EMILY BALL AT SEAWHITE |
CONTEMPORARY DRAWING AND PAINTING COURSES |
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WINTER COURSES AT THE STUDIO
WITH KATIE SOLLOHUB
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Expand your horizons and get ready to experiment and play |
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Images: Embodied Drawing, Drawing Residency, Dancing & Drawing, Figure, Fashion & Frills with Katie Sollohub |
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“[You’re] gently pushing me out of my comfort zone with regards trying new things, encouraging me to be more
playful & experimental. I also love how holistic your teaching is in guiding me towards combining both body & mind with my developing art.” ~ Susanna J
Dear
Katie Sollohub is brilliant at developing courses that really challenge people’s perceptions of what drawing - and painting - are all about. Through her courses she offers artists opportunities to try out new approaches and encourages them to experiment with form and scale. Her approach is calm, clear and meditative, introducing processes that lead artists into making work without angst and anticipation of the outcome. When she teaches her joy, energy and enthusiasm for drawing is infectious. Anyone who has attended a course with her has experienced that ‘Katie Magic’ and has found her invitation to experiment, explore and play irresistible! And the results speak for themselves: not just in terms of the work that is produced but in the way the courses build artists’ confidence in their own abilities and expand their belief in what is possible (or allowed).
In this newsletter, we’ll be sharing four courses that Katie is delivering at the Seawhite Studio this winter:
- Embodied Drawing: a two-day course focused on using the whole body to explore gestural drawing on a large scale.
- Join Katie in the Drawing Den – a studio residency: take time to expand your own drawing practice and work alongside Katie as she shares her practice with you.
- Figure, Fashion & Frills: a three-day course painting from the clothed figure, where the focus will be looking at colour, texture and pattern as well as form and flesh.
- Drawing and Dance: a joyful 1-day workshop where Katie invites you to immerse yourself in drawing without inhibition – draw likes no one is watching!
Joining Katie for one of these innovative courses could be ground-breaking for your practice and will certainly give you food-for-thought for months to come. Read on to find out more…or click on the buttons below to head straight to our website and book:
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Embodied Drawing
5-6 December 2024 (Thursday – Friday)
£200
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Image: Embodied Drawing 2024, Katie Sollohub |
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Be brave, go large and embrace the idea that your whole body is a drawing tool
Gestural mark-making and engaging with the whole body is a core theme for Katie, and Embodied Drawing is a course that perfectly demonstrates this. It’s a two-day experimental drawing course that invites you to approach drawing as a physical experience; thinking of body movement as a drawing in space, and the body itself as a tool to make marks with. Over two days you will be your own model, working on two or three large scale drawings, guided by Katie’s exercises and meditation. She will encourage you to experiment, layer, develop and change the drawings throughout the course.
To give you an idea of what to expect from this experimental approach to drawing, click on the image below to watch a short film on our YouTube channel. The film was made ahead of Katie’s Live Online version of the course in 2021, and shows how she encourages students to warm up their bodies and to “think of yourself as a drawing” – drawing with hands, arms, elbows, mouth and even cycling helmets!
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Embodied Drawing is for anyone wishing to expand their drawing practice and find new limits, by working large, freely, involving body and breath. Using the generous space of the Seawhite studio there is almost no limit as to how large you can go. |
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Images: Emboded Drawing participants (Katie Sollohub)
The outcome is perhaps not as important as the process. However, the results may surprise and inspire you in your approach to drawing and painting beyond the course, helping you to discover a fresh way of working from the figure, reinventing your visual response to the physical body.
To find out more about the course and to book your place, click on the button below:
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Drawing Den Residency with Katie
9-13 December 2024 (Monday – Friday)
£480
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Image: Katie's Drawing Den |
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Come and join Katie in the Drawing Den
What kind of space do you need for your drawing practice? A den, a white wall, a huge floor space to move about in, a place to curl up in and draw? How might you create that space for yourself, for a week, your own special den? Come and join Katie in the Seawhite Studio for a week of exploratory play through drawing, where you can focus on your own projects, guided and eased into the day with Katie’s unique approach, combining meditation with short drawing prompts that will set you up for the rest of the day.
The Drawing Den is a metaphor for the space we all yearn to have for our creative practice, whether physical, virtual, or emotional. During this residency week in the Seawhite Studio, Katie will bring the idea of the Drawing Den with her, and help you create an environment in which you will feel totally free to expand and explore your drawings in all dimensions - you might even make your own den, plaster the walls with huge drawings to immerse yourself in, or scatter 100s of smaller drawings, suspended in the space like leaves.
