Marilynn Brandenburger Workshop 2007
Journaling the Keweenaw
For three days in August, participants in the Journaling Workshop visited various Keweenaw locations to record with both words and pictures their experiences with the peninsula's wild waters, ancient rocks, towering trees, glorious wildflowers, various creatures, and succulent berries. Students learned to write and draw quick sketches that captured the essence of a scene in a loose-leaf journal using ink, colored pencil, and watercolor. The workshop included demonstrations, hands-on exercises, examples from naturalists’ journals, and outdoor excursions, including a visit to Gratiot Lake.
Marilynn Brandenburger is a professional artist who has been keeping illustrated journals for 16 years. Her writing skills were honed on the job as a college grant writer and she has studied non-fiction writing at the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program and at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
She is an award-winning watercolorist and has been happily teaching adults to draw and paint for more than 25 years. In 2004, Marilynn was GLC’s Artist in Residence at the Noblet Field Station.
Marilynn Brandenburger has been painting and exhibiting professionally for more than twenty-five years. Awards and recognitions include grants from private and public foundations, appointments as Artist-in-Residence in national and state parks, including Isle Royale National Park. Her work is in collections throughout the U.S. Marilynn’s work has been featured in national newspaper and magazine articles and in two books: The Best of Colored Pencil 5 and The Island Within Us. She has also illustrated three books.
Marilynn’s images come from 20 years of hiking, sketching, and photographing the beauty of nature throughout the U.S. Her work generally takes two forms: medium to large-scale landscape paintings and small intimate studies of nature’s detail. She also paints still life, using objects from her personal collections, or, most recently, objects in artists’ studios. A native of the Midwest, Marilynn has lived in the South for more than thirty years.
She holds a Bachelors degree in anthropology from Tulane University and a Masters degree in art education from Florida Atlantic University, and she is a graduate of Harvard’s Institute for the Management of Lifelong Education. Marilynn also teaches drawing and painting to adults in Atlanta and the Southeast.
