Art Adventures Blog

To families, friends and returning students spending the holidays in Santa Fe – my class schedule has been updated. Since both Christmas and New Year’s fall on a Friday, I will be offering my group classes on Thursday of those weeks.

In all of my 2015 December classes, a holiday gift making option is offered! Choose any of the art pieces that you make in class and I will photograph it, and  make high quality reproductions that you can use as cards or gifts. You will leave the class with your original art and also with cards of your favorite image.  If you are interested in this option, let me know before the class and I will give you more details.

I am proud to offer my skills and experience, love of art and the creative process, sense of humour, and also my flexibility in working with groups. If the group is a family, such as shown in the photo above, I feel honored that this particular family has chosen to spend their vacation time taking an art class. I feel good about life in general when I am with people (of all ages) who choose to make art, to give a class to their daughter, grandson, spouse, or best friend.

I am also honored and inspired when students choose to take a series of private classes with me. This happens when someone who wants to learn clicks with what they see on this website and also on my fine art website at www.janeshoenfeld.com. This can also be a very special gift for the right person. I have had a number of students this year whom I have gotten to know as we shared the art journey. This is an enduring connection – here’s a toast to art time together in 2016!

And the element of the undpredictable is always welcomed, after all, this is an art class.

“Jane was a pleasure to work with! Her recommendations for our group worked perfectly. We truly enjoyed our Team building session.” Quote from Melanie L., group organizer

Melanie was from a major corporation in Albuquerque. She contacted me about a team building event for her group of eight staff members from human resources. We talked about the size of her group and came up with an idea – a group mandala. A mandala is a circle, often considered to represent the cosmos. The center of the circle is viewed as a power symbol. There are Tibetan Sand Mandalas, Native American Medicine Wheels, Rose Windows, the Celtic Cross, halos, and of course, from nature – the sun. Even the iris of our eye can be considered a mandala.

For the group mandala, I recommended a geometric format that had eight sections in it – since there were eight participants. I also suggested that the geometric divisions of the mandala include triangles- triangles are dynamic and indicate change and movement. The center of the mandala symbolized unity and was a good metaphor for the team building art project. The group was energetic, new to art and new to pastels. They dove right into the large poster board with their vivid chalks and used the mandala outlines to create the vibrant image you see above.

Another amazing project was organized for a group of over 100 business people from a large company.  So that there could be more personal interaction, we subdivided the group and I worked with twelve business men and women. We met in an artist’s studio and made collages. The theme was self portraits, and my group made portraits of themselves as an aspect of nature. The participants surprised themselves and each other with their creativity and their final images – self portrait as tree, self portrait as cloud, self portrait as fish. The group laughed a lot, was absorbed in what they were doing and learned something about themselves and each other. The people I worked with were playful and creative, although none of them were trained as artists. Collages are fun because no drawing ability is needed and almost everyone remembers learning how to cut, tear, and paste.

A very different group came and stayed at La Posada in Santa Fe, as part of a Spring Fling Adventure. This was a group of women who have joined together for a number of years to share their travel experiences across the United States. I suggest to Teresa from Grand Events that we organize a pastel sketching class outdoors in the gardens of La Posada. This was perfect for an adventurous group of women who wanted to try out their creativity. We painted with pastels on a lovely spring day among flowers, intense blue sky, and the deep peach color of the adobe walls. I love creating activities where “non-artists” experience the joy of connecting to nature through art.

Each one of these activities (and others not mentioned in this blog) were developed in an exchange between myself and the organizer of the group. The creativity in the planning and then the creativity in the process itself, makes my job of offering expressive arts for team building very satisfying.

I am so pleased to offer classes to families, friends that travel together and all of you that choose to take an art class on your holiday. I have always liked working with groups because there are always surprises. It is the same in individual classes – I can never predict what will evolve, but when I am teaching in a group, the surprises are multiplied. The interaction when people open to their creativity is genuine and fun.

My classes combine an introduction to how to use the media, creative art exercises that introduce or expand basic principles about the use of color, contrast, and edges and the opportunity to work on a longer art piece where these principles can be put together in an imaginative and individualized response to nature and landscape.

