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, Wolff 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. Working across a range of disciplines and material approaches, her practice extends out of American folk-art and quilt making traditions, minimalism, geometric abstraction, pattern and decoration movements, feminist art and social practice, with a studio output that spans drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based work and public, collaborative projects. Her work has been presented in galleries and museums across the country and is held in the collections of ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She lives with her wife, artist Miriam Klein Stahl, in Berkeley, California.