Improvisation: Jamming with the Visual Language
with Valda Bailey and Doug Chinnery
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Course Description
Valda Bailey and Doug Chinnery return to Santa Fe Workshops this spring for a unique program on how to elevate your images to another level. In follow-up to their program in December, this new online journey expands upon the why and how they do multiple exposures and goes deeper to explore how to add richness and depth to your work.
In a program designed for all photographers, regardless of style and technical ability, Valda and Doug discuss how to integrate layers of ideas and meaning in your images and go beyond purely retinal beauty. Together, they have spent the last ten years discovering the joy to be had in using their cameras in unconventional ways. They have built up a loyal following of students who have learned from them how to move beyond the technical and instead, focus on creative expression. This program in April is the next step as Valda and Doug join us via Zoom from England for another four-hour adventure.
On Day One, Valda goes “In Search of Gestalt.” She explores this fundamental area of art and design theory to aid our understanding and reveals how we can employ the ideas to enhance our own images. Closely allied to this, Doug then delves into “The Art of Seeing.” His focus is on how to open-up to the secrets of the visual language, an understanding of which is fundamental to making compelling and emotionally connected work.
On Day Two, the ‘jamming’ continues as Valda and Doug dive deeper still into the world of art and question how we might use these lessons learned in our own photographic projects, no matter what style of images we make. Valda shows how the principles of the Bauhaus movement forever changed art and design. She analyses how we can use the ideas of the Bauhaus to infuse our work with richness and interest. Building on this, Doug traverses the world of metaphor. Looking at what metaphor is and how it has been used in art and photography for generations, Doug investigates the many subtle forms of metaphor and how we can skillfully permeate our work with it to add layers of meaning and interest beyond the purely visual.
Question and answer sessions are sprinkled throughout each day’s presentations to keep the audience engagement at a high and enjoyable level. This being said, if you can’t make the live events, recordings of the two programs will be available for all those registered.
Join Valda and Doug for what promises to be an intriguing and craft-enhancing program.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
Open to anyone interested in this special program.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
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about
Valda Bailey is a freelance photographic artist living in Sussex, England. Her approach to photography is greatly informed by her background in painting and her influences come as much from artists as photographers. She is largely motivated by color and form and the tension and dynamism that these components can bring to an image. She makes her images using in-camera multiple exposure which help to create abstract shapes and blur extraneous detail. Her objectives are to portray an emotive interpretation of a scene rather than a literal representation.
Valda made her U.S. debut in 2017 in the group exhibition Into the Woods at Sohn Fine Art in Lenox, MA. In 2015, she was the first woman to be invited to join six other photographers to exhibit at the Biennial Masters of Vision at the Southwell Minster, United Kingdom. More recently, Valda has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom with solo presentations of her work at MMX Gallery, The Sun Beyond the Shadow (2018), and a traveling exhibition, titled Fragile, which was on view at the Jersey Arts Centre and at Bosham Gallery (2017). Her work is consistently included in group exhibitions, including Tides + Falls at Sohn Fine Art, Lenox, MA and Vision 9, OXO Gallery, London, both in 2018.
Her photography is included in corporate and private collections worldwide and her work has been purchased by notable members of the art and photographic community.
Website: valdabailey.com
Instagram: @valdab
about
Doug Chinnery has been described as a “pivotal artist who has redefined the creative photographic landscape.” Primarily influenced by and drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionist painters such as Hodgkin, Feiler, Rae, and Ryman, Doug’s gestural work eschews topography, aiming to distil the rhythm, rhyme, and flow of the landscape through poetic visual expressions.
With the camera as Doug’s principal medium and mirroring his painted mixed media abstracts, these intuitive abstracted works layer texture, colour, and form to create a deeply emotional and expressive response to the natural environment.
Doug devotes much of his time to teaching, and his passion for creative thinking has helped students worldwide to express their own unique artistic voice. He exhibits widely in the UK and overseas, is in demand as a public speaker and his first book, Abstract Mindedness has now sold out. When not making art, he enjoys making furniture (badly) and spending with his wife, Beth and their two dogs, Eddie and Lily.
Website: dougchinnery.com
Instagram: @dougchinnery
