weekend with nick bantock

What can I say... Nick is incredible!

I was fortunate to spend this past weekend with Nick in his 'Urgent 2nd Class' Collage workshop. My lovely art friend Nadine and I headed over to Victoria where we stayed with another of our fabulous art friends, Mary and her hubby, Don. The three of us were in the class together, which was terrific. Thank you again, to our wonderful hosts.

Nick's teaching was centred around process rather than technique and I learned a ton.

We started with 2"x2" illustration board doing several exercises within set amounts of time to force us to not think too much about what we were doing.

This is Mary's 2"x2". After we worked on our squares for about 30 mins, Nick had us pass them to the person on the right, so I had a chance to work on this piece as well. It was a great exercise.


We eventually worked our way up to 16"x16". I thought I would be intimidated by that size, but as Nick says "getting rid of the white" right away with pastel chalks, makes it much easier to jump in.





Here is the start of my 16"x16" with a quick coating of chalk pastels.






Nick would give us prompts every 30 mins or so...(i.e. "two figures", "gold") which we could then choose to incorporate into our collages.

This is about two hours in.

Here it is after about four hours. Nadine and I decided to continue working on them during the ferry ride home. Doesn't look like much yet, but you can really see the different textures.


Nick said that we needed to be prepared to put in 10 times as much time as we had (approx. four hours), so there is much more work to do before the piece is completed. I will post it as it progresses.

The class size was perfect with just eight of us...the three of us as well as Pat, Patti, Jill, Rose and Olga. After the first day of class we had a pot luck dinner with Nick, Joyce and our hosts Lori and Allen. We played a really fun game which allowed us to get to know a bit more about each other [I would tell you about it, but our friends Janice and Mo are taking the same workshop this weekend]. At the end of the second day, Nick said we produced some of the best work he has seen in a workshop and acknowledged that there was no competition and the group was very supportive. Wow!

Thank you to Lori for hosting the workshops at her amazing home.

If you are interested, Nick has a series of upcoming workshops in his studio on Salt Spring Island. Here is a link to his website. You can find out more about the workshops by contacting his partner and web curator, Joyce.

Another wonderful art experience!