Instructor: Gabriela Sánchez
Tuesday - Thursday
June 1 - 3
10am - 4pm
3 sessions

ZEN MARKS: From Gesture to Form invites students to explore encaustic monotype as a language of gesture, rhythm, composition, and personal expression. This three-day workshop begins with Zen-inspired mark making and moves toward developing a personal visual vocabulary through repetition, layering, scale, positive and negative space, visual language, and composition. Students will create works on paper, then select, tear, layer, and reorganize their monotypes to discover relationships between marks and move toward a finished piece.

Over the three days, we will move through a progression:

Day 1 – Find Your Mark
Zen painting, gesture, breath, rhythm and repetition, translating those ideas into encaustic monotype and creating a vocabulary of marks on paper.

Day 2 – Build Your Language
Working with repetition, scale, layering, positive and negative space, value and composition. Students would begin selecting, tearing, layering and reorganizing their monotypes to discover relationships between marks.

Day 3 – Create the Work
Moving from paper to a more resolved piece: preparing/building the board, integrating the papers layering and returning to the surface with additional marks.

Gabriela Sánchez is a Mexican visual artist and instructor working with encaustic, mixed media, monotype, and Zen-inspired mark making. Her work explores presence, gesture, memory, and process, while her teaching focuses on helping students develop a personal visual language through material exploration, composition, and intuitive practice.