The Charles County Arts Alliance is sponsoring a Conté Drawing Workshop on September 7, 2006 from 12:00 noon to 4:00 pm at The Corner Studio in La Plata. The instructor is Rose Beitzell and the fee is $25 (CCAA members) and $35 (non-CCAA members), depending upon needed supplies. Call The Corner Studio (301-932-1439) for directions and to register.
Rose Beitzell has called St. Mary's County, Maryland, “home” for more than 40 years. She loves the water: the Potomac, the Wicomico, the salt marshes, the swamps, and all the little tributaries that feed the rivers to the Chesapeake Bay. She loves the farmlands and finds life in Southern Maryland to be exciting . . . the lands, animals, and people provide much of the inspiration for her work. Rose’s greatest joy is capturing the spirit of the local habitat and transferring that feeling to canvas, paper, or wood.
Rose began, as she expects all artists do, with painting and drawing. Her skills developed as she experimented with oils, acrylics, watercolors, graphite, pastels, and charcoal. Then her Uncle Buck introduced her to woodcarving. With her first duck, she was able to meld her love of pencil drawing and painting into a brand new medium . . . and she was hooked!
After many wildlife-carving classes with Roselyn Daisey, a master carver, and much coaching by the fine carvers of the Southern Maryland Wood Carvers guild, she has developed her own technique and expanded her repertoire. Since that first duck she’s gone on to other birds, flowers, small mammals, and even a water faucet!
From woodcarving, wood burning (pyrography) was a natural step. Now a slab of wood becomes a canvas where Rose can create a textured drawing and highlight it with an acrylic stain. One technique feeds another and her excitement and creative juices continue to grow. There are no limits, only new adventures.
On September 7, 2006 from 12:00 noon to 4:00 pm, Rose will be teaching a Conté Drawing Workhop. Conté is a traditional medium used for hundreds of years to create extraordinary works of art. It is more stable and much easier to work with than pastel since it is essentially a pure pigment mixed with a relatively hard binder. Conté is ideally suited for loose sketching and for intricate drawing. It is worked just like charcoal and deals with monochromatic work.
ILLUSTRATION: An example of a Conté drawing by Rose Beitzell—a woman with her dog.