Courses with Katie Sollohub at the Seawhite Studio
Images: Embodied Drawing, Katie self -portrait, Get Grounded (Katie Sollohub)
"Serious Play is not just a warm up, it is a way of working. It is in fact, the work itself." ~Katie Sollohub
Dear Visitor
Anyone who has attended a course with Katie Sollohub has probably heard the phrase Serious Play.It is a fundamental belief for Katie – not just as an artist, but as a person.In this newsletter, we invite Katie to expand upon and share her thoughts on what Serious Play means to her, and how it is experienced by students on the courses that she delivers at the Seawhite Studio.
“Serious Play may seem like a contradiction, but since I have fully embraced the importance of play in my work, it has made me a much more serious artist! There can sometimes be a sense that serious art is not allowed to be playful, but we all know how essential play is for children to learn - why should it stop when we become adult? We learn through our sense of curiosity, our sense of adventure, the ‘What ifs’ and ‘I wonder whys.’ ” ~ Katie
Katie’s teaching and art practice are deeply intertwined, both grounded in the principles of her yoga practice. For her, drawing is a whole-body experience – one inwhich physical movement is a liberating, creative act “Freeing me to follow the impulse that otherwise my overthinking brain would have already thought, considered, criticized, doubted and dismissed!” ~ Katie
For Katie, drawing is a way of seeing and sensing the world; of experiencing life fully, awakening the senses, and honouring the creative act of being.
“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 allow curiosity and excitement to become the creative driving force.
Images: the many faces of Katie
IMage: Katie making space for Drawing
“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.It’s about allowingpossibilities to emerge by letting go of expectations.
"The permission to play is very often the turning point in a project - it allows us to let go of expectations that ‘serious’ work brings with it, gives us so much more scope, mental space to experiment, freedom from our own inhibitions - and then the serious play begins. Before you even realise it, the work has opened up, changed direction, and something new and fresh has been created.” ~ Katie
Katie will be delivering two courses this spring that exemplify the idea of Serious Play:
Embodied Drawing
26-27 March | £225
A two-day drawing course embracing the physicality of drawing on a large scale: using your own body, gesture and sensation as your subject.
Get Grounded
18 -19 May | £250
This new course invites you to explore the woods, engaging your senses and deepening your connection to the landscape. You’ll draw within and alongside nature, before creating larger-scale work back in the studio.
Read on to find out more about these courses and Katie’s philosophy regarding Serious Play and whole-body, gestural drawing. If you already know that you want to join Katie for one of these inspiring and horizon-broadening courses, then click on the buttons below to head directly to our website:
“Embodied Drawing is an invitation to create drawings that surround and encompass the body. Drawings that involve the whole body in their making. Drawings that inhabit space, take up space. Drawings that grow and breathe, and allow you, the drawer, to breathe and grow with it.” ~ Katie
Images: Embodied Drawing (Katie Sollohub)
Embodied Drawing invites you to experience drawing as a physical act—seeing movement as a form of drawing in space, and the body itself as a mark-making tool. Over the two days, you will be your own model, creating two or three large-scale drawings guided by Katie’s meditative exercises and creative prompts. Throughout the course, she will encourage you to experiment freely—layering, adding, editing and transforming your work as you go.Using the generous space of the Seawhite studio, there isvirtually no limit to how expansive your drawings can become.
Images: Embodied Drawing (Katie Sollohub)
"If I create from a place of movement, whether it is conventional drawing, or ‘drawing’ by moving objects around in a space, I am instantly excited by the possibilities - what happens if I put this mark here, or stretch a piece of string across here? How far does my arm reach up? Can I draw right up to the edge of the paper? What if I extend my arm with a stick of bamboo and tie charcoal to the end - how does this exaggerate the movement and scale of the mark? And if I myself am part of the space, am a mark moving across the drawing in my navy blue boiler suit? And what if I cover myself with paper dots, and put a paper bag on my head - who am I now? Who knows what might happen…” ~ Katie
Images: Embodied Drawing (Katie Sollohub)
The course offers a fresh way of working from the figure; inviting you to reinvent your visual response to the physical body.It’s an immersive approach that may surprise and inspire you, and could transform the way you approach drawing and painting beyond the duration of the course.
To find out more and to book your place, click on the button below:
"Come and walk in the woods when the bluebells are out and the ground is burgeoning with colour and new life. Feel more alive, engage with your natural surroundings, wake up your senses and create during this two day fully immersive, practical and tactile workshop." ~ Katie
Images: Get Grounded (Katie Sollohub)
Get Grounded has Katie’s holistic whole-body/all-senses approach written all over it.Over the courseof two days, you will be making drawings in the landscape, about the landscape, with the landscape - sometimes using the landscape as your canvas.
Responding to the sights, sounds, smells and feel of the woods, you will return to the studio each day equipped with natural materials, handfuls of inspiration, and hand-made tools to continue working on a larger scale (think Richard Long and his mud drawings!).
Drawing with mud, puddle water, leaves and twigs - this workshop will remind how drawing is a truly tactile, instinctive, primal experience, using the body and natural materials to make marks.
Image: Get Grounded (Katie Sollohub)
Image: Get Grounded (Katie Sollohub)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ Doesn’t make any sense. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep”
~ Rumi - excerpt from A Great Wagon
“These days I prefer to work outside when I can. In and of nature, in a field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. I use these words from Rumi a lot in my workshops, to set the conditions for a day of ease and exploration. There is too much judgement in this world. Too much good versus bad as if we really know the difference, when in fact we just want to be right. After 25 years of teaching art I see it too often in the anxious faces, I hear the question “am I doing it right” over and over, spreading through the room. To ease this anxiety, I use poetry to inspire, meditation to quieten the mind and engage the sense, and movement (qigong) to awaken the body.” ~ Katie
Image: Get Grounded (Katie Sollohub)
Move beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing and join Katie for this fun and experimental course, that could be the start of a bigger project, a step outside of your ordinary practice, or a creative reset.
To find out more about Get Grounded and to book your place, click on the button below:
