Inviting Creativity to be Your Studio Partner with Fran Gardner

Tuesday-Thursday, August 29-31, 2023 | 10:30am-3:30pm

What is Creativity and how do we access it? This three-day workshop led by Fran Gardner is about developing a closer relationship with Creativity. It is about helping you see a deeper structure upon which to think about your art making. And since your artmaking is unique to YOU, so is this workshop. Through guided exercises, each artist will study their own artmaking voice and then use these discoveries, layered with challenges set up by the instructor, to explore variations of their themes. While making new work, we will seek to understand on a deeper level what we are making, why we are making it, and how to move forward, challenging ourselves to keep Creativity close to our studio practice every day. This workshop welcomes artists of all mediums and those who practice their art regularly. Registration deadline is August 24.

Objectives

• To analyze the type of images to which you are intuitively drawn
• To create art that looks at new ways to build on your established voice and deepen personal expression
• To leave the workshop with an understanding of how to stay engaged with creativity in your own studio

Supplies

The instructor will provide materials for the first day and paint for all three days.

Each artist needs to bring:

• Scissors
• Sketchbook approximately 9x12, with heavy paper. We will use water media so choose wisely. Any size close to this is fine.
• 10 pages of images to which you are attracted, torn from magazines.
• Any materials you typically use for mark-making such as markers, artist crayons, colored pencils, graphite.

About the Instructor:

A native South Carolinian, Fran Gardner lives and works in Heath Springs. She earned her BFA from Columbia College (1982) and later, her MFA from Vermont College of Norwich University (1993). She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of art and art history at the University of South Carolina Lancaster where she taught studio courses and art history for 32 years. It is through these many years of teaching that she developed her methods for working with artists on their studio practice and creativity and gained the expertise for writing critical essays about art, leading retreats, teaching workshops, and judging and curating exhibitions.

Gardner has gained attention in mixed media collage. She paints and draws with traditional materials, but also with the sewing machine, layering her work with rich texture, color and mark-making. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally and published in Fiberarts and Needle Arts magazines and in the books Crafting Personal Shrines by Carol Owen, The Art of Textiles by Mary Schoeser, and Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist & Postmodern Representation by Nathaniel Wallace.

Gardner has won a variety of awards in competitive exhibits both regionally and nationally. In addition, she has exhibited and led workshops and retreats at numerous art centers and museums across the US. She is a signature member of the National Association of Women Artists in New York and Past President of the SC Chapter. Career highlights were invitations for artist residencies at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico and Wildacres Retreat Center in North Carolina.