New Workshop Schedule

The new (and somewhat revised) schedule is out and about. Here's a copy:

Nurture your creativity as you come away from a weekend with renewed energy, new  materials and techniques in surface design applicable to fiber, ceramics, jewelry, painting and mixed media work. Susie Monday leads artists’ retreats and workshops throughout the year at her studio near Pipe Creek, Texas, about an hour from downtown San Antonio. El Cielo Studio workshops are designed with the needs of the participants in mind;  free time is scheduled throughout the weekend for reading, reflection and personal work in the studio. You are welcome to bring projects in process for Susie’s critique and for peer feedback in an environment of trust and respect. You’ll share meals, poetry and stories, music and advice for living an artist’s life. Enjoy the 25-mile vistas from the deck, hot tub and pool time,  and strolls down the country roads. The fee for each workshop retreat is $175 for a 2-day event with discounts for early enrollment. Comfortable accommodations are available from $15 -  $30 per workshop. Most workshops offer a Friday night potluck option. Limited enrollment. Most supplies included. 

Susie has taught creative process and art techniques to adults and children for more than 30 years. Her art is in private and public collections around the world.

TEXT ON  TEXTILES

ONLINE course at JOGGLES.com

JUNE 15-JULY 14 includes 4 fully-illustrated weekly lessons, plus a bonus week, $45

Have you ever wanted to incorporate a favorite word, poem or quote into an art quilt, garment, art doll or other textile project -- going beyond simply writing or embroidering the text? This all new surface design/mixed media class will give you a set of process tools for making text and words an integral part of artfully designed fabrics that you can use in a wide variety of projects. Learn soy wax lettering, freeform cut letters, sunprinting and more.

JUNE 15-17

Optional potluck 

Friday night

FROM SCRIBBLE TO SYMBOL; PERSONAL MARK-MAKING 

In this workshop, start with simple sketches and doodles and end the weekend with an arsenal of new surface design tricks and tools.   Explore doodles and scribbles as sources of  uniques and personal imagery that will give your art quilts, wearable art, or mixed media work personal depth and layers of meaning. take a favorite symbol -- for example a heart, star, spiral, circle -- and by taking it (and yourself) through a series of creative generative exercises, you’ll make something new and different to incorporate into your design, composition and surface design. Tools and techniques explored include paper lamination on fabric, large scale “mark-making” rollers and monoprinting.

JULY 6-8 

CHANGE OF DATE

Optional potluck 

Friday night

KITCHEN ALTAR   WORKSHOP

Embrace your inner goddess of summertime. Design and make a small art quilt “altar” for kitchen or dining room with tools and materials that depend on heat, sunlight and passionate delight: sun-printing, vegetable prints, fusing, hand and machine stitching and “found” fabrics from attic, thrift store or kitchen closet. We will recycle napkins, tea towels and other like objects and design a thermofax featuring a meaningful symbol, favorite fruit, icon, saint, culinary relative, heroine, angel or other meaningful design as the centerpiece for the altar. (Altar frame, $12 supply fee).

AUGUST 17-19 

NATURE INSPIRED 

SURFACE DESIGN

Optional potluck 

Friday night

Let late summer colors, shapes and even heat inspire your surface design. The weather is perfect for dyeing, dye-painting and soy wax! Sketching from nature, and from collected natural objects (don’t worry, you can do it), we’ll design one-of-a-kind fabrics, silk scarves and mixed media pieces.

SEPTEMBER 7-9

FEARLESS SKETCHING

Face your fears of drawing head on, as Susie takes you on a sketch and draw adventure, with no failures allowed. You’ll try different approaches, learn so me classic tips and tricks, and find out how drawing is a learned skill, not something you had to master as a 6th grader who “couldn’t draw horse like your best friend.”

WHAT PARTICIPANTS SAY ABOUT SUSIE’S CLASSES & WORKSHOPS:

“ The exercises we did this weekend were freeing on the one hand, but will also help me focus.”

 “This workshop was a fabulous, uplifting, nurturing environment to create in. The journaling was particularly helpful, I would definitely recommend it to a friend.”

“Thank you for creating such a fun, yummy, comfortable, and inspirational experience...”

Get out of the Middle

Sometimes the universe delivers just what you need to hear/see right to the mailbox. 

I susbscribe to the BOX OF CRAYONS newsletter and always enjoy it. Here's their latest video message:

Stretching an Art Quilt on a Wooden Frame

Here's a stab at explaining how I mount my art quilts around a wooden frame. It would be better with video, but until I get a tripod mount for my phone or iPad, I can't quite manage to do the work and video the process!

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TEXT Projected, Jenny Holzer

San Diego, Projection, Jenny Holzer LAST NIGHT: I  watched on Netflix an interesting documentary about conceptual text artist Jenny Holzer “About Jenny Holzer; Protect me from what I want”. She works (ed) with “truisms,” short statements from various perspectives that she may or may not personally agree with, but that are concise restatements of what she thinks is “in the air” in our Western culture. More about Jenny here.

Here use of text, messages and meaning is striking and ephermeral, the material is often projected LIGHT; her space, the architecture or natural environment. I highly reccommend the documentary.

Holzer's work made me open to looking for a "truism" in the text collages I had made recently as part of demos for teaching a Joggles on-line course. It was about finding a message that already existed in the text work that I had done, a kind of unconscious writing come to consciousness.

Here's the raw material: (text collages printed on fabric, erser stamps, paper cloth text collages, etc.)

And here's the process toward Art Quilt Complete:

I found: “Unseen messages never settle.” The cut letters are from fabric that was a direct print of a collage (now deconstructed into individual letters). a print of red “S”s from an eraser print and “NEVER SETTLE” from a paper cloth collage.