the tactile experience of creating beauty with our hands has never been more important that now.
Holly Len Downing is an American artist, writer, and incessant creative notebook-keeper living in the village of l’Albi, in Catalunya, Spain. She is also the host of l’Artesania | the Craft, a retreat home for artists, writers, and revolutionaries. Before moving back to Spain in 2024, Holly was leading an art theory course for university level students that integrated creative journaling into an understanding of visual culture, after having taught creative journaling for decades, from children to adults. In the States, Holly worked as an editor and arts journalist.
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Personal website: notesfromthecraft.substack.com
Keeping a creative notebook: the interplay of words and visuals to explore meaning and beauty
This is not a workshop for just artists. in fact, it might just be for those who most definitely do *not* think they are artists at all!
Participants will play with writing and visual prompts that build upon each other, utilizing ephemera (paper bits), loads of washi tape, scissors and gluesticks to dig into a process of letting your visual and written explorations talk to each other on the page. We’ll finish up with a practice to help participants continue playing with these ideas and integrating visual elements into their journals long after they leave the workshop.
This workshop is a distillation of a semester-long university course that was full of business majors, nursing students, and in fact very few humanities students, let alone art majors. If they can not just survive but absolutely end up enjoying keeping a creative notebook, so can you. I have intentionally designed this form of journaling to be approachable and beneficial for non-artists. After all, we all could use more moments of creating beauty in our lives. We are all visual creatures, even if our middle school art teacher somehow made us feel bad about our ability to make good art.
This workshop is your permission to play with visual bits again. To once again enjoy visual expression, and see how the interplay of words and visuals can not only create beauty but help us process our lives with a broader insight and inspiration as well.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD