In the Sandbox: Strategies for Creative Visual Play

June 22 - 24, 2018
9 am - 4 pm daily (with a 1 hour lunch break)

Hannon Barn in Arroyo Grande, CA
$450

In the Sandbox: Strategies for Creative Visual Play is an art workshop devoted to exploration. We will have a chance to explore color, pattern, mark-making, non-traditional tools and materials, and above all – childlike fun. We will work with a wide range of materials (water-based paints, collage, graphite, ink, charcoal, and more). No worries about getting to recognizable subject matter, just a dozen of us exploring basic design principles that will be put forward. If that sounds appealing, sign up now. This one will fill up quickly!!!

Long-time figure artist and California Emeritus Professor Joanne Beaule Ruggles, whose notable artworks range from heroic multi-figures narrative panels to intimate portraits of high emotion, will lead the workshop. Ruggles initiates the vast majority of her own drawings and paintings with non-representational compositions (she coined the term “environments” to describe them). By starting her work in this way, Ruggles believes she can build into her process a period of visual play with paint and/or collage materials and thereby increase the opportunities for chance and accident to play a critical role in her artwork. She enjoys discovering and employing unorthodox tools as mark makers, saying they are not linked to the art tradition, so there is no etiquette that dictates how they are employed. Accordingly they allow for personal invention and the production of highly original marks.

Join us for lively sessions filled with ideas, creative fun, and encouragement. Sign up soon…only 3 spots remain.