Summer 2025 Newsletter

One of the paintings Charlotte Griffin painted at the Bloomington Garden Walk 2025

Some Inspirational Quotes:

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

“If you could say it in words, there would e no reason to paint.” — Edward Hopper

Meeting & Program

The Bloomington Watercolor Society will meet on June 9th from 6 to 8 p.m. at the First Christian Church, 205 E. Kirkwood Ave. Details will be sent to the membership via email. A brief business meeting will open the meeting after which Laura Brown will present her artist journey as recorded in her sketchbooks (see “From the Dest of BWS President Laura Brown” for more details).

Inside BWS

FROM THE DESK OF BWS PRESIDENT LAURA BROWN

Greetings Painters!

On June 9th we are finishing up the 2024-2025 year. We will email you with further details (which room we were be using at First Christian Church, the door code, etc.) as we approach that date.

Bring a worked in or completed sketchbook for a show and share. During the program I will present “My Journey Through Sketchbooks.” This is my personal story of working in them and asking myself two questions: (1) What were my sketchbook plans? (2)And what actually happened? You might want to ask yourself these same questions as a way to summarize your own journey.

No sketchbook? No problem! Come to just listen and get inspired!

Watercolor paints in palette travel box with a brush close up. Art Supplies

Just a Reminder: There will be no meetings for the month of July and August so be sure to read through this issue and watch your emails for things that come up for BWS in the summer.

New Officers

THE VOTES ARE IN! Laura Brown, our current BWS President, she is happy to announce next year’s 2025-2026 Executive Board (Officially voted into office at the BWS May Meeting):

President: Nancy Metz
1st VP: Carol Rhodes
2nd VP: Julie Boyd
Treasurer: Daniel Goebbert
Secretary: Charlotte Griffin

Laura wants to give a big thank you to all these individuals and all the other members helping to make BWS possible!

BWS Thanks Our May “Four on the Floor” Artists

Four Member-artists — Jeanne Dutton, Daniel Goebbert, Sara Steffy McQueen, Barbara Coffman — demonstrated their approaches to painting flowers while members watched, ask questions, and painted. Attached is the painting that Daniel Goebbert worked on during that meeting. Daniel wrote to say, “I finished my demonstration painting from May’s 4-On-The-Floor Meeting. It’s currently untitled.”

BWS Turns 20!!! SAVE THE DATE!

Patty Uffman wrote to ask: Did you know that BWS is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year? Please join other BWS members and guests to commemorate this occasion!

Date: Saturday, October 11, 2025 (Our original July date had to be cancelled.)
Time: 7-9 pm
Where: The Mill / 642 N. Madison Street

Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served and a cash bar will be offered. We will also enjoy a 20th anniversary cake and will draw for door prizes!

We would love for you to attend with a guest. Don’t miss it!

The Bloomington Watercolor Society
Gallery Report

The Gallery opened in September of 2022, thanks to the inspired leadership of Stephanie Shelton, Director of Development. Sales of original art, greeting cards, and prints help fund art programs for patients, survivors, family members, and caretakers. It’s a most worthy cause which includes art packs for kids!

Due to the creative efforts and energy of many BWS artists and art lovers, sales have reached nearly $8000. Contributions to CSCSCI from those sales have resulted in a grand total of $2426!

Would you like to show your art work? Artists are invited to present an exhibit at the Gallery, either solo or with a group of friends. Each show is on exhibit for two months. Artists earn 70% from sales and CSC provides a reception on the 2^nd Friday of the first month of the show.

Interested? Contact Emily at (812) 233-3286 or by email at emily@cancersupportscin.org

Bloomington Garden Club’s Garden Walk 2025

On May 31 and June 1 artists had a chance to paint out (Plein Air) at the Bloomington Garden Club Garden Walk. This cool rainy spring and the early date for the walk provided a chance to capture some of nature’s beauty as interpreted by Gardners and landscape designers.

Photographs compliments of Charlotte Griffin

BWS Art Scholarship 2025

Bloomington High School South held its awards program on May 8, and that means we can now publicly announce the winner of the Bloomington Watercolor Society Art Scholarship!

Congratulations to Lorelei Held, a talented artist in many mediums! Angela Berzins, art teacher at BHSS, comments, “…her style is clean and beautiful, and her resulting projects are gallery display-worthy.”

Lorelei writes, “My aspirations are to attend IU and take classes to become an art teacher. Art and teaching are both things that I’ve always loved and admired, and I am super grateful and excited to have received this scholarship and the opportunities that it will help provide me. Thank you so much!”

Here are two examples of her artwork, a metal pendant titled “Antler” and a ceramic set, “Fishbowl.”

She will attend Indiana University beginning this Autumn and is looking forward to meeting us at the September BWS meeting.

Outside BWS

Hoosier Art Salon

The Hoosier Art Salon is now accepting entries for the 101st Hoosier Salon Annual Exhibition. The deadline for members to submit works is June 16th. Go to their website for more detail: http://hoosierartsalon.org

Watercolor Society of Indiana

The 43rd Annual WSI Juried Exhibit will be held at Newfields/Indianapolis Museum of Art from September 5 to November 1, 2025. The deadline to enter is June 20, 2025. For more information go: https://www.watercolorsocietyofindiana.org/Juried-Exhibit

Bloomington Fine Art Supply Offers Summer Workshop on Painting in Plein Air

Membership News

At Ghost Ranch in the high New Mexico desert, Claude Cookman paints distant buttes framed by a juniper tree in the foreground. Photo by John Long

Cookman relishes plein air workshop
in Georgia O’Keefe country

Editor’s Note. Longtime BWS member Claude Cookman sent this report with the accompanying images.

