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Margaret, a workshop buddy wearing one
of her lovely creations |
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| La Cascade |
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| My retreat buddies |
A million apologies everyone for my slack behaviour in blogging. I do have an excuse for the last two and a half months though. I know thats still not a good enough excuse. I will just have to try and make it up to you, if I can?
I turned 50 in June and treated myself to a big trip. Now I have lots to blog about so you will be sick of me by the time I share with you what I saw and experienced.
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| One of Dayle's altered books |
My first instalment starts with, a mixed media creative retreat I attended on June 26. The retreat was led by the wonderfully talented Dayle Doroshow, a mixed media, polymer clay artist from the United States. Dayle has been taking groups to La Cascade, a beautiful villa in the French village of Durfort for over ten years now. Durfort is approximately one hours drive eastvillage from Toulouse airport. It is a delightful reknown for making copper ware since the Middle Ages. I just fell in love with its beautiful artisans galleries, small streets, waterfalls and nearby villages .Oh and did I mention the French flea markets, known as the vide - greniers ! It was no wonder I had to mail a box home after only one week in this part of the world. I picked up a number of goodies, including an old letterpress box that housed metal letters in it for an absolute song! I was very chuffed with this purchase as I am collecting, ( yes, I know another thing ! ) pieces to create assemblage artwork eventually. My brother was not so pleased as he had to carry it in his suitcase for more weeks than he cared to know about.
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| A constantina, pop up book section |
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| Artwork at La Casacade |
Days in Durfort passed very quickly as we would spend half the day in the La Cascade studio learning a huge variety of techniques. Numerous ways of transferring onto polymer were covered. I thought I knew all of these. I particularly loved the packaging tape transfer one. Another area we covered was the technique of sculpting polymer faces , which will be great for my new found love of making art dolls. The other area we worked in was that of altering books. Suddenly childrens' books were transformed into magical works of art using gesso, paints, crayons, transfers, polymer embellishments, fabric, to mention only a few of the materials we played with. Dayle showed us several samples of art dolls with books incorporated into these which has opened up another world for me. I make canes and teach this art. Dayle had a very simple approach to understanding and making canes which I will show my students in the near future. Apart from studio time, each day was filled with field trips to nearby towns where we saw fantastic art exhibitions, flea markets to collect paraphernalia for our creations and general sightseeing. There is so much more to tell but watch this space and you may hear some more.
Until then, a bientot, Kathy
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