Asilomar Part 1

John and I arrived home from our road trip to Asilomar last night at 8 pm. It was the best road trip ever. We had summer heat, a cool, foggy stay at a 5 bedroom house in Pacific Grove right next to Asilomar (staying with Stephanie Lee and her family, Misty, Michael, John and Bee) and then a short overnight with our friends north of San Francisco. I hadn't been back to the bay area in several years and so this trip deeply satisfied my desire to see that land again.

I love the trees that grow around Monterey and the bay area; the mist rolling in and the flat, moody coloration. We did see the sun come out about halfway through; summer came and then stayed with us through the rest of the trip. In fact, Medford, Oregon was in the 90's when we passed through yesterday.

The images in this post will be from the Facebook class. We constructed a simple book out of mostly watercolor paper and did a number of exercises on the pages. The class was about exploring our own grafitti styles and painting faces; some collage and paint techniques thrown in.

We bound the books in lace and ribbons. The books were casually constructed and the imagery went well with the binding style.

Each student chose their own color palette and we talked about how art is a journey into discovering and inventing a personal style of expression. A look that will be our own and will tell our personal stories.

Some of the pages were paintings; I can imagine a large version of this persimmon colored one. That color always lights my fire.

I took photos during the painting process so not all of these pages are finished.

And I took soooo many pictures and don't have time to size them all so these are just a sample.

We talked a little about how painting has changed over the centuries. What we think of as good painting today compared with what was expected of Renaissance artists.

In addition to just enjoying the day, painting with our fingers, eating chocolate truffles and laughing a lot we had books to take home filled with samples of various painting techniques.

We surprised ourselves.

There was at least one student in the class who had never painted a face before. But you never would have guessed which one. Everyone's work was rich and wonderful.

Each book had 16 pages to fill with paint.

On the last morning John shot my photo standing in front of the house we shared with our friends. I was feeling mixed emotions here; thinking about the sea-change a week can bring. Right now I have e-mails to attend to but as I get caught up I'll tell you about the other 2 classes I taught and about the road trip. It was wonderful and my head is swimming with beautiful memories.