It’s always good to get out of town. Even better if you’re going to an art workshop. Best of all if that workshop is in a magical location. From May 26 through May 31, I was lucky to attend a pastel workshop at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Nestled among red and ochre mountains; populated by juniper trees, shrub brush and desert wildflowers; illuminated by strong sunlight that’s modulated by majestic, ever-changing clouds, this is indeed an enchanted space.

If you’re not familiar, Ghost Ranch is an educational and retreat center about 65 miles northwest of Santa Fe. It rightfully bills itself as a “unique combination of natural beauty, geology, paleontology, archaeology, history and art.” Among artists, it’s best known as the site of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio.

Natasha Isenhour, a southwest studio and plein air artist with an impressive resume of exhibitions and awards, taught the workshop. Her work in oil and pastel is represented by the Ventana Fine Art gallery on Santa Fe’s famous Canyon Road. You can see her paintings at this URL: https://www.ventanafineart.com/natasha-isenhour

There were nine participants in the workshop, which allowed maximum one-to-one interaction. Members worked in oil, watercolor, arcylic, pastel, and graphite. Isenhour tailored her teaching to each individual’s medium and met each one of us where ever we were in our artist trajectory.

Alchemy is a major theme for Isenhour, whose educational background is in science. She named the pastel set she created for Terry Ludwig Pastels, “Alchemy.” But she also brought the concept into her workshop, engineering a chemistry among the participants that elevated the group experience.

At the opening session, she framed her objectives for us with the rubric head, heart and hand. Part of making art involves the head or intellect. We need knowledge of the materials, for example. Most important is heart. We need an emotional connection to our subject. Whenever we respond to a scene or motif, Isenhour encouraged us to write down our feeling and what attracted us. The third element involves moving that knowledge and feeling into our hands so we can create the painting. Among other things it involves composition, value and temperature.

In any educational environment, you learn some things from the instructor and discover other things for yourself. I arrived with a list of objectives, but during the first session had to adjust it. As an off-hand comment, Isenhour said many beginning artists confuse value with temperature. Clearly guilty, I immediately adopted understanding temperature as a new goal. In one-to-one coaching, she helped me choose palettes that reflected not just the motif’s hue and value but its cool and warm temperatures.

She explained we can capture anything with a light, middle and dark value. She repeatedly urged us to lock in our shadows first, because they are fleeting. She said we were free to break the rules, but only after we first understood them. Also that we were free to edit the scene in the service of our painting. She said, we each have our own artist’s fingerprint and encouraged us to find and trust that personal style.

One obvious goal of any art pedagogy is to move what we know intellectually into our intuitive practice so we can work spontaneously without thinking about every line, brush stroke or color choice. This happens only through long hours of practice. During my practice at Ghost Ranch, probably my most important discovery concerned approach. Like many, I aspire to work more loosely. I had mistakenly equated that with working quickly, doing gestural drawings, getting charcoal or Conté down on paper, and then wrestling it into something recognizable.

Muddy pastel colors taught me that in painting I need to work much more intentionally, make each color choice and stroke correspond to a part of the motif. I came to understand that working loosely is not about slapping things down but the level of detail.

Isenhour taught me the concept of clean color, not contaminating a shape with lower layers of conflicting colors, keeping each area in the same color and value family. I had to adjust my practice of laying down broad areas of color then painting objects of conflicting colors on top. I stopped doing under paintings and started putting down a color and value as close to the motif as possible in a first layer.

Many of you know drawing has been my primary artistic expression for more than 30 years. Drawing helps me see more deeply. I embrace Fredrick Frank’s quote: “I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen.” While drawing, the formal qualities I see comprise lines, values, textures, details.

Watercolor and pastel have been elusive goals of mine for several years. I’ve dabbled but never committed the serious time necessary to mastering them. Now, I’m hoping time-on-task will help me see hue, intensity, value and temperature more deeply and help me intuitively incorporate those deeper sightings into my paintings.

As I frequently tell my art companions, I consider myself extremely lucky to have the leisure and resources to make art. I would now add: I am very lucky to have attended Isenhour’s workshop.

“Learning Experience” • Soft pastel on UArt 400 grit paper • 10.5 x 18 inches • May 29–31, 2025

This is the painting Claude was working on in the above photo. He titled it “Learning Experience,” because it’s his first big-shape painting and first attempt trying to incorporate many of Natasha Isenhour’s lessons from the workshop, especially clean color. Because of the rapidly changing light, he painted it for two hours at a time over three mornings.

— Claude Cookman

Andy Roberts. Andy wrote to say, “I have a painting that I created from a photo that I took will visiting our friends in Ontario, Canada in the fall of 2023. I just now got around to painting something from it. I named it “Nautica Blue”. The location is Long Sault Marina on the St. Lawrence River. This old sailboat has been moored there and I think abandoned, but I loved the setting. Hope everyone enjoys their summer.”

“Nautical Blue” by Andy Roberts

Lynne Gilliatt. My latest brush tip painting of the series:

Painting by Lynne Gillett

Jerome Harste. I’ll be returning to Myrtle Beach on June 10th. Looking forward to our family’s vacation, a tradition that started some 30 years ago.

“The Orange Umbrella,” Jerome Harste, 12x18x1″ Cradle Board, Acrylic Collage

My depiction of this umbrella on the beach inspired me to look at how famous artists had depicted summer. I found my search of the Internet interesting as the setting seemed less important than capturing and depicting the play of light, shadow, color and mood. To give you a feel of what I noticed, below are some of the famous painting of summer I studied. Klint really fascinated me as I read his painting as “summer equals abundance.”