Artist Talk - Presentation & Aloha Pot-Luck
~With Ken Little and Cathy Cunningham
Event Type: Presentation
Cost: Free!
Cathy Cunningham-Little is a mixed media sculptor utilizing glass, neon, light, wire, string, and other materials in a variety of ways to explore the phenomena of perception, both the visual interaction of color and light and the mental aspects of perception. Her earlier works were based in mixed media installations and drawings made of light. These were both representational and narrative.
KenLittle is a modernist San Antonio-based sculptor born in Canyon, Texas in 1947. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1970 with a BFA in painting, he received an MFA from the University of Utah in 1972. He has maintained an active national profile as an exhibiting and reviewed sculptor for over twenty five years. His work has been featured in over 35 one person exhibitions at prestigious venues such as: The Washington Project for the Arts, Wash. DC; The Nelson Gallery of the Univ. of California at Davis; The Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Diverse Works in Houston; The Honolulu Academy of the Arts; and many others.
Sculpting Dogs Ceramic Workshop
~With Jeff Downing
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $225
Level: Beginners
Action Hand Building: Narrative Sculpture with Dogs
Jeff Downing will demonstrate various approaches to making narrative sculpture using leather hard slabs and sections of moist clay. The focus will be on working at a quick pace to create exciting forms with personality and character. Students will be encouraged to create their own stories using a variety of hand-building techniques. Students can make dogs or any other animals or imagery of their choice using memory, drawings, or photos to work from. Composition, form, and technical solutions will be discussed throughout the workshop.
JEFF DOWNING exhibits his ceramic pieces throughout the United States and has received several awards for his work. He is currently an Associate Professor of Ceramics at San Francisco State University.
Concrete Sculpture Workshop with Randy Shiroma
~With Randall Shiroma
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $300
Level: Open to All Levels
Randall Shiroma has both pioneered and mastered the use of terrazzo as a sculptural material. With the advent of modern technology, synthetic fibers and matts have been developed to augment concrete compressive strength. User friendly, it allows a more fluid development of organic forms. With the addition of admixtures concrete can be applied paint thin, in multiple layers, left rough or ground to a high polish.
This workshop will present ways of approaching cement as an art media. Taking the physical strength and durability, its ability to be worked by hand and set up into a rock like substance that can be carved like stone, modeled like clay, left with a rough rock like texture or polished to a high finish. Reinforced concrete is a combination of compressive strength with materials of tensile strength. The advances in technology that allow bonding multi- layers as well as the development of synthetic tensile fabrics opens up the possibilities and exploration of a material that can be mixed up thin as paint and thick as paste, that can be heavy and strong or light and easily carved, that can be cast, modeled or layered, that will accept colorants, stains and polish. It is a different way of looking at cement. It has been my belief that the world is formed by our conception of it, similarly I feel the material of cement is only limited by our conception. What you do not need is a preconditioned idea of this material. What you do need is that visionary artistic perspective or maybe just curiosity.
"Art is transformation, the ability to take a base material and through inspiration and physical manipulation change it to something beyond what it was. I have always been intrigued by taking the most mundane material and transform it to something of beauty. I have been working with concrete for the past 25 years. I like its ability to change from a wet slurry to a incredibly hard mass in a relatively short time frame. I like its strength, its ability to withstand the outside environment and its simplicity. From here I like to transform it into sculptures grounded to the earth and refined to a high polish that somehow mirrors our development; ideals grounded in the earth".
Precious Metal Clay
~With Victoria Serrao
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $95
Level: Beginners
This is a fun and fast-paced one-day workshop where you will learn basic tools and techniques in working with silver precious metal clay.
Precious metal clay is a product developed in Japan from recycling the silver from exposed photography, medical and veterinary film. The silver is extracted and recycled with a clay-like medium to produce a pliable material and slip. The silver clay can be used employing any of a variety of hand building techniques much in the same way as using conventional clay, just on a smaller scale. After firing to a temperature of 1500 - 1565 degrees, the clay medium burns away, shrinking the fired piece by 12-15% and leaving a piece of art which is 99.9% pure silver
The class will go over techniques for working with precious metal clay (including paste, syringe and paper) with demonstrations in slab, coil, textures, mold making, joints and bales. Books will be available for inspiration and students will be encouraged to explore their own unique approach to this new and innovative medium.
Any additional jewelry making supplies will be available for purchase at a small additional fee. For example- leather cord, sterling silver wire, decorative beads (these will be available for purchase at a modest fee).
Sculpting Cherub Busts
~With Esther Shimazu
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $150
Level: Intermediate - Advance
In this workshop we will be making small hand built cherub busts including the head and shoulders/upper body. This class will cover sculpture techniques from the basic form through the feathers and dimples. We will focus in on fine detail, and students will learn to construct and attach wings, halos, head lei, even details such as individual teeth. The goal is to create a finely made, totally unique piece.
Image Transfer Workshop
~With Wendy Maruyama
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $225
Level: Open to All Levels
The Donkey Mill Art Center is honored to welcome Wendy Maruyama, recipient of the 2012 James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Educator Award. The James Renwick Alliance is a national nonprofit organization that supports the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery of American Crafts.
