Last week, my studio was the site of a workshop by Australian artist Robert Hagan. As you can see from the photo (taken on Day 1), we had a full house of students to soak up whatever this popular artist could teach. I took the workshop, too, and learned a lot while having a good time.
So how did this come about? Last summer, I saw a posting on a local artist board, looking for a place that could host the workshop. I didn't know anything about Robert, but looked him up and discovered that he has a very different style of painting from mine. And he travels around the world giving these workshops. So the combination of learning some very different painting techniques while seeing how a pro runs a workshop was too much to pass up. I volunteered my studio as the location and we took it from there. It required a good bit of coordination to get everything lined up, but we did it, and Wednesday morning we kicked off the workshop.
Robert is quite the personality. He is a largely self-taught painter focusing on popular subjects such as people on the beach, cowboys, horses, cattle drives, and similar themes. Things that I just don't paint. And as a self-taught artist, he has a very different way of putting paint on canvas. Many of the things he did are variations on traditional techniques, such as scumbling, but his approach and tools were not at all traditional. I found it to be quite liberating. In fact, I have a commission coming up in a couple of weeks and had been wondering how I was going to make it livelier than my usual working style. Now I have a pretty good idea of ways that I can loosen this commission up.
The other aspect that I wanted to focus on was how he ran the workshop. I run art workshops several times a year and am still figuring out how to make them effective and fun. Robert certainly hit it on both counts. He had us all working from photos so that everybody was making the same paintings. It was very interesting to see how each student developed their own images. He's very energetic and personable, too. No big or sensitive ego. He's good at what he does, knows it, and wants to share his skills with the students. He spent a lot of time one-on-one with each one of us, making sure we understood what we were doing. Very effective and enjoyable.
Robert worked our tails off, too. We started at 9 am and continued, with a lunch break, until 5 pm each day. Which meant that I had to be up at 6 am every day in order to get the studio open shortly after 8 for all the early birds. At the end of the day, the last people trickled out around 6 or later. Long days. Now, I am NOT a morning person. I spent many years in the Navy getting up at 5:30 or 6 and I just don't do it anymore unless it's absolutely necessary. Not only that, but I was on my feet all day. I can't paint sitting down. So three long days of standing wore me out.
At the end, I'd achieved my goals: I'd learned some new techniques and learned a lot about how to run a good workshop. And we all had a good time. It took me two days to get my studio back to normal and I just finished today. So tomorrow, I can start playing with new paintings and try some of these techniques. Lookin' forward to it!
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