This morning, Grace and I drove to San Jose for Jean Warren's abstract workshop. Jean is from Bodega Bay, California and there are 17 people in this class offered by the Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Association. The workshop is at Herbert Hoover Middle School in San Jose and it is right across the street from the Rosecrucian Egyptian Museum.
We started the day with a short introduction by Jean and then we walked across the street to the museum grounds and sat on our stools around the obelisque in the garden. She led us through some contour drawing exercises, encouraging us to really "see" what was around us and to capture the essence of the gardens in our memories.
After about an hour, we returned to the classroom and began our day by watching her demonstrate what she wanted us to do on Day 1. I am not going to attempt to "recapture" or outline the day in much detail because that requires that you take the full workshop and it would be unfair to present too much of the information here. But suffice it to say that we worked on capturing what we had seen in the garden in a quick rhythm wash of putting down the colors and the feelings that we'd experienced and then continuing to paint on top of the color. At the end of the day, we each put our work up and talked about how we felt about the day's efforts.
When we got back to Fremont, we were treated to a wonderful dinner at Grace's neighbor's home, worked on our paintings a little, visited a lot, and went to bed early to be ready for Day 2 tomorrow.
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