About the Workshop

This generative workshop explores natural ink and paint making through a hands-on approach and an interdisciplinary lens. Uniquely different from working with stable store-bought art materials, making handmade color is dynamic and surprising, while also offering a path toward a more environmentally sound relationship to artmaking. On a practical level, we’ll build up a collection of inks and watercolors with crossover in the world of natural dyes, utilizing dried earth pigments, foraged plants (including local Provincetown seaweed!), and harvested botanicals. Along the way, each participant will document the process in a notebook, creating color charts and recipes to take home. Time will be set aside to experiment with small artworks on paper that incorporate watercolor and collage.

As a longtime teacher of color theory, Lena will weave broader context into the workshop with slideshows related to the history of paint-making and the nature of color perception, looking at the practice through multiple lenses of art, craft, science, design and environmentalism.

Students should come prepared with the materials detailed in the Materials List. 

About the Instructor

Lena Wolff is an artist, craftswoman, independent teacher, and activist for democracy who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Her work extends out of American folk-art and quilt making traditions while at the same time being connected to minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Lena’s broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, frequent collaboration, and public projects. Her work is in the permanent collections of ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. She lives with her wife, artist Miriam Klein Stahl, in Berkeley, California.