A Chicago adventure

This past weekend I had a 2-day encaustic mixed media workshop in my home- not in my studio, but actually in my basement! This was the first time I did this and it was so much fun. Normally I don't have people over to my studio unless I know them pretty well because of the fact that my studio is in my home and I usually have little kids and a big dog running amok. But I consider Suzanne Clements an old friend even though we've actually only spent time together twice in the seven-eight (?) years that I've known her. We met each other on LiveJournal, where I first started blogging about my art back in the day. And Suzanne, well, I call her my art angel- I've got to come up with a better description, because that doesn't quite capture the spitfire that Suzanne is. Ha! She pretty much pushed me into exhibiting my paintings and helped me get my first show and talked me through everything. She believed in me and my work and I will never forget it. She was and is awesome. When I had flown to Melbourne, FL from Seattle to attend the opening reception in 2007 and we spent the day chasing after manatees that never showed up for us, I told her- if you ever need anything, please don't hesitate to ask.

So earlier this year she got in touch and said, "Hey! My friends and I are thinking of coming up to Chicago and would love a workshop from you while we're there, would you be interested?" And, I said, "Anything for you, my dear!" And thus the transformation of my basement into a workshop space this past weekend. I was honored to be included in their Chicago adventure weekend. The energy that happens when artsy friends get together and take a workshop is really fun.


Suzanne, hamming it up, as she is known to do

Suzanne and Melissa Hall are both photographers and so the focus for the workshop was how to integrate one's photos with encaustic. Renee Decator is a painter, but has been delving more into mixed media and I am pretty sure by the end of Saturday she was really digging all the possibilities one can do with encaustic. I met Renee when I had gone down to FL as well, but after this weekend, I feel like I can count her as an old friend too. There's nothing like spending 2 days straight painting with people to create a friendship!


Melissa has been exloring encaustic for about a year now, visit her blog to see what she has been up to


We made little plaster windows to create an encaustic book. These are Renee's plaster pages in progress.

And we also made accordion books made out of paper, this is Renee's cover.

As usual I was terrible about taking photos during our time together. This is all I have! But trust me, we had such a great time. And I loved hearing their Chicago food adventures they had each night while they were out on the town. Chicago is the place to come to chow down.