Have a case of the winter blahs? Can’t go out to paint and sick of your studio? Some of the artists at Sagebrushers have turned to the Karlyn Holman book Watercolor Without Boundaries to step up their art and step out of their usual skill set. 

Wednesday mornings at Sagebrushers are humming with excitement. A group of between eight and 10 watercolor artists of all levels of skill, experience and knowledge are working together to explore the watercolor medium. Led by Jennifer Ware-Kempcke, they’ve been devoting two hours every Wednesday to stretching their creativity with a series of projects that explore abstraction, the use of kitchen tools to create texture and develop new ways of thinking about watercolor. 

Karlyn Holman is an internationally known artist who will be visiting Bend this summer for a week long workshop on watercolor. The artists in this group are exploring her book in depth prior to this workshop. You can learn more about Holman by visiting You Tube and searching out her instruction videos.

The Wednesday Watercolor Workshop began in January with a series of exercises using table salt, palette knives and saran wrap to create interesting textures that were then used to develop finished paintings of dried grasses gathered within the city. 

Next they moved on to creating abstract paintings using bandage gauze, watercolor crayons, spray paint and saran wrap to achieve textures unavailable to strictly brush painters. Now they are exploring collage with papers that they create. These are then pasted onto paintings to develop texture and abstraction. 

Each artist takes a unique approach to the challenges presented and they find that no two paintings are ever alike, even though the initial stimulus was the same. 

Stop by Sagebrushers on Wednesdays between 10am and 12pm if you’d like to learn more.

www.sagebrushersartofbend.com, 541-617-0900, 117 SW Roosevelt Ave., Bend.