2024 Painting Classes - Imperfection Welcome!

2024 Painting Classes - Imperfection Welcome!

Monday, January 1, 2024

Happy New Year all you creative people..and yes, that means YOU!

I hope you all had some refreshing and fun times during the holidays, and are ready to get back to creating - because there is NOTHING more healing and transformative than creating. 

I spent close to 3 weeks of December up in Seattle with my daughter, good times and she healed really quickly from her surgery (thanks for your healing wishes and prayers).....and upon my return home i looked on my art desk and saw two of my last little paintings for 2023. They both had been quite quickly done in some gouache on gessoed vintage paper.....very fragile stuff. But yummy to paint on. Honestly I forgot I had even painted them, so that was a fun surprise.

So this morning I thought, ok, what can i do with these two small pieces?  I got out a glue stick and thought well....why don't i just stick them down to some stronger paper and see what happens. At least it will preserve them long enough to figure out what to do with them.  But as we all know, the best laid plans....

The glue stick was old and harder than I thought and the paper ripped, then ripped again in a horrible mess. Paper stuck to my sticky fingers....what a mess.  So what does one do?

What would YOU do?

Throw it out, anyone????

Too easy. Things that happen like this often inspire me to think outside of the box. That's what I did. So what I chose to do was sit down at my sewing machine (I think you all know that 2023 was my year of adding fabric and threads to the myriad mixed media of my Art Life) and simply stitched around the fragile artwork. And the rips?  Well why not add a bit of a zigzag stitch to bridge the two sides of the tears? And thus, an inspiration for this newsletter was born!

My Mascot for the Year is born!

My last two paintings of 2023

It got me thinking about the Theme of this year.....

My hope is that we become Gentler and more Accepting of our individual creativity. Who we are is who we are... let's celebrate that, together, in community, encouraging each other's individual expression. And developing our own uniqueness. One we don't judge, but celebrate. 

The overarching Theme of the year will be Color 

There will be lots more involved, but each month we will be focusing on a particular color range, and in January that means YELLOW. And guess what is growing so abundantly in my backyard?

This year I invite you to paint whatever subjects you most love, in whatever styles you most love...and I will always provide prompts if at any time you draw a blank, so no worries there. But for January, think Yellow Green for week one. And what better than a lemon to get our creative juices zinging again. Got another yellowy idea? Bring it on!

So around the COLOR WHEEL we will go, practicing and imperfectly "perfecting" our color mixing skills and discovering some new colors that make us want to dance and sing. So if you have been in a color slump, Welcome! And of course we will be playing with our mixed media and so much more. 

Here's our Schedule for January 2024. Classes start a week from today!

Zoom classes Monday and Wednesday 10am to noon, California time. $130/month, all classes recorded and video emailed after class.

In person classes in Santa Rosa, CA 1:30 - 3:30pm on Mondays. $135/mo. Includes emailed recording of Monday AM class instruction and demo.

Slight price change. Sorry! 

Care to join us? Commit to your creativity? Celebrate your imperfectly perfect creative expression? Need some creative souls to paint with each week? and get inspired by?

Get in touch.....classes begin next week. Save yourself a seat. Your commitment is for one month only....though most of my students are year long. Because we record each class (they remain on the Zoom server for two weeks, but you can download and keep every or any one of them) you don't have to worry about taking those vacations and missing out on instruction.

A few of my favorite paintings from the latter part of 2023. A process I deemed Blur Babies. 

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with an artsy friend.

Be Creative. It's Good for the Soul!
Blessings, Joanie

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By JoanieART / January 01, 2024