april workshops pt 2

beautiful mixed media, felt and encaustic beads (sorry, don't remember who made these!), a 2d piece incorporating crocheted horsehair and amazing small sculptures by camila mesquita, lisa klakulak's felt and encaustic 'volcano' and an image transferred painting, 2 lovely paintings by ingrid eliasson, a painting incorporation 2d & 3d effects by ava chan, monoprinted drawings by lucia taxdal, a beautiful book cover by judi zaepfel, our amazing work stations in the penland fiber studio.

i'm so excited about this encaustic and felt workshop i taught at penland in late april! it was my first time at penland and i must say it is as special as everyone says it is-great food and accommodations, top-notch studios and an organized, professional staff-namely fiber studio coordinator megan fluegel and workshop assistant jamie sparks-many thanks to both of you! i was very impressed with everything and everyone there and look forward to returning soon.
at penland, the early spring is devoted to 8 week concentrations in all of the studios and felting with the fabulous lisa klakulak was being taught in the fiber studio. as part of her felting concentration, i was invited by lisa to do a 3 day encaustic segment as a visiting artist. by the time i arrived, the felting participants had been felting every day for about six weeks, so they had created some amazing felt work and i was there to show them how they could incorporate encaustic into some of the felt pieces. lisa and i had been talking about doing this workshop together for over a year and during that year we had been working on samples, discussing some sort of curriculum and basically just experimenting to see what the two mediums could do together. at first i was concerned because i could find no examples of encaustic and felt combinations from other artists to work from and my first experiments were utter failures. i was about to declare the two mediums incompatible when i started to erase from my mind all i knew about encaustic-i wanted to start from scratch with what it could do with felt and i know nothing about felt, so i just went from there. in doing this i was able to build on the strengths of each of the mediums and put those strengths to use while making the samples. besides the basics of encaustic, i taught branding, working with horsehair, accretion and using the felt as an encaustic mono-printing surface. as it turned out, there were a good many successes and the students had a great time and made some awesome work. an exciting thing that happened at this workshop that doesn't usually happen in my workshops is that the students experimented more sculpturally and 3-dimensionally, which was very cool. the participants in this workshop were ava chan, lucia taxdal, ingrid eliasson, camila mesquita, judi zaepfel, jamie sparks, lisa klakulak.

look forward to reading more about this workshop in an article that lisa is writing for the fall publication of fiberarts magazine-very exciting!