SUMMER RESIDENCY
Build a Body of Work Around a Single Theme
with Shannon Amidon, Professional Artist & Mentor
Spend the summer building a cohesive body of work — from finding your theme all the way to knowing what it means and how to talk about it.
You Will Learn:
How to identify a theme with real staying power, one that comes from genuine curiosity or obsession rather than what seems marketable or expected, so your work has somewhere to go beyond the first few pieces.
How to research and gather material in a way that feeds your studio practice rather than stalling it, using observation, collection, reading, and field time to build a rich source of imagery and meaning before and during the making.
How to sustain a body of work over time without losing momentum or repeating yourself, understanding how constraint and consistency work together to generate variety rather than limit it.
How to talk and write about your work with clarity, so that when it comes time to share, exhibit, pitch, or simply explain what you spent your summer making, you have the words for it.
Audience: Fine Art Painters
Medium: The Medium of Your Choice
Stages: Aspiring, Emerging
Session Dates & Times:
North America
July 9, 16, 23, 30, Aug 6, 13, 20, 27
6pm-7pm PDT / 7pm-8pm MDT/
8pm-9pm EDT
Australia/New Zealand
July 10, 17, 24, 31, Aug 7, 14, 21, 28
11am-12pm AEST
$198.00
11 in stock
WORKSHOP Description
This summer residency is about doing the thing most artists keep putting off: building a real body of work around a theme that actually matters to you. Over eight weeks, you’ll move from identifying what you’re genuinely drawn to, through the research and early making, all the way to looking back at a cohesive group of work and knowing what it means. It’s part studio practice, part conversation, part accountability.
Each session opens with a short talk on one aspect of working in series, finding your theme, doing research, staying consistent without getting repetitive, understanding the deeper why underneath your subject matter. Then we share work and talk about what’s happening in our studios. You’ll leave every session with something to think about and something to make. By the end of August, you’ll have a body of work in progress and a much clearer sense of where it’s going.
If you’ve been making individual pieces that don’t quite connect to each other, if you have a vague sense of what you want to explore but haven’t committed to it, or if summer tends to scatter your practice rather than deepen it, this is for you. It’s also for artists who have a theme in mind but keep circling it without diving in.
How to identify a theme that has real staying power for you. How artists research and gather before and during a series. How to start before you feel ready, and what to do with the pieces that don’t work. How to stay within a theme without repeating yourself. How to find the meaning underneath your subject matter. How to look at a body of work and understand its shape. And finally, how to share or present what you’ve made.
🎥 WORKSHOP RECORDINGS available for 1-YEAR after the workshop ends!
🎥 NOTE: Workshop Recordings may be offered for sale at a future date at Mastrius, with the consent of the instructor.
High School, University, and College students get 20% OFF. See FAQs at the bottom of page.
Supply List
This residency is designed to work within your existing medium and practice, so you won’t need to purchase new materials. What you will need is your usual working setup plus a few simple tools for the research, reflection, and documentation aspects of the program.
Your Studio Materials Whatever you already use to make art.
A Sketchbook or Dedicated Notebook This will be your theme journal for the summer. You’ll use it for writing, sketching, collecting ideas, noting observations, and tracking your thinking as your body of work develops. Any size, any kind.
A Way to Document Your Work A phone camera is fine. You’ll be photographing work in progress throughout the summer to share during sessions and to track your own development over time.
A Simple Folder or Box for Gathering Something to collect physical material related to your theme, clippings, found objects, printed images, scraps of paper, pressed plants, postcards, anything that belongs to the world of your subject. A manila folder, a shoebox, a basket. It doesn’t matter what it is.
Access to Research Materials Books, library card, online image search, field guides, whatever suits your theme. You don’t need to know what these are yet, we’ll talk about research during our sessions.
Instructor Bio
Shannon Amidon is an artist, writer, and community builder who lives and works in Troutdale, Oregon, where the forests, fields, and creek edges of the Pacific Northwest find their way into everything she makes. She is a wonder seeker, a beekeeper, a lover of insects, old books, and the kind of beauty that most people walk past without noticing.
For more than twenty years, Shannon has created mixed-media and encaustic artwork using beeswax, natural earth pigments, vintage paper ephemera, pressed botanicals, and found objects, materials that carry history and wonder. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide, collected by institutions including Google, Kaiser Permanente, and Genentech, and recognized with grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, International Encaustic Artists, Silicon Valley Creates, and others. She has been an artist in residence in Canada, Iceland, Costa Rica, and Oregon, among other places.
Shannon is the founder and director of The Verdancy Project, a nature-based artist residency and creative community on a 4.5-acre property in Troutdale, Oregon. Welcoming artists, writers, performers, and dreamers who need time and space to explore, plant seeds of creation and rest.
Her writing explores creativity, ecology, and the art of building a life that means something. Her essays on art and creative practice have appeared in notable publications, and she is the author of Nurturing Creativity: A Guide to Building Your Artist Residency and Cultivating Creative Community and the anthology Cycles of Creation: Five Years of The Verdancy Project.
