KNOWLEDGE + CRAFT = FREEDOM
Forty years of teaching experience allows me to meet you, the artist, at your level of proficiency, and then help you elevate your skillset to its full potential. By expanding your knowledge of concepts, techniques and strategies, you will be able to create compositions of richly orchestrated color in successful, eye catching designs.
This workshop has proven to help overcome doubt, fear, and uncertainty – common maladies among artists. As a group, we open many doors, push through some walls and set up a path for each participant to further explore.
This workshop has proven to help overcome doubt, fear, and uncertainty – common maladies among artists. As a group, we open many doors, push through some walls and set up a path for each participant to further explore.
2026 DATES AND VENUES
April 27 - May 1, 2026 in Santa Fe, NM - Madeline Island School of the Arts
November 2-6, 2026 in Asilomar, CA - Madeline Island School of the Arts
Student Testimonials
Please take a moment to read this Blog post from the artist Robin Olsen
... plus a few more here:
This workshop will enhance one’s studio practice and life in general. It will speak to you. Each day you decide what are the most meaningful takeaways for your practice. Mark created a lovely balance for both learning and allowing individual expression.
Mark is a great lover and keeper of knowledge, a perpetual student who not only wants to demystify the knowledge for his students, he wants them to have the keys to the kingdom.
I will keep these days (in the workshop) as a torch to be light when in a tunnel.
Since the workshop, I feel more confident that I could select three primary colors and go about mixing and planning a color palette for a painting or series. Something I found very intimidating before.
I have known teachers who were simply instructors, and I have known teachers who were excellent and generous. But you Mark, are more than an excellent teacher. Your great reverence and respect for what art is and what it can be are obvious and contagious.
Learning Goals
I want to hand you many tools, ideas and directions that you can build upon in your own studio practice.
COLOR + DSIGN workshop is designed to benefit artists who work figuratively and abstractly at all levels of experience.
You will immerse yourself into the vast world of:
COLOR
The seven visual elements are line, shape, value, color, mass, space, and texture. Arranging these elements will determine the success of a composition. We will pay special attention to:
IN SUMMATION:
The single most important means by which artists integrate the elements and parts of their works is by showing the many kinds of similarities and connections among them. If the teaching of drawing and painting were to be reduced to one word, perhaps the word that comes nearest to embracing much of what artists need to consider above all other factors in the forming of their images is relationships.
- Nathan Goldstein’s Text on Design and Composition
I want to hand you many tools, ideas and directions that you can build upon in your own studio practice.
COLOR + DSIGN workshop is designed to benefit artists who work figuratively and abstractly at all levels of experience.
You will immerse yourself into the vast world of:
COLOR
- Prismatic Colors (primary, secondary and tertiary)
- Muted Colors
- Chromatic Grays (their hue and temperature)
- Achromatic Grays
- Learn to mix thousands of colors using only three primary colors + white
- Understand the relationships and create successful and balanced orchestrations of colors
The seven visual elements are line, shape, value, color, mass, space, and texture. Arranging these elements will determine the success of a composition. We will pay special attention to:
- Line / varieties of line, line and shape, line and direction, density, value, etc.
- Shape / varieties of shape, shape and value, shape and color, etc.
- Exploration of Color / perception of color & the role of hue, value, & saturation
- Understanding Abstraction / freedom of representational qualities
- Design + Composition / balance, emphasis, simplicity, hierarchy, unity
IN SUMMATION:
The single most important means by which artists integrate the elements and parts of their works is by showing the many kinds of similarities and connections among them. If the teaching of drawing and painting were to be reduced to one word, perhaps the word that comes nearest to embracing much of what artists need to consider above all other factors in the forming of their images is relationships.
- Nathan Goldstein’s Text on Design and Composition