Self-Portrait Workshop (for women, ages 18 to 80)

This workshop is different from any other. It is not structured as conventional workshops with demos, models, or critiques. The focus is instead on supporting and inspiring you to go on an inner journey of the heart and mind! Who are you? Who do you long to be? Are fears holding you back? Paint a portrait of them! Experience the excitement of self-discovery and sharing with others on their journey inward. What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a mother, a daughter, a grandmother, a woman alone, or an aging woman? How does it feel to be a woman on the fringes of society? This workshop is a journey of self-exploration and adventure. Who is the face in the mirror? You will discover in that mirror, which is your paper or canvas, etc. desires and longings you didn't know existed.

Skills will be encouraged to develop but not stressed as the focal point of this workshop. However, skills must continue to grow along with personal insight. I will share my own methods used to realize ideas, feelings and thoughts for self-portraits. We will talk about how to encourage your own intuitive process. Brainstorming techniques will be employed to further share methods of working. I will speak of how I began self-portraiture and what circumstances motiviated me, as well as how it has advanced self-growth. I will give concrete examples of how concepts developed in my mind using specific samples of my work. We will analyze our own process in order to better understand how we work. Every workshop participant will give and receive support and encouragement to walk her own highly individual path. Come with tools you hare already accustomed to working with, whatever they are and new untried ones, if you wish. We will sketch, draw, paint whatever pops into our heads as well as verbally describe them and discuss how they came to us. We will learn to make associations between the images in our work and life situations to see the connections more clearly. Share, have fun and grow while enriching the soi of our woman's heritage!

Contact Evelyn Embry, at (607) 657-2791 for more information.

Feminist Art Workshop

Biographical Information

I attended the Summer Art Program and the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Women's Building in Los Angeles during the 1970s. This experience helped me build the ground-work for the art I am producing today. Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, and Arlene Raven, among others, founded the Women's Building for the purpose of supporting and encouraging women artists to create art that reflects our experience as women in a male dominated society. It was an invaluable experience for me as a woman and an artist, and I feel I would like to pay back this debt.

I also attended consciousness raising groups sponsored by N.O.W. in Los Angeles, during that time, and that gave me perspective on my life as a woman, which I later turned into art. It also taught me that I could share those experiences with other women without being judged and be supported in my efforts.

I have had some teaching experience, in the respect that I taught painting techniques but not the deeper aspect of creating feminist art out of our own life's experience. I feel that giving this workshop would be a challenging experience that would add greatly to my own growth.

Project Goals

The workshop would be open to women of any age, race and geographical area. However, they would need to have some art background, and an intense descire to create art that is based on their life experience as women.

I would use women's publications to advertise this event, as well as web sites that are potentially viewed by women artists. I would post notices at women's colleges, such as Wells College, Aurora, NY, and William Smith College, Geneva. I would also contact women's studies program directors at Cornell University and Ithaca College, as well as the heads of art departments

Since I intend to hold this workshop here in Ithaca, perhaps the greatest potential lies in this locale, since many women may not be able to afford to travel far in order to attend this event. However, I would like to advertise it in as many7 places as possible in order for women outside this area to come.

Workshop on Color

I will teach my approach to color as I learned it from Sergei Bongart, a student of Nicolai Fechin, who has been called a colorist by those familiar with his work. I will get students to see color as it exists in relationship to each color surrounding it, so that they can produce scintillating, color that vibrates with life. The dance and orchestration of warm against cool is the basic principal of understanding how to use color to achieve maximum vitality and energy in painting. Though I concentrate on portraiture and still life, this method can be applied to any genre with the same success.

Color is like notes of music. It can hurt the ears or heal the soul. Acquire a technique that can help you hear the symphony by learning to see color relationship.

In a five-day workshop, I will focus on color, but will also demonstrate my approach to composing a painting from beginning to end. Students will work from a model and also still life compositions. The workshop can be flexibly structured to suit the group. This workshop is for intermediate and advanced only.

Contact Evelyn Embry, at (607) 657-2791for more information.