Category Archives: Workshops

Photography with Rob & Lisa Walcott

Posted by Adam Weiler on December 1, 2011

You will rarely meet a more talented duo than husband and wife team Rob and Lisa Walcott. This December we were lucky to have them join us for our after school workshops. Although their professional and personal work spans a wide variety of mediums (photography, drawing, painting, installation) a strong reverence for the temporal unites it all.

On the first Thursday in December they joined us for a photo-walk and studio tour. Rob opened with a video excerpt from a BBC program (shown below) exploring the four words the Himba (a tribe in Africa) use to describe color. The whole program is fascinating and the accompanying website is worth a read too. Back to the Himba – because of the words their tribe uses to classify color they are often unable to observe differences in certain colors you and I (assuming we grew up with ROYGBIV) can easily recognize. In playing a more elaborate version of “which one of these things doesn’t belong” the anthropologist shows the theory in action.

From here a simple yet profound metaphor emerges: if language shapes what we see, then a camera gives us access to a new kind of language; one that we are constantly submersed in by but rarely notice (or have the words to explain). From mouthes to eyes and back to mouthes again.

After the video we took to the streets like a horde of photojournalists. During our walk Rob, an experienced guide, pointed out often overlooked characteristics of light. Shadows were tinted a cool blue while areas bathed in sun were warm. Rim and fill light brought the two in close contact. Surrounding colors tinted skin tones one way or another. The whole tour made the everyday act of seeing quite magical…which, when you actually think about the act of seeing (a lens focuses lightwaves onto rods & cones that convert said waves into electrical signals that your brain interprets as color) makes it even more so.

Eventually we worked our way to their studio where he used a student model as an example to show how the size of a light source effected the shadow. Larger lights cast a softer shadow while smaller sources cast hard lined shadows.

Praxis. This word contains all that I love about our workshops; it’s the perfect blend of theoretical knowledge and hands on experience. I can’t thank Rob and Lisa enough for giving us a glimpse into their profession and the language they use everyday. Rob is a excellent teacher and it came through in the workshop. Afterwards several students expressed gratitude for how simply he explained the basic concepts of photography. It was quite brilliant to watch and I found myself equally (if not more so) enthralled. Thank you so much, Rob, for exposing us to a language of light that makes our life richer.

Be sure to check out the photography of Rob & Lisa at Walcott Imaging.

Color with Chuck Anderson

Posted by Becca on November 16, 2011

Chuck Anderson’s client list reads like a who’s who of international brands.

Microsoft. Burton. Lupe Fiasco. Reebok. Chicago Marathon. Target. Under Armour. Kaskade. Vans. Mountain Dew. The list goes on.

But it didn’t start there.

Taking full advantage of an extensive high school art program he was ready when community connections opened doors to start designing flyers for clubs he wasn’t old enough to get in to. He continued to gather steam and started NoPattern when he was just 17. Eventually the time came to graduate high school he chose (with his parent’s blessing) to forgo college to pursue the profession full time.

This past month we were lucky to have Chuck join us for a frank conversation on hard work, color, and experimentation. For this particular workshop the things said in Room 220 are best kept private but we’ll boil down a few of the main things we learned during our time together:

Network — get your name out there! — send lots and lots of e-mails to magazines, publications, blogs, companies whose work you like, and whose work yours would work well with.
Get Involved — the world is a web and the the more connected you are the easier you are to find.
Be bold.
Persistence pays off.
Be kind of annoying, but not that annoying

This Month’s Artist Tee

Many thanks to Chuck for sharing his story with us at the workshop and for designing this month’s tee (seen at left) which you can snag here.

Figure Drawing

Posted by Becca on October 29, 2011

Drawing upon inspiration from our last session with Chris Mrozik, we put our pencils to paper and our eyes on each other to experiment with blind contour and figure drawing.

We sketched out the person sitting across the table from us using blind contour. It was a test of relinquishing control, practicing patience, and maybe a bit on looking someone in the eyes for an extended period of time.

After warming up with the faces, we moved onto blind contours of figures, using our very own Ambrose-goers as models.

We decided that blind contour works best from the inside out — concentrate on where the hips, shoulders, and ribs would be, and add everything else on top of that. Using a skeleton and our helpful volunteer models, we were able to work that out.

By the end of the session, we got comfortable with blind contour as a means to experiment with drawing — our theme for October. Although, I can’t say the models didn’t go home a little sore…

Papel Picado

Posted by Becca on October 13, 2011

In honor of the Day of the Dead, Ambrose tried our hands at some traditional Mexican art: “papel picado,” or cut paper.

We discussed and sketched pattern as we compared our Happys and Crappys (a weekly ritual). Papel picado generally involves pattern, and some skull and nature themes, but we wanted to leave it up to interpretation, with the only prompt being: how can you represent the things in life that matter to you in pattern and symbols?

And along with that big question, how do you represent that when you are tied down by a media, such as tissue paper and an Exacto knife?

Well, I think the answer lies in the work: a bit of precision, neat imagery, and a steady hand.

Drawing with Christina Mrozik

Posted by Becca on October 6, 2011

What’s the best way to decode your emotions? Well, drawing helps.

This week we kicked off the month of drawing workshops with brain and hand warm-up. We drew abstract images for eight different words: joy, loneliness, mourning, peace, conflict, courage, fantastic, and RIGHT NOW.

These emotive marks led us into our guest artist for the month, emotive mark-maker herself: Christina Mrozik.

We crowded around the table on tip toes and chairs in amazement as Chris’s work in front of us. The room fell silent for the next hour as we drew ourselves into her work, captivated with the precision, creativity, and emotion.

Chris took a leap not all of our guest artists are brave enough to do: she not only showed us her current thought-out, polished pieces, but also how she got there — her high school and college sketchbooks, still lives, and works in progress. The room chuckled at the juxtaposition between the intricate marks and the dark imagery of her recent work, with the Sailor Moon, mermaids, and trees of her high school sketches.

As we considered her path from Sailor Moon to birds attached by the beak, pulling out sketch upon sketch, portfolio upon portfolio, she said, “one day when you’re an artist you’ll have a lot of baggage too.”

It was important for Ambrose to see that baggage — the Point A that led to Point B and even Point C. We’re all at different points in our art, and for high school students it’s significant to see a successful artist bear her Point A to the world…or at least to those of us at Ambrose.

Chris had further advice to those of us at all stages of our artistic journey:

Keep trying new things; don’t settle too soon
Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do
Know that it’s not always happy and pretty
Weed out what you don’t like (She never liked cleaning up after a project, so she chose markers)

Chris stressed that drawing is being thoughtful, and learning to see clearly and differently. She looked at her work, and found a repeating nature theme. Thus, she researched birds and different animals, and naturally applied them to themes in her life (death, struggle, symbiosis of people).

She was honest with us about the emotion behind her work — she often draws without a deeper meaning, and then realizes at the end that, for example, the birds attached at the beak function as a metaphor for the inability to detach in her own life.

We are so thankful for Chris’s honesty and openness, and showing us that you don’t get to Point B or C without the Sailor Moon, mermaid sketches happening RIGHT NOW.