My Friday morning Sketching and Painting Santa Fe Classes are part of DIY Santa Fe: A Creative Tourism Journey. I am proud that I can offer my great skill, a love of art and the creative process, a sense of humour, and flexibility in working with groups. If the group is a family such as in the photo above, I feel honored that this particular familyhas chosen to spend their vacation time taking an art class. I feel good about life in general when I am with people (of all ages) who choose to make art, to give a class to their daughter, their grandson, their husband, or their significant other.

And the element of the unpredictable is always welcomed, after all this is an art class!

In addition to my classes, be sure and check out DIY Santa Fe: A Creative Tourism Journey, which is a project of the City of Santa Fe Arts Commissions’s Creative Tourism program and offers 250 creative experiences in historic Santa Fe, New Mexico. In March 2014 DIY Santa Fe is sponsoring a month-long celebration of the great arts tradition that provides this region with its unique character. Follow this link for more informationSanta Fe Creative Tourism

Abstracting a landscape suggests a simplification of form, while maintaining a clear sense of a landscape space…a horizon, a ground line. We will also look at expressing aspects of nature along with eliminating an obvious ground line and/or horizon. Taking this step places your artwork in abstract space, which has its differences from landscape space.

We will also focus on the relationship between light and dark tones and color. Seeing the “value” of a color will greatly enhance the strength of your composition. Pastel painting is also enlivened by energetic mark making. Knowing when to blend, making areas soft and graceful, and when to leave marks as they are, retaining immediacy, is another focus of this series. 

Each class will include demonstration and technical instruction on the sequence of developing a pastel landscape.

Contact me if you would like to attend a session of Pastels at Twilight while you are on vacation in Santa Fe.If you are visiting here and are new to pastels and plein air painting I recommend signing up for a three hour private class prior to joining us of for this series. The class will be held in eight different locations and starts on Thursday, June 20; ending on Thursday, August 22. We will be skipping July 4 and July 25. Time is 5:15 to 8:15PM

In front of the Randall Davey Audubon Center, there are two large cottonwoods shading a sturdy, old adobe, and in the Orchard of the Audubon Center, there’s a layered view that starts with the gardens, proceeds to the coral colored adobe and emerges in the mountains. I also enjoy painting in Cerro Gordo Park. The view of Sun Mountain is also layered, first the rows of chamisa, then the pinon/juniper, a few small adobes clustered in between, then cottonwoods, then mountains, then sky. The sky is always a surprise here in New Mexico – often a radiant blue, but sometimes a looming grey – never just grey though, always more purple than grey. And I have many favorite places to paint and hold art classes out in Abiquiu, where O’Keeffe spent many creative years. The picture above is me, a year ago March, painting en plein air at Ghost Ranch. I have three classes scheduled so far out at Ghost Ranch; one of them is a residential workshop in the Fall. I plan on getting out there soon, on my own for four or five days, at least – I’ll keep you posted!

This image is a detail from a pastel painting I made in Costa Rica. It took a few days to get someone to help me carry plastic table and chairs up to my painting spot on the wild banana mountain. I went up there every day (almost). I preselected my colors and carried them in my back back. I had a light weight folding easel to carry over my shoulder. I loved painting on banana mountain. It was the opposite of what I love about New Mexico – New Mexico with its ancient mesas and the intense stillness of the sky. Everything in Cuidad Colon is moving. The banana trees I especially loved. They are mostly diagonals, and they point and wave and curl and the shadow and light are constantly changing.

There is no way to “copy” and I’m not interested in copying anyway. The colors I use express the energy of the place, not the locale’s “local” color. This is the second year that I have gone there to paint. I stayed at the Julia and David White Artists’ Colony for a month and  I plan to go back next year. I recently came home, back to Santa Fe

In both my large scale studio work and my smaller work, the eyes are the beginning. When paintings are taller or wider than I am, my peripheral vision is filled and my body is enveloped within the piece. I traverse, not only the surface, but also the dips, glides, tilts and tunnels of the space. As my work proceeds towards abstraction, it no longer homes towards a vanishing point, rather it ventures deep, or down inside slices of landscape, without a horizon or ground line for reference. Sometimes there is an experience of dream space with no fixed place to land. Shifting references to representation stimulate the imagination, but I don’t want recognizable imagery and traditional perspective to overtake goal-less roaming in space.

