CLASS: Painting with Yarn–Huichol style with Robin Bernstein
Dates: Saturday & Sunday March 29 & 30th
Times: 9:30am – 4:30pm
Tuition: $140 members, $160 non-members
Min/Max Students: 5/10
Materials Fee: $10 paid directly to the instructor
Students should bring to class: If possible, please bring a Desk Lamp fitted with a bulb that produces small amount of heat, Odds-and- Ends yarn and/or string (not thread!) that you have hanging around
Class Description: The making of a yarn painting can be much more than drawing a design and filling it in. The process of pressing colorful yarn into wax under the warm glow of a lamp accompanied by the sweet smell of honey is as much meditative as it is exhilarating. Preparatory work will include discussions about composition, optical color mixing, symbolism and content.
In this 2 day workshop, you will learn about traditional yarn paintings of the Huichol Indians and then make a yarn painting of your own design. Working on a wood panel, you will transfer this design, prepare the surface using a melted wax medium, and adhere the yarn to the wax by pressing with a stick. A wide variety of colorful yarns and strings will be available to choose from. Techniques included are drawing, creating a composition, transferring a design, melting brushing and smoothing wax, and pressing yarn.
All levels are welcome!
BIO
Trained as a painter, Robin L Bernstein has worked with string and wax as her primary medium for the past 15 years. Her work focuses on both historical and urgent contemporary content and is created by obsessively cutting tiny pieces of colored string and then pressing them into wax. Bernstein believes that art has the power to shift human behavior and therefore chooses subject matter, materials, and processes that support this idea.
Bernstein, born in St Louis.Mo received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and currently splits her time between a small town in the San Francisco Bay Area and an equally small town north of Fort Bragg, CA. She has been a teacher for over 30 years and incorporated yarn painting into her studio practice after preparing art students for a visit to Mexico. She has regularly exhibited her work and spoken about her current project, Beauty and Terror, an 18 piece series about the Holocaust. Bernstein’s subject matter combined with her artistic technique is her way of shouting from the rooftops that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Instagram: @robinlbernstein
Fueled by anger at injustice, an artist forged a new path through ‘Beauty and Terror’
