Drawing: Mark-Making as Meditative Practice (Creative Class)

About This Event

This 1-day drawing-based workshop will focus on exploring repetitive mark-making as a calming, meditative practice. Students will use repetition with a variety of drawing materials to discover the benefits of slowing down, finding focus, and developing rhythm in order to counteract the high stress of our fast-paced society. With emphasis on exploration, this class is open to all levels of creatives while placing value on the practice of being present in the moment rather than thinking too far ahead to a finished piece.Ticket required, discount for members, Museum Friends, and students. Learn more and register here: https://www.denverartmuseum.org/.../creative-classes...To gather ideas and an understanding of ways in which repeated marks are used by artists, the class will tour the Denver Art Museum galleries to see works by Agnes Martin, Vance Kirkland, Lucy Lewis, and Camille Pissarro (and other Impressionists.) In addition, students will view works by Modern and Contemporary artists beyond the DAM Collections. Students will experiment with mark-making in sketchbooks using a variety of drawing tools including pencils, pens, markers, and other dry media. This experimentation will lead to creating a work or multiple works on small-format fine art paper. Class participants will develop a unique visual language of marks to add to their toolbox for both artistic creation and personal well-being.About the Educator:Tonia Bonnell is a Denver-based artist whose work is rooted in both attentiveness and subtlety. Growing up surrounded by cornfields in Illinois, she developed a fascination with clouds – an ever-changing subject that continues to inspire her. Tonia earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Illinois State University in 2001 and her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2005. During her time in Canada, she started composing images with simple, repeated marks as snowflakes accumulated outside her studio window. After graduate school, she