined with basic encaustic techniques. i realize this sounds like an overwhelming amount of stuff to take in, but this class took it and ran with it! the most exciting part for me was to see how the participants combined these things to make some amazing work.
Workshop participants were betsy dribben, michelle o'patick-ollis, kirsten stingle, valerie diaz-leroy, daphne hill, sarita zaleha, elizabeth vitale, brooke fullington, mindy gelfand, sara gibson, marie gibson, pinky schmerler, candace tucker, debbie fullington.