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Image: Drawing Residency (Katie Sollohub) |
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During the week each artist will be exploring their own themes and subject. Everyone has a large working space and use of any of the studio equipment and materials that they need. Katie’s role during the residency is to support and facilitate discussions and to encourage experimentation by example, rather than to lead and “teach”. She will be offering guided meditations and drawing prompts to start each day for those who want.
Katie herself will be making large scale drawings and installations, exploring the purpose of drawing as a practice. Currently inspired by movement, dance, improvisation and story telling, drawing has always been integral to her work. It is an opportunity to see how she uses her own practice to make work and navigates the highs and lows of the work as it progresses in real time.
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Image: Drawing Den Dismantled (Katie Sollohub) |
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"Drawing is for me about being present, seeing with awareness, responding to the space around me, as well as the space within me. With drawing, I can let go of control and follow the touch of my materials, the movement of my hand, and enjoy it like a dance. This will be a week of improvisation. Come and join me in my drawing den.” ~ Katie
The residency week follows on from Embodied Drawing, and would be an ideal partner to this course - make your space over two days, tuning into the creative energy and your own body’s innate impulse to move, draw, and leave its mark. And then keep working with it for the next five days.
To find out more about the course and to book your place, click on the button below:
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Figure, Fashion & Frills:
An Expressive Painting Workshop
8 – 10 January 2025 (Wednesday – Friday)
£330
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Image: Painting of Eve (emily Ball) and Eve modelling |
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Join Katie in turning the studio into your very own catwalk!
Start the New Year with this exciting 3 day course in the Seawhite Studio, working with the wonderful Eve, dressed in her own dynamic and inspirational costumes, designed to adorn and accentuate the body. This course will celebrate the way fabric adorns the figure: how it changes as it wraps around form; offers glimpses of flesh; how the features of the face emerge from folds and frills.
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Images: Eve (Emily Ball)
Using inspiring creative processes , Katie will invite you to make a series of quick studies from the figure in movement, as a warm up; reacquainting yourself with the body as a subject using the fluidity of paint to express its lyrical dance-like qualities. You will then start two or three longer paintings in which you will start to use the language of paint to describe the texture, direction and weight of cloth, how it shrouds, conceals, and reveals the form underneath. Throughout the course, Katie will encourage you to play and experiment (rather than relying simply on observation), so that the paintings you make are fresh and exciting, and open to change.
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Image: Figure & Fabrics, with Eve as Model and led by Katie
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“[Katie’s] course a had a big confidence impact on my work and reinforced to me the importance of trusting the process.” ~ Linda
To find out more about the course and to book your place, click on the button below:
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Drawing & Dancing:
An exploratory, Interactive Workshop
Monday 20 January 2025
£100
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Image: Dancing & Drawing (Katie Sollohub) |
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Draw like no one is watching, loose your inhibitions, and experience the freedom of boundless creative movement as you draw spontaneously and expressively.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to make work as big as your studio walls? Have you ever seen children lose themselves in a large sheet of paper, painting with their hands and feet. Think of this as an experience, rather than a technique or process to learn. Something you might never dare do at home, and most likely would never have the space for.
Using meditation and some informal freeform dance exercises and music to connect with the body, and the senses, you will be encouraged to move the body and make marks, with ink, paint and charcoal, without being restricted by expectations and outcomes. You will be given charcoal on sticks, ink in buckets, with a mop as your brush. You will learn to overcome the paralysis of ‘overthinking’ by practicing spontaneous movement, and letting this flow into your marks. You will work both independently and in collaboration with fellow participants, to experience the freedom of boundless creative movement.
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Image: Participants on this year's Dancing & Drawing Workshop (Katie Sollohub)
“What an amazing experience … I spent the day immersed in a creative exploratory dance and drawing workshop run by the incredible Katie Sollohub …exhilarating, emotional,experimental. This day has lit a fire in my belly and unleashed a freedom in my bones .” ~ Jane Johanson
This year’s Dancing and Drawing workshop was joyful, playful and thought-provoking, so we’re excited to have Katie deliver this one-day workshop again in January. This workshop is suitable for all, for anyone with an open heart and mind, physically able and willing to let go and get messy. Beginners are welcome – and you do not have to be a dancer to attend!
Click on the image below to see a short film on our YouTube channel that provides highlights from last year’s course:
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To find out more about the course and to book your place, click on the button below: |
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"When I draw, I mostly don’t have a plan. It’s like going for a walk without a map - I trust that I will get where I need to be, and along the way I pay attention to all that I see, so that in each moment I am fully present. I may not know where I am going, but I know where I am." ~ Katie |
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