The Garden/Art experience

This incarnation of the Painterly Print brings printmaking together with plant life and landscape amidst Early Renaissance Italian architecture and exquisite gardens. In our open-air studio, we’ll explore the myriad ways print imagery can be developed by combining painting, graphic elements and collage to create a wide variety of prints. While our primary focus is lots and lots of hands-on material intensive printmaking, the castle gardens, designed not only for their beauty but also for sustainability, present an opportunity to observe and investigate a remarkable diversity of  native and introduced plant species and cultivars as well as the insect, amphibian, avian and mammalian companions that share the water features and woodlands of the castle farmstead. All these life forms will be an integral part of the creative work we do together.

With group studio instruction running 6 hours daily, there will be ample time to explore, tend in the garden at your leisure and take part in preparing our shared meals of seasonal herbs and locally sourced veggies (accompanied by wine, olives, bread and cheese of course!) Gardening and dining with Clark Lawrence (Galeazza’s landscape designer, curator and all around bon vivant) together with the castle’s enthusiastic array of local and traveling visitor/gardeners offers an opportunity to learn about the history of Galeazza and the Emilia-Romagna region as well as the castle’s contemporary permaculture goals. The weave of art, art making, deep history and sustainable horticulture makes for an experience that is bound to be memorable.

The Printmaking Intensive

Working outdoors as weather permits, we will be creating monotypes inspired by our direct experience of botanicals and landscape just as plein air painters do. We will be exploring a number of techniques for making painterly one-of-a-kind monotypes using additive light field, subtractive dark field, trace drawing, stencil and stamp methods.  We will be combining foam plate reduction relief printing, photo transfer, rubbing (found texture frottage) and chine colle with our painterly techniques for making a dynamic series of archival monoprints and monotypes on a variety of papers including kozo and cotton in color, black and white. 6 hours per day will be spent printing with instruction, and a 24-hour studio space within the castle's horse stables adjacent to the gardens will be open for printing. I and our studio assistant will be available as a resource throughout.