Instructor: Debra Claffey
Monday - Tuesday
June 2 - 3
10am - 4pm
2 sessions at the Main Campus

Day 1: Discussing our held notions of what collage is, and exploring the other terms that cover making art from disparate materials. How does collage differ from bricolage or assemblage? How can we use those differences to create a deeper personal connection to what we make.  Is narrative a part of your art? How does our choice of materials enhance or diminish your narrative?

We’ll find our own answers to these and other questions by beginning with a day of printmaking—making monotypes with either oil-based or water-based media (other than acrylic). We’ll incorporate drawing and personal mark-making, making masks and stencils, and trace monotypes into our inventory of papers and materials to work with on Day 2.

Day 2: We will take all of our collected bits and pieces and begin construction. Encaustic medium allows for changing your mind, removing, re-applying, revealing what’s below, re-positioning for the most direct expression of who we are and what our stories are.

We’ll cover practicalities too, such as other substrates and grounds, paper choices, and choosing your surface texture. Students will be encouraged to go off the beaten path and think –for two days—about translating the personal into visual imagery that speaks for you.

Debra Claffey’s paintings in oil, encaustic, and mixed media concentrate on abstracted plant and foliage forms as expressions of the human dilemma. Her experience in horticulture adds a scientific perspective to her aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. With the plant kingdom as muse, Claffey’s work employs direct observation of nature to comment on the critical relationship between humans and plants. Claffey’s paintings have been exhibited across New England and have won several awards, including the Juror’s Award at Anything But Flat at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. She holds a BFA in painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University and an Associate's Degree in Horticultural Technology from the University of New Hampshire. She has been Past-President of both the New Hampshire Women’s Caucus for Art and New England Wax. She exhibits with a four-artist collective named Elemental, which focusses on environmental issues. Claffey currently teaches online and in her Maine studio.