Drawing from Observation: Expressive Mark-Making in Response to Seeing with Nina Jerome
This workshop centers on the art of SEEING and paring down the landscape to its essential visual elements. In the morning session, we’ll explore techniques for creating visual space in drawing. Through a series of short exercises using pencils, charcoal, and erasers, participants will be encouraged to observe closely and use line, shape, and value to represent landscape space, with individuals discovering parts of the landscape that interest them. Weather permitting, we will work outside, looking at both shallow and deep spaces for compositional possibilities. After lunch, we’ll continue with a few brief exercises, then move into a more sustained exercise using value contrast on a toned page, allowing the morning drawings to guide us toward dynamic compositions. At the end of both the morning and afternoon sessions, we’ll review work and hold group discussions, offering opportunities for questions and sharing. The focus will remain on seeing visual elements and understanding the process of developing ideas, rather than on making completed, finished works.
All materials and lunch will be provided. Space is limited; register now.
Retreat Leader: Nina Jerome
A long-time resident of Maine, Nina Jerome finds inspiration for her work in both natural and constructed environments, drawing and painting in series that examine visual variations of place. For her, the painting process conveys her personal direction through the land as she witnesses its light, movement, and changes.
Nina spends the warmer months in coastal Maine, a rich visual resource with its undeveloped shoreline and wide-ranging tidal fluctuations. She has also explored sense-of-place in other Maine areas, relating her landscape interest to her personal experience. Having completed residencies in Iceland, Virginia, and two favorite Maine islands, she has extended that range beyond her place of residence. Nina has created paintings for fourteen public art projects in Maine, including a series of six triptychs for the Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor.
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Rhode Island School of Design, Nina taught drawing and painting at the University of Maine for twenty-seven years. She has also taught painting and drawing workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Monson Arts.