There will be an Artist Talk and Ohana Style Potluck on Thursday, April 5, 6 to 8pm at the Donkey Mill Art Center. Wendy Maruyama is an artist and educator from San Diego, California and has been making furniture/art since 1970. She will give a presentation of her life's work and overview of the weekend workshop that she will teach on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, April 6-8, 10am to 4pm. Tuition is $225 and space is still available. This workshop is made possible through the collaborative efforts of Hawaii Craftsmen, Hawaii Forest Industry Association and Donkey Mill Art Center.
This workshop will go over the various ways images can be transferred to wood surfaces and how these surfaces can create storylines, depth and metaphor. Participants are asked bring color Xerox images from photos, books, magazines drawings or text to work with.
Wendy Maruyama's work is often inspired by extended residencies and visits to various countries such as France, England, Japan, Korea and China. In the past fifteen years, Wendy's work has taken on stylistic influences from Asia. Born in La Junta, Colorado to second-generation Japanese American parents, she made several pilgrimages to the land of her heritage; Japan. At times, reverent of Japan's craft history and advanced technology, and appalled by Japan's self-indulgent, materialistic and almost faceless and patriarchal society, she vacillates between creating works that both emulate and satirize contemporary Japan.
Wendy's newest work, "Executive Order 9066" is hitting closer to home - the work is influenced by personal and family history and addresses the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. This event dramatically changed the Japanese American psyche and is to this day a vague segment of a history to most Americans.
Artist Talk - Presentation & Aloha Pot-Luck
~With Wendy Maruyama
Event Type: Presentation
Cost: Free!
Thursday, April 5, 2012, 6 - 8pm, join us at the Donkey Mill Art Center to welcome and meet Woodworking and Image Artist Wendy Maruyama!
Admission is free, just bring pupus to share!
Wendy Maruyama is in the forefront of contemporary studio furniture makers. Her work is characterized by a sense of character and emotion, the bold use of pop culture iconography, and dualities - Eastern/Western, Traditional/Contemporary, Feminine/Masculine,
Maruyama is professor emeritus of the Furniture Design & Woodworking Program at San Diego State University and has been making furniture/art since 1970. Her work is often inspired by extended residencies and visits to various countries such as France, England, Japan, Korea and China.
Join the Donkey Mill in welcoming Wendy and get the opportunity to meet this truly inspiring artist.
Wendy will be giving a Woodworking Workshop April 6,7 & 8, here at the Donkey Mill Art Center.
![Photography: Photographing Artwork](/archives_workshops.php?returnImage=1327792786-s114_jacobson_wayfinding_2011_clayacrylic_24"x17"x17"_$2500_$1000_$3500.jpg "Photography: Photographing Artwork")
Photography: Photographing Artwork
~With Alvis Upitis
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $35
Level: Beginners - Intermediate
This three-hour workshop will cover basic to intermediate techniques for archiving your drawings, paintings, fiber art, ceramics or sculptures. The workshop goal is to teach people with basic cameras and no special lights how they can document their work and also to give people with more advanced equipment methods for improving their photos. Format will include an illustrated lecture covering simple to intermediate techniques. Advanced points will also be mentioned however emphasis will be on methods using equipment available to the amateur photographer. There will be demonstrations, but no setup for photographing individual pieces at this
event.
Alvis Upitis is a working commercial photographer with 40 years experience shooting for Fortune 500 Companies and top advertising agencies worldwide.
He has a BS and MFA in photography and taught photo art and technique at the college level for 10 years.
Photography: Advance Your Personal Eye
~With Jonathan Rawle
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $35
Level: Beginners - Intermediate
How does your personal eye see and tell about the world around you?
Bring 3-6 of your own favorite photo images on a USB thumb drive or recordable CD/DVD or in print form. We will share these with each other and learn to appreciate what you do with a camera. Bring, too, your digital camera, because after sharing and discussion of each other's visual strengths we will go outside and shoot new images. We'll stay near the Donkey Mill area but wear clothes and shoes appropriate to exploring outside. We'll then share these to see growth, new visual expression. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions about photography that are important to you. Our goal is for you to appreciate and advance your personal eye.
Workshop Leader: Jonathan Rawle. Mr. Rawle is a Big Island commercial photographer. An annual report, corporate, and adverting photographer in Boston for twenty years some time ago, he has returned to the photography business after careers in business and teaching elementary school in Massachusetts and Waimea.
Photography: Simple Post Production Techniques
~With Alvis Upitis
Event Type: Workshop
Tuition: $35
Level: Beginners - Intermediate
One of the most exciting aspects of digital photography is the many ways
images can be edited, communicated, manipulated and enhanced once they are
acquired. The goal of this workshop is to introduce several of the post
production options available to digital photographers including tools such
as Picasa, GIMP, Lightroom and Photoshop. Format will include an illustrated
lecture covering simple techniques to manage, edit and improve your images.
Alvis Upitis is a working commercial photographer with 40 years experience
shooting for Fortune 500 Companies and top advertising agencies worldwide.
He has a BS and MFA in photography and taught photo art and technique at the
college level for 10 years.
Eric Edwards developed digital imaging products, technology and intellectual
property at Sony, and led development of international standards in digital
photography, digital cinema, JPEG and MPEG.