Andrea Matus Workshops

Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul, will be our inspiration and our muse as we seek to breathe life into our seven veiled collage. In this project based workshop we will explore the richly layered world of mixed media collage by embracing the use of personal symbols, powerful imagery, textures and found objects that will infuse our work with an essence unlike any other. Like Salome's dance of the sevens veils, we too will add depth, mystery and intrigue into our creations as we begin our unique 7 layer journey on an earthly wood foundation. We will explore the different possibilities for preparing the wood for collage as we incorporate many techniques, mediums and materials into our process. As each new layer is introduced we will discuss how to use our veils to overcome challenges in composition, unify our elements, contend with our inner critic and finally push the boundaries of collage into a new dimension by incorporating found objects and dimensional elements. We will finish our day by exploring some of the options for finishing, protecting and presenting our soulful work.

Artists have been creating iconic works of art for centuries, in fact there are several branches of art history devoted to that subject alone. The Artist's ability through the use of powerful imagery and cultural symbols to take an "ordinary" image and elevate it to something other worldly is rather divine. In this project based workshop prepare to do some transformative magic of our own as we take every day images and transform them into large scale iconic mixed media masterpieces. Bring your assortment of personal symbols, imagery and that box of ephemera that you've been collecting and we will incorporate them into your canvas elevating them from the ordinary to the extraordinary as we explore many sophisticated techniques for creating our deeply symbolic multilayered collage. We will use several techniques for seemlessly merging otherwise unrelated imagery into a unified composition that will allow us to create modern day icons of our own.