2005 - 2006 Paper Arts Winter Workshops

Integrative Marbling with instructor Tom Leech.
This course encourages a new way of looking at and using marbled designs. Students will combine drawing, painting and traditional marbled patterns. For beginners, nothing will be left out, and for experienced marblers a new way of thinking about the craft will be presented. Students will use acrylic paints on carragheenan size, and will try a variety of papers. Papers will be treated with acrylic gesso prior to marbling. The limit for the number of students is eight.

The workshop will run February 10, 5-7pm and February 11-12, 10-4 daily.

Pop-Up Structures and Sculptural Bookbinding
taught by Carol Barton.
Discover the magic of the sculptural book through exploration of three dimensional and pop-up forms. Learn how to use book structure to help convey your message. Students will learn a variety of pop-up structures, beginning with simple non-adhesive cut and fold pop-ups and progressing through a series of more complex glued constructions. The class will also explore sculptural bindings, including the carousel and tunnel book formats. Slide shows of historical and artistmade books will be presented. An ideal session for book artists, teachers, graphic designers and anyone who likes to play with paper.

This workshop runs from February 20-24, 10-4 daily.

Paste Paper Construction taught by Deena Schnitman.
Paste paper is one of the earliest forms of decorated paper and dates back to the late sixteenth century when it was widely used in Europe for book covers and end papers. The process of making paste paper has changed little and remains simple. A specially prepared paste is colored with paint and brushed onto wet paper. While the paper is still wet, designs are created using traditional and handmade tools. Along with a number of provided tools, students will make a roller (or two) to create designs that are uniquely theirs. Students should be prepared to have fun, be surprised and make lots of paper using a variety of techniques including layering.

The workshop will run February 25-26 from 10-4 daily.

Dynamics of Color is taught by Ati Gropius-Johansen, daughter of Walter Gropius and a student of Josef Albers. Drawing upon her experience as the founder of the Bauhaus School and as a participant in the influential Black Mountain School, Gropius-Johansen will lead participants in investigating the behavior, interactions and potentials of colors in a series of exploratory studies that emphasize personal discovery rather than theory. Based on the color teaching of Albers and the method of the Bauhaus foundation courses, studies with color-aide papers encourage new awareness and understanding of color, not only in professional work but everyday experience as well.

This workshop will run from March 7-10, 9:30am-12:30pm, and a special lecture on Ati Johansen-Gropius’ Black Mountain experience will occur on March 6 at 6pm at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Incanting Flesh, Incanting Persona: Storytelling and the Body. Taught by former SFAI resident Elizabeth Block, this exploratory and meandering fiction writing class will delve into the human body as site for narrative and poetic prose development. Participants will explore the body as storytelling site by engaging in writing exercises, reading, writing a draft of a story, and discussing each other’s works. While human transformation and the problems of character tend to comprise most of what we commonly know as fiction or drama, the body as narrative site seems infinitely ripe as a mode of creating or undoing mythic persona. Take for example Kate Braverman’s acclaimed and poetic novel, The Incantation of Frida K., an almost mythic autopsy of a heroic female persona in the flesh. Departing from (but not bound to) Braverman’s novel, the class will give students the opportunity to look at how the specificity of bodies and their personas determine and guide storytelling structures. A fictional framework for the life of Frida Kahlo, for example, would look wholly different than a story based on the myth and body of Martha Stewart. But finding a compelling character and sending him on his fictional journey, while significant to constructing and tearing apart narrative, is almost peripheral to the journey on which this writing workshop will traverse. We will focus not just on what the body does in a story, but the hallucinatory gaps between how the body acts and how the body’s persona may perceive. And the most interesting fiction depends on these gaps!

Ideally, participants should read Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K. before the workshop, and bring a 2-page writing sample to be distributed and read to the group during the first part of the workshop. Bring a “bag lunch” and pen and paper, or if you prefer, a laptop computer.

A One-Day Writing Workshop with former SFAI resident, Elizabeth Block
Sunday, March 12th 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

Text and Image in Artist’s Books with Carol Tyroler.
Using simple printmaking and bookbinding techniques this workshop will focus on combining text and image to develop a work that will focus on words, their meanings, and the images we associate with them. The content can be personal or you can work with similar issues in the public arena. We will start with some writing excercises to establish the text and then work out how to combine it with the images made, using monoprints and transfer printing techniques. The books will be bound using Japanese binding techniques.

The workshop will run from March 18-19, 10-4 daily.

Clay Printing with instructor Mitch Lyons.
In this week long intensive students will learn how to make monoprints from a prepared plywood board using colored kaolin slips mixed with ceramic pigments and painters pigments, painted on a wet slab of stoneware clay. After the slab becomes firm the instructor will demonstrate various techniques that he has developed over the last 30 years, including slip trailing, stamping, stenciling, inlays and more. Once the design is complete you will be able to pull multiple monoprints using paper or canvas that has been dampened and rolled with a wooden rolling pin.

The workshop will run from March 20-24, 10-4 daily.

Participants have the opportunity to choose package accommodations at La Posada de Santa Fe Resort and Spa or stay at SFAI’s extraordinary facilities. Call SFAI for more info at 505-424-5050.