At the end of October, I had the pleasure to take a five-day workshop with William Park, a Portland artist. For five days we had morning demos, then the luxury of painting the rest of the day.
In the afternoon Bill would share artists he loves and we would have chats about the love of painting and the challenge of keeping fear out of our process and paintings.
On the first morning, we did a nice warm up exercise of making marks and adding paint. Simple, yet profound in the ability to jump start our week.
The demos Bill did were primarily in acrylics, but I had brought my oil paints and a gallon of cold wax; there were eleven of us in class and a couple other people were painting in oils, so it was a mixed bag and we were encouraged to explore and do whatever we wanted.
Bill made the rounds throughout the day, spending time with each artist for as long as they needed. Here he is with my friend Katy, who also took the class.
For the first couple of days, I just laid down paint in order to get some early bright layers to respond to in later days. No fear, just the joy of painting and playing with color.
I’m not sure I finished anything, but I made progress and came away with some wonderful early layers.
And besides Katy being in the class, my good friend Stephanie was also there, so as you can imagine, we had a great five days together.
