As summer’s heat gives way to fall, the studios at The Bascom are still bustling. Classes run year-round on the six-acre campus in Highlands, and the fall season brings a rich mix of offerings in ceramics, oil painting, figure drawing, and floral arrangement, each shaped by the understanding that to make art here is to make art in a special place.
The instructors The Bascom draws are working artists with active studio practices.
Pat Fiorello, a past president of the Georgia Watercolor Society and author of Bella Italia: Italy Through the Eyes of an Artist, leads a three-day workshop on painting flowers in oil this August.
Marc Chatov returns in late September with a still life intensive built around the fundamentals of composition and value.
Larry Moore’s four-day workshop on the abstracted landscape, offered in October, invites participants to find their own level between representation and abstraction, guided by the mountain terrain surrounding campus.
The ceramics program brings some of the most place-specific opportunities on campus. Thaddeus Erdahl’s Head Games: Building Bold Sculpted Heads (Aug. 24–28) includes a firing in The Bascom’s soda kiln, housed in the Virginia and Mike Campbell Soda Kiln Pavilion. Hand-built and gas-powered, the kiln produces rich, atmospheric surfaces by spraying a sodium solution into the chamber at high temperature. The results can’t be replicated in a standard kiln, and they can only be experienced here.
The fall workshops build toward two signature events. The 16th Annual Dazzling Dahlia Festival (September 10–12) gathers horticulture and the visual arts across a weekend of floral installations, a juried Single Bloom Competition, a Studio Member Pottery Show, and free gallery exhibitions. Three workshops are woven directly into the festival: a floral arranging session with Christy Curcuru on opening morning, a beginner collage class with Caryn Raming on the closing afternoon, and a dahlia-inspired painting workshop with Cath Connolly Hudson on September 5, each centered on locally grown mountain dahlias.
Two weeks later, on September 26, the 16th Annual Bascom Clay Symposium brings Alexander Thierry, Andrew Godfrey Shaw, and Tiffany Thomas to the Dave Drake Studio for a day of demonstrations and conversation on surface treatment in contemporary ceramics. The symposium is free and open to all.
The Bascom’s workshop program is one expression of its broader mission, to keep the visual arts accessible and alive on the Plateau. The full schedule is available at TheBascom.org or by calling (828) 526-4949.
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