Using their choice of acrylics, oils, water soluble oils and mixed media, students will learn various painting techniques such as color blocking, blending, shading, over-painting and direct color application, basic color theory and composition as well as a variety of mixed media techniques including collage and montage. Participants will consolidate information and techniques learned, with the goals of creating more compelling paintings and, in the case of more advanced students, each discovering his or her

I have worked on several Artist-in-Residence projects in Pinellas County, Florida, with at-risk teens through Youth Arts Corps. One of the projects was What Home Means to Me. For this mixed media installation I worked with youth at both Wildwood Recreation Center in South St. Petersburg and at the Gulf Coast Museum in Largo. Each youth was given a shoe box and told to create his or her ideal room in an ideal home using

Spending the summer of 2012 in Santa Fe, where I had lived from 1980 to 1993, brought back memories. In that dry, arid climate I was flooded with memories of my years in New Mexico. It was a period of reflection and contemplation. One day in July I walked into a Santa Fe art gallery where Judy Chicago’s Power Play, a body of paintings from the 1980s, was on exhibit and I was transported to

In the summer of 2011 I worked, in collaboration with the Florida Holocaust Museum, at Pinellas County recreation centers with middle school youth. The project, Speak Up, Speak Now! was designed to educate youth about the Holocaust and, by extension, to bullying and gang violence. There were speakers who lectured and showed videos on the subjects of the Holocaust, bullying and gang violence, a writer worked with them to create and perform a play and

“A flower touches almost everyone’s heart,” and “I’ll paint…what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it,” stated Georgia O’Keeffe in the early part of the twentieth century. When I taught a two day workshop to teenaged girls through the O’Keeffe’s Museum’s Art and Leadership Program at the Santa Fe Art Institute in the summer of 2012, my students learned about