Celebrating the Creative Spirit Workshop

Next weekend Marilyn Hughey Phillis and I will be offering our workshop at Sandscrest Retreat Center. It promises to be a beautiful weekend to get away to this beautiful, quiet place where we are well fed and cared for, and where we have uninterrupted time to create.

Small class size ensures quality time with Marilyn who acts as guide and mentor helping each participant try new paths, stretch self-imposed limitations.

I will offer a class on clay monoprints which is a wonderful, playful release from tightly held paintbrushes and cerebral painting. Let go and let clay! Serendipity and creative accidents provide beautiful, never-fail monoprints. At the same time something, the creative spirit perhaps, is released and artists find that on returning to their painting blocks have been removed, new options become viable. It's an exciting juxtaposition of art styles and media.

If you are in the Wheeling area, or if you are interested in joining us, there are still a couple of spaces available. Contact me through this blog or email me at cherylrharshman at gmail dot com.

Hopefully there will be some new work to share on my return from the workshop.

Playing with the Paints

Here is my newest rooster. Where do they come from? I don't even like roosters! But part of the attraction are that they are fun to draw.


This one is a watercolor monoprint, the second pull from a plate that I painted at Hemlocks Studio last month. Hemlocks has been a great treat/re-treat place for me these past few years. A quiet cottage in the NC mountains filled with creative, talkative, wonderful women.

I spent my days at Hemlocks learning about paint and color and value. I don't usually consider myself a painter, but I think that one form or media informs the others.

In fact there was also some dyeing and felting. Here is a dyed, felted, over-dyed scarf made in a workshop with Chad Alice Hagen in Pittsburgh on one of the hottest days of the year. Yes! Let's hear it for steaming hot, wet wool!

And yes, these pix are in reverse order!

So this summer there are watercolor monoprints, wet wool, and abstract paintings, but so far no clay monoprints. Hopefully that'll change in the next week or so because a deadline looms and I've got to get some work made for a show in October.

More later.

Happy NYC Girls

How does Mom celebrate her birthday? Why with her kid in NYC. We had an art-cation this past week and braved the heat along Manhattan's canyons. Lots of museums and galleries and great food of course.