![]() ![]() "It was camp for adults," said Shradha Shah, an emergency medicine doctor who traveled from the San Francisco Bay Area for last summer's urban sketchbooking workshop. Katy Perry, a retired educator from Minneapolis who has taken memoir workshops at Madeline Island and Tucson, said natural settings - whether they're on an Apostle Island or tucked into the Sonoran Desert - can spark a spiritual connection that nurtures creativity. ![]() This October the school will offer workshops in Bar Harbor, Maine, for the first time. He then expanded with springtime workshops in Santa Fe, N.M. School of Art founder Charles Meech found a way to expand workshops to January and February by partnering with Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson, owned by the same family as Minnesota's Grand View Resort. Madeline Island runs its workshops from June through September. It allows time to wonder, to ponder, to learn. That comes with the gift of slowing down to sketch. "I wish it could tell me its stories," he said. I spent an hour sketching a beaded Ojibwe vest with flowers, a decorated birchbark basket and a 500-year-old dugout canoe.Īs my eyes studied the details that my fingers moved to capture, I could also listen to Red Cliff Chippewa guide Rob Goslin answer visitors' questions about artifacts like the dugout, which would be sunk into Lake Superior each winter and recovered in the spring. Some lessons are unexpected.Īn outing to the Madeline Island Museum allowed a small group of sketchbookers to roam and find artifacts that drew interest. Students bond quickly through presentations, demonstrations, island excursions and by sharing ideas and techniques. Others jump at the chance to learn from internationally known artists, such as textile designer and color expert Kaffe Fassett, folk art-influenced textile artist Sue Spargo, and urban sketchbooker Koosje Koene. School enrollees come for the dedicated time to create and to learn more about specific topics within photography, writing, painting and sketching, textile art and quilting. "The physical beauty of the place helps me write with more intensity than I am able to do anywhere else," she said.Ī barn-inspired dining hall serves three meals a day at Madeline Island School of the Arts. Coyotes could also be heard howling in the night. They meet in a milkhouse-style workshop space filled with natural light, meander paths mown into the meadow or sit at tables tucked into small groves of trees.Ĭolleen Bell, a retired Hamline University professor from Minneapolis who has attended memoir workshops here, fondly recalled waking up to fog hovering over the grasses, and returning to her room after dark, encircled by fireflies and stars. They gather for communal meals in the barn-inspired dining hall with a photography studio upstairs. Most School of the Arts participants stay onsite, spread out among white-trimmed red cottages. The remaining 21 islands make up Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, off Wisconsin's northern coast near Bayfield. It's less than two miles inland to the school's farm-inspired campus.Ĭars crunched onto the gravel drive as students arrived from across the continent - from Tucson, Ariz., to Quebec and San Francisco to the Bronx - to reach the largest and only inhabited Apostle Island. La Pointe, the island's one small hub, blends a smattering of shops, a history museum, a ferry dock that clunks as vehicles deboard, and quirky spots such as Tom's Burned Down Cafe, an open-air bar. ![]() About 430 residents call this island home year-round, but the number rises to about 2,500 for the summer. Sketchbooking students draw on the beach at Big Bay, Madeline Island.įor 10 years, aspiring artists, writers, photographers and quilters have found their way to Madeline Island School of the Arts, a roughly five-hour trip from the Twin Cities. "I never forget a place I draw or paint," she said, explaining how art requires her to slow down, pay attention and be fully in the moment. Later, I sat near Susan Amodeo of Blue Springs, Mo., beneath a towering pine on the beach and studied the way sunlight flickered across the bay. A distant kayak drifted closer, and we happily added a pop of red to the blue and green landscape. Godas, one of three instructors in a weeklong sketchbooking workshop, had offered a lesson in using gouache paint - a vibrant hybrid of watercolor and acrylics - in the morning before this afternoon excursion to paint outdoors.īrushes swished. "Yes! Use lots of color," encouraged Maru Godas, a guest instructor from Barcelona, Spain, while looking over the shoulder of a Madeline Island School of the Arts student. Books teetered on the laps of aspiring artists, perched on camp stools or logs overlooking a scenic Lake Superior inlet on Wisconsin's Madeline Island. A breeze stirred, and several people scrambled to hold down sketchbook pages without dripping paint or dropping their travel-sized palettes. ![]()
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