Instructor: Isabelle Gaborit
Monday - Wednesday
June 7 -9
10am - 4pm
3 sessions at Castle Hill’s Main Campus

How do we move from looking at a landscape to creating a painting that expresses our experience of it?

In this three-day workshop, Isabelle Gaborit explores landscape as a starting point for abstraction, using observation, photographic reference, memory, color, gesture, and material to develop a personal visual language.

Rather than reproducing a landscape, participants will learn to distill it—reducing complex images into essential shapes, values, directional forces, and rhythms, and then gradually rebuilding them through painting. The workshop will explore notan studies, underpainting, layering, color, mark-making, texture, and both additive and subtractive processes.

Gaborit will demonstrate her own approach to moving between reference, drawing, and painting, while encouraging participants to experiment, improvise, eliminate, and make unexpected choices. Participants will consider how color can move beyond description, how layers can suggest memory and atmosphere, and how the physical qualities of a painting can become part of the meaning of a place.

The three days will move from seeing and reducing, to building and disrupting, and finally to deconstructing, editing, and developing a personal response to the landscape.

Demonstrations, individual guidance, group discussion, and critique will be woven throughout the workshop. Although encaustic and mixed-media approaches may be incorporated, the focus is not on a particular technique, but on developing a more intuitive and personal relationship with landscape and the painting process.

This workshop is suitable for artists at all levels who want to loosen their dependence on photographic representation, explore abstraction, and discover new ways of expressing the physical, emotional, and remembered experience of landscape.

Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond painting what a landscape looks like and begin painting what it feels like to be there.

Isabelle Gaborit is a contemporary artist whose work explores the intersection of ancient technique and lived landscape. Working primarily in encaustic—a process using molten, pigmented beeswax manipulated with heat—she creates tactile, layered surfaces shaped by heat and immediacy.

Based in the Auvergne region of central France, her practice is informed by its distinctive volcanic terrain, deep valleys, caves, and river systems. Her work is process-driven and arises from an ongoing engagement with the physical environment and its underlying geological forces.

Originally from La Rochelle, France, Gaborit studied sculpture, drawing, and painting at l’École des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers, France, before completing a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts in Ireland in 2006. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in France, Northern Ireland, the USA, Germany, and China. With more than two decades of teaching experience, Gaborit has led workshops and retreats across Ireland and internationally, including at the International Encaustic Conference in Massachusetts, Mulranny Arts in Ireland, and kunstfreiraum in Switzerland.

She is a core instructor with R&F Handmade Paints, contributes to the online program Painting with Fire, and serves on the board of the International Encaustic Artists (IEA).
www.isabellegaborit.com
@isabellegaboritencaustics