On July 16
and
July 17, Marilynn Brandenburger taught a watercolor workshop at Noblet Field Station and the GLC preserve at Gratiot Lake. Participants learned to simplify subjects, render them quickly in pencil, and enhance the drawings with ink and watercolor. They then added words to their pages to express their thoughts and observations.
Activities included demonstrations, drawing and watercolor lessons, and outdoor sketching. Assignments included sketching birchbark and orange hawkweed, selecting a small focused subject to depict (e.g. a bit of moss and a wildflower) and sketching a landscape which included water.
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 beautifully illustrated watercolor journals reflect her love of nature and provide inspiration for her paintings. 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. 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.
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 has been happily teaching adults to draw and paint for more than 30 years. She was an artist in residence at GLC's Noblet Field Station in 2004.