I have several work areas set up in my studio. One corner is for the small, mixed media pieces. The easel where I do larger work is in another part of the studio. When I reach an impasse with what I am painting, it usually is best to give us both (the painting has a life of its own) a break, sometimes for just a day. So I will switch off into a small, or tiny mixed media piece (often no larger than 5 by 8 inches). These pieces are also teetering – with indefinite horizons and wavering references to representation. The entrance into this work is less through the body than with the larger paintings, and more through the inner life, the emotions, and the mental stimulation of imagery that keeps changing forms.

The painting that I do en plein air ranges from small color sketches to finished pieces no larger than about 2 by 3 feet. When I work outside, my boundaries relax and I resonate with the form and energy of nature. Working on location is the beginning of my studio work, both large and small.

From Santa Fe, our route west was a diagonal to Idaho and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve – a 52 mile long volcanic fissure. We camped there amidst the black lava rock and then continued west and north, diving our car into the verticality of Oregon forest. Next, we laid back in mist, sea and sand of the Oregon Coast for eight days. At the end, we headed back towards rock again – auto-ing for over four days on two lane roads. We drove a route through Utah that passes Arches National Monument and got out of the four wheeled vehicle to use our legs. We scrambled and rambled through stunning red rock arches. Arches, like Craters of the Moon, is an area that needs citizen vigilance to maintain its protected and nearly unmarred status.

The art I have been making since I got back to my studio is strictly out of my head and the medium is watercolor and ink pencil. These small, playful pieces have a very serious edge. Most of what we saw on our road trip was inspiring and very scenic; however, we camped under a moon red from fires all over the Northwest. Many forested areas were clear cut.

I play with pigment on water, letting gravity pull the water as I tilt the paper, paper that once was a tree . . . pulp from trees, upheaval, drought, flood and fire. I call up thoughts of climate change. These thoughts enter the marks I make and the colors I chose.

One way in which repetition is useful is that it develops the ability to see the “value”, that is the shade from dark to light, of a specific color. Advanced students still confuse color saturation, color temperature, and the hue of a color with lightness and darkness. In my own work, I frequently change the literal colors of a scene, but I tend to stick pretty closely to accurate values. The values, and particularly the contrast between dark and light, have a great deal to do with how the eye moves through the picture. Movement is a big part of what gives the painting its energy.

Most of the art work I do is in series. One pastel series completed several years ago was “100 View of Guadalupe Mesa”. I fell in love with Guadalupe Mesa and stayed with its image for several years. The more I repeat and absorb a particular view, the more inventive I become. The borders that are dictated by “reality” break down and the edges between trees, clouds and mesas take on unexpected diversions.

The borders between what I think is there in the landscape, and what may be hidden there, open up in response to repetition. Repetition is a form of devotion. I love looking at the world and I believe I see more, the more I look. I am convinced that the interior world and the exterior world meet in response to this act of devotion and seeing.

I ALSO have a residential workshop planned at Ghost Ranch in late September (Sept 20-23). There is something strange going on regarding the residential workshop. I only have two sign-ups and may have to cancel if I don’t get six more people enrolled in the next week or so. I have been teaching this residential workshop for many years. It has many repeaters and has always filled at twelve participants.

Back to “strange matter”. Earlier this year I decided to reinvent my schedule. I am passionate about everything I teach, but I decided to cut back on the number of workshops to which I make a commitment. The Sept. 20-23 workshop RESONATING IN THE PRESENCE OF NATURE, was definitely not something I would chose to cut. But it seems as if this cut may be made for me. Do you think occurrences such as this have meaning beyond that which one ascribes to them?

I am holding the workshop open, and putting this dilemma out in the open . . .  till July 29th! If not enough people sign up, then I will have to cancel it. Transparency, a buzz word in politics . . . transparency as a good thing.

In my painting, I am seeking a certain type of transparency. I have gone back to the maxim of my undergraduate training at Pratt Institute a million years ago. Be true to your work and your work will be true to you. I am always influenced by the years I have spent studying and improvising on the mesas at Ghost Ranch. When I look at Kitchen Mesa near my room at the Ranch, I see the layers – the volcanic uprising – the prehistoric creatures – the tumbling water that once was present. I see a variety of creatures, mammals, rodents, humans and fish all scrambling together within the mesa. I am working on evoking a transparency of layers that pile up across centuries. This has been my studio work during the last few weeks.

I see this as a different kind of transparency than the belabored transparency in politics. It is a commitment to truth with no preconception of what truth is. And putting it “out there” – that it is time to sign up for Sept 20-23 at Ghost Ranch if this is right for you.