The World is Its Own Magic - A Weekend of Plein Air Painting and Mindfulness

Description
This four-day residential weekend workshop offers techniques in outdoor landscape painting in the high desert forest of the eastern Columbia Gorge. The workshop is designed for artists of varying skill levels who have some experience in drawing and composition; knowledge of color theory is helpful. We will explore color, composition, and perspective in new and complex ways allowing artists to unlock fresh avenues of expression and deepen their understanding of visual storytelling. Set at a Buddhist rural retreat center near Goldendale, Washington, the schedule will include a guided morning meditation led by KCC teacher Kathleen Benz. We will allow ourselves to become still, reflective and observant, and from this mindful stillness we will visit our first painting site where Jef will give guidance on viewing the landscape, seeing space, and how it might be arranged in a rectangular canvas, and then how to manage drawing and colors with mind and heart.
The tuition includes lodging, vegetarian meals and guidance in painting and meditation. The SCOL center will provide a cook and facilities staff, but each student will be asked to complete a daily task of service.

Artist Jef Gunn
A Northwest native, Jef Gunn studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s and held residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s. With a balance of humor, broad knowledge and helpful insight he is able to draw from each student their own natural way to paint, while bringing to bear practical instruction through contemporary and historical examples. He has been teaching painting, including landscape outdoors, for over 20 years. Jef has been a part of the KCC Buddhist community since moving to Portland in 1998. He was part of the team that built the retreat facility at SCOL.

“Over these years of meditation practice and learning Buddhist views on life, ethics and kindness, and care for all beings, I’ve seen a shift in my work as an artist. Sometimes, I’ve made this explicit in the forms of the work or in the titles, with both abstract works and landscapes. Bringing Buddhist awareness and perhaps a Daoist understanding, life and living systems open before us. A hill is just a hill, then it’s a metaphor, then it’s a hill again. It lifts into sky and drifts into valley. River flows to the sea. Cloud flows. Warm colors and cool colors interact. The blues of the sky change as you look higher. The wind blows through you. You mix colors, looking at the wide world for clues. You’re interacting with this wild inhabited land, and you’re responding with irascible paints on a palette. Just as with following meditation instructions, you follow a protocol with the palette, the mixing knife, the colors, the canvas, the impossible view, its impossible spaciousness. The mind too is impossibly spacious. You can be present for the whole thing. You might even end up with a painting.”