Instructor: Debra Claffey
Wednesday - Thursday
June 5 & 6
10am - 4pm
2 sessions

Using encaustic and collage as a means to developing your Personal Voice. 

There are as many ways to develop your personal artist’s voice and vision as there are artists. In the beginning it’s difficult to find out what you want to express with your work. Beauty, contemplation, anger, or outrage are all common themes, but how do you get to the core of your expression?

Collage is a versatile way to explore themes and feelings, as well as line, color, and form. Encaustic paint and medium can be a fantastic method of trying out content, composition, and scale. It’s eminently changeable. Most every action can be reversed and tried a new way.

For two days we’ll work with monotypes, papers, fabrics, and other materials--making and remaking compositions so that our outcome matches our intention (or surprises us with a new direction) and has power and beauty.

Debra Claffey is a visual artist who uses encaustic, oil, and mixed media in her work. She holds a BFA in Painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University and an Associate's Degree in Horticultural Technology from the University of New Hampshire. In both 2011 and 2020, she received an Artist Entrepreneurial Grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Claffey’s work has won several awards, including the Second Place Award at the Monotype Guild of New England’s Fifth National Monotype Exhibition in May 2018 and the Juror’s Award at the Anything But Flat Exhibition at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Claffey has curated five exhibitions, the most recent being The Space Between Shadow and Light for the Eleventh International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown, Massachusetts in June 2017.

Claffey is a Past-President of New England Wax, and Past President of the NH Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art. Raised in Connecticut, educated in Massachusetts, she now lives and works in New Boston, New Hampshire.