Capturing the Moment in Plein Air Watercolor with Geoff Allen
October 2 - 4, 2024
9 am - 4 pm
$550 + 6.88% NM Sales Tax
A note to our students: To ensure that the workshop will not be canceled, we kindly request that you sign up as early as possible. Please note that if the minimum number of students required is not met three (3) weeks before the first day of class, the workshop will be canceled. However, we offer a full refund in the event of a canceled workshop, so there is no monetary risk for you. Please take some time to review our cancellation policy.
About the Workshop
Skill level: This workshop is designed for all levels. Beginners and masters both practice watercolor fundamentals which this class will emphasize.
Materials used: Watercolor (plein air)
Overview:
Learn the joys of capturing the moment, color and mood of the Southwest landscape. This workshop will cover the basic watercolor techniques that can speed up your process, loosen you up, and increase your success in capturing outdoor scenes.
There will be daily skill building exercises focusing on controlling moisture, mixtures, and timing. Geoff’s demonstrations will review materials, and illustrate how all these techniques flow together and show students how to “keep it fresh”.
Geoff will cover how to take your inspiration through a process of simplifying the composition while enhancing design dynamics, expression and creating atmosphere. It all starts with practicing watercolor’s quartet of skills; tonalities, shapes, color, and marks. Geoff will be following up individually with students to reinforce concepts and skills.
There will be daily demonstrations reviewing the crucial ingredients to successful watercolor paintings; strong design, a value sketch, tone, defining major shapes, “one-go”mark making, and edges. We will be practicing indoors the procedures that make painting outdoors easier; thumbnail sketching, grouping values, visualization, simplification, and setting up our palettes for quick paint applications.
About Geoff
As an artist, plein air painting allows my art to showcase two of my greatest passions: my enthusiasm for being outdoors and the beauty of watercolor. Plein air painting helps me focus intensely on my work while promoting a sense of mystery and spontaneity.
To borrow Alfred Korzybski’s phrase “the map is not the territory”, meaning the map is merely a plan and the “territory” is reacting in the moment whatever the conditions may be.
In the studio, as artists, we practice, plan and evaluate our art within an open time constraint. However, in a plein air practice we become vulnerable to time, the whims of nature, and interact within a social environment. This adversity though is necessary to experience the primary source of the subject (nature) and reality, experiencing “the territory”.
Watercolor echos this idea of immediacy and nature. I find that watercolor is both medium and metaphor, and at times both a blessing and a curse. I love that aspect of art making- when something is slightly out of my control and a challenge. It allows me to feel that I am playing with mysterious forces beyond my own understanding.
My art journey began unconventionally. I graduated with a bachelors in Economics, with a passion at the time for black and white street photography culminating in 1986 with a solo exhibition at the Reno Art Museum called “Suburban Views”.
My most pivotal moment as an artist came during a postgraduate summer watercolor class. The class was plein air painting in the Sierras during July when it began snowing on us, I was thrilled and hooked.
Soon after, I graduated with an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1990, and thrusted myself into the urban grind and contemporary art scene of Los Angeles. Initially working as a scenic painter in Hollywood and residing in a downtown studio, life felt exhilarating but there wasn’t much time for art. Luckily I began to teach drawing and ran several college galleries. My art at the time was poured pastel sculptural wall reliefs. Instead of brushes, I used poured plaster, fiberglass, and syringes filled with acrylic. This work resulted in a solo exhibition at Post Gallery, on Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles in 2001. As different as all these experiences may seem, I have found the connecting threads to plein air.
Currently I am living in a beautiful coastal town north of San Diego. I left the complexity of Los Angeles and began an illustration business with my wife, Jennifer Brinley, who was my high school girlfriend who I met in art class. Looking back on my career in art, it was always about making art to fit into preexisting categories or labels: be it contemporary art, modern art, abstraction, conceptual, performance, installation, illustration, folk art, or commercial. Whereas my focus now—the tradition of plein air painting, feels more about an appreciation of life, nature and transforming that excitement onto paper.
What’s Included
Bluebird Studios offers an array of complimentary food and beverages during our workshops. Attendees can enjoy an ice breaker the evening before the first day, complimentary continental breakfast served every morning, complimentary unlimited beverages, and afternoon treats each day. We also offer catered lunches brought to the studio or the plein air site (optional for $20), and lastly, our complimentary signature lunch of Frito Chili Pie on the final day. We will spoil you!
Supplies
The supply list for this class can be opened via the button below and printed at your convenience.