Los Cerillos, New Mexico
September 11-14, 2024
Get your best face on with Bill Skrips in his Los Cerillos studio September 11-14, 2024. In this workshop, you will have an opportunity to make masks from different substrates--heavy cardboard, wood and more.
We will use paint, glue, found objects, cutting, bending, and carving, plus your imagination to create some fantastic masks. This is a workshop for self-starters - instructions will be heavy on how-tos, as opposed to “what.” Come with your own great ideas and the instructor will help you facilitate them -engineering, application, and “do-ability” will be stressed.
Our Lady of Letters
START collecting images of inspiring masks now not only for inspiration, but also to share with your fellow students (oh yeah…and with Bill, your trusty instructor) .
Look at the mask cultures of Africa, Mexico, Japan, Papua, Europe, Native American, Nepalese, and Esquimaux origins
Patience - Bill hopes to balance drying times with the need for folks to keep working which is not always the easiest thing (Bill’s solution has always been to work on up to 12 projects at once, but you will not have quite that amount of latitude).
Arnie
Our projects - Some starting concepts. It’s up to you to bring them to life.
Memory (jug) Mask - a memory mask, like the old (large) bottles you might see in an antique store. These have doodads, odd bits, broken pottery, old pins, costume jewelry, etc. that could not/ would not be thrown away by the makers, all pasted or attached in a gumbo of paint and objects
Memory jug
Objects for a memory mask. Images/trinkets/bits and pieces that might help you facilitate the ideas that follow…
Teufelo
The Sin-Eater Mask - a mask to help you expiate (personal) bad stuff or perhaps your close-to-angelic- ness (Bill will leave this up to you and your conscience). He is riffing off their local tradition of Zozbra.
Fool
Interpretive Mask - This one would be a portrait of a loved (or hated) one who you know (or think you know) pretty well.
Capra
This Escape Includes:
Four days of instruction with Bill
Some Materials
Other materials will be for sale for your use
Use of tools on site (limited)
Welcome Dinner
Four lunches
Carving Tools
Price: $1,300, limited to 8.
A $600 non-refundable deposit is due upon registration with the final payment due June 1, 2024
Price does not include airfare to/from New Mexico, lodging or alcoholic beverages. There are hotels, VRBOs and B&Bs nearby. Santa Fe is 36 minutes from Los Cerrillos.
Supply List
Please bring tools/materials you are happy to work with. The memory mask and the self portrait mask will reflect YOU...the materials you bring to the class should have meaning to you and yours. Bill has paint, glue and tools for constructing. There are limited materials available to adorn your mask creations.
Kathie’s suggestions -
scissors
exacto knife or similar
small hammer
needle nose pliers
sketchbook
couple of screw drivers
Small cutting pad
Bill has paint brushes and some paint. If you have a specific palette in mind, bring paint.
If you know that you may need epoxy, bring that. I use Devon’s 2-part epoxy
Itinerary
Day 1 September 11. Meet in the studio at 9:30 a.m. Bill will go over the workshop schedule. We will work until lunch, then resume creating. We will stop around 4:30 and then go out to dinner.
Day 2&3 September 12-13. Meet in the studio at 9:30, lunch and then end the day around 4:30.
Day 4. September 14. Meet in the studio at 9:30. Stop for lunch. Finish working, then clean up around 3:30, and have our Show ‘N Tell. The workshop will be over at 4:00.
Personality Mask - a type of mirror-that is, a mask to reflect an aspect of yourself, possibly with paint or sort of a collage with attached paper, cloth or whatever you can think of… (old letters, maps, clothing patterns, tissue paper, bits of fabric, etc.)
Judy
Literate
Spirit Mask - A Spirit, either a muse or a monster or a favorite animal. Here the “personality” of the being would dictate how the mask “reads.”
Rotat
Semot
Los Cerrillos artist Bill Skrips has always collected things or their constituent parts, treating them as raw material for his sculptural work. Sometimes mysterious in origin or purpose, sometimes more obvious, these bits and pieces tend to spur him on creatively. Added handmade components bring the sculptures to completion—including carved, welded, painted and otherwise constructed bits. In the work, he attempts a union between the humorous and the dark, which represents his outlook on life. Using the influence of Southern folk art as a springboard, his work often approaches the absurd and sometimes the surreal. In incorporating found, “dirty” materials, the grittiness of the work neutralizes its playfulness. His artwork rarely draws conclusions or edifies—he finds posing questions more satisfying.