2012 Workshops at Tipi Village Retreat
Artists: Connect with the Land through Color 
A Color-Making Intensive Workshop
with Artist Tilke Elkins ~ contact@tilkins.org
Date: September 21-23, 2012
Workshop Fee: $495 + $15 for materials (this includes lodging and meals at the retreat)
Deposit: $100 (non-refundable), due by August 1, 2012. Please contact Tilke directly.
Balance: $395 due by September 1, 2012
Connect with the land as an artist at a profound, material level by painting with the very stuff that inspires you: the landscape itself.
Spend four days in the woods by the creek at Tipi Village Retreat in beautiful Marcola, Oregon -- sleep in a luxury tipi and learn to make paints from earth, rocks and plants you find and gather yourself.
As you explore the surrounding hills in search of color, you'll be encouraged to examine the specific human-scale features of the land that attract you. What are the ways in which these features seem to echo your inner state of being, and do they hold the potential to transform you?
Using the pigments you've made, you'll play with color by making small abstract paintings that reveal a wealth of color relationships. Once familiar with the nature of these natural pigments, you'll blend the boundries between 2D and 3D work by using the pigments in addition to found natural objects to create a personal outdoor, ephemeral installation in the form of an alter. Assembled in the combined spirits of installation artist Andy Goldsworthy, Japanese Shinto shrines, and sacred pictographs, the alter will express a chosen aspect of an inner growth edge and offer insight or guidance to those who view it.
Are you chemically sensitive or do you work with those who are? Do you long to understand the material mysteries of color? Bid farewell to dependance on expensive, toxic, petrochemical-based art supplies!
Transform the inner through the outer and leave an offering behind.
Bond with the land, swim in the creek, sleep with the stars, eat scrumptious color-themed food and come prepared to ask every question you've ever had about color.
DAY ONE
GATHERING COLOR: To begin, we'll take a walk through the landscape 
around Tipi Village. We'll gather earth, rocks and plants that will
make brilliant, light-fast pigments that can be used with both watercolor and oil mediums. We'll take time to be sensitive to aspects of the land which resonate with us.
Following dinner there will be a lecture on the history of colored
pigments around the world.
DAY TWO
Participants will be encouraged to go on solo morning walks to further
explore the area before we meet as a group. Then, we'll embark on the exciting, alchemical process of creating color from rocks and
plants by pounding, grinding, separating, boiling and drying, skills you can use yourself for your future pigment needs. These pigments are beautiful, extremely light-fast (the mineral ones -- the vegetable ones are less permanent, unless kept away from light) and easy to work with.
By the end of the day we will have a broad color vocabulary to work with the following morning.
Evening: Color Games and Music by the Campfire
DAY THREE
Morning: We'll use the colors we've made to create luminous color pallets and paint small color abstract paintings on wood to take home.
Afternoon: After selecting a specific site at or nearby Tipi Village, participants will complete a series of exercises designed to bring 
the theme and nature of a personal altar-installation into focus.
Group will disperse to the sites and assemble the altars.
We'll take time to tour the altars individually, then discuss them as a group. As a final project, we'll assemble one large altar together somewhere on the land.
Color Celebration: Color Meal, Face and/or Foot Painting, Color Ceremony
Farewell!
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Artist Tilke Elkins has spent the last seven years studying, exploring, making, writing about and painting with natural color. She grew up in a family of grapheme synaesthetes (people who see colors in their mind's eye when they think of letters and numbers) and is passionate about both the language of color and the intimate relationship that exists between people and the land.
Tilke studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and received an MFA in studio art at Bennington College. You can view her work at http://www.tilkins.org/ and read her blog at colorsong.tilkins.org .
Tilke Elkins lives in Springfield, Oregon. email: contact@tilkins.org ~ Thank You!
"This is what a picture should give us...an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a colored state of grace. Lose consciousness! Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colors, be steeped in the light of them." -- Cezanne
