This spring, I’ll be returning to the Grunewald Guild to offer two distinct art retreats, each inviting a slower pace, deeper attention, and a more connected and embodied relationship with creativity and artmaking. Whether you’re a seasoned artist or someone who struggles to “find time” for creative practice, both retreats will offer space for your own creative exploration.
The Guild is one of my favorite places. I grew up going to Plain (the town) where my grandparents had a home. The pine trees, the Wenatchee River, nearby Sandstone Ridge – the beauty of this landscape is in my bones. It is always a homecoming for me. The Guild – a hodgepodge of lodgings and studios across 12-ish acres – offers welcome, hospitality, and community for creative travelers of all types. I make new friends every time I go. It is a magical place and its existence makes my life sweeter. I go up there as often as I can, and so it is with delight and privilege to be hosting two artist retreats, coming up very soon! Below I explain both of them.
Gesture & Matter: Working with Movement and Materials, April 16-19
Gesture and Matter strips creativity and artmaking down to its essences – your body, your imagination, and whatever you find in front of you to work with. This rigorously playful workshop invites participants into a way of making that begins in your intuitive knowing and stays connected to the material world. Through embodied mark-making, the use of reclaimed materials, and our own innate spirit of meaning-making, we’ll practice art as unfettered play.
This workshop seeks to loosen the grip on preciousness and perfection, to gain a deeper relationship with our creative selves. We’ll explore the works of artists who explored materiality and relationship between body and landscape, and make connections to our own creative work as we re-envision our artistic expressions as in the flow of all creative life. We’ll work with reclaimed and unconventional materials, rethink our relationship to “failure,” and utterly reconsider what makes an art-making instrument. A torn crumpled piece of paper becomes our “fresh sheet.” Walking becomes a form of drawing. The landscape becomes a surface. Frustration becomes information. Come ready to get your hands dirty. To break your medium before you use it. To taste and see what happens when we invite the Unknown into a co-creative relationship.
This workshop is an invitation to step outside our old and frustrating ideas of what art is supposed to look like or otherwise conform to be—and remember creativity as a lived, embodied, playful act of being.
Inner Summits: Painting Our Inner Landscapes, May 10-15
This retreat focuses on painting as a way of listening. Drawing on landscape, memory, and imagination, we’ll explore how inner terrain—peaks, valleys, weather, and thresholds—can find form through color and shape. I’ll offer some technical instruction and examples, and will invite you to discover your own personal meanings, and practice attentiveness to what emerges.
Expect lots of time to paint in an uncomplicated, fun, and free method, along with pauses for wisdom readings and contemplative reflection via meditation and journaling. All that is required is your time and attention to what is arising on the surface of the canvas or board, and within your own heart.
Both retreats are open to all experience levels and held in the beauty and quiet of the Grunewald Guild—a place that naturally supports creative attention and rest. If you’re longing for time to make art without urgency, to listen more deeply to yourself and your materials, I’d love for you to join me this spring.
You can find all the information for these and other cool art retreats through the Grunewald Guild. I hope to see you there!
Sunrise over the Wenatchee River, Grunewald Guild.