Mixed Media Collage: The Art of Surprise with Mary Bollington (6 classes)

This is a 6-week series, meeting on Fridays from January 30 through March 6.

What if you could take an art class where mistakes are good? Where realism is optional and free play is the rule?

This mixed media collage class begins with the idea that making art starts with easy upper-body movement to generate works of the imagination. We will loosen up physically and psychically, using movement and our mistakes to generate new ideas and images.

Mixed Media Collage: The Art of Surprise, with Mary Boxley Bullington

Join me for a rollicking series of experiments in making your own collage papers and collages by mixing acrylics, oil pastel, gesso, and other media of your choice. We will start in the footsteps of the Surrealists creating a collaborative “Exquisite Corpse” and go from there to painting and scribbling our personal collage papers. Then, from this handiwork, we will construct collages of people, animals, and flora bound to alarm, amuse and amaze us. As we work, we will peruse some of the works of Dubuffet, the artists in CO.BR.A., and Romare Bearden.

You will need to bring:

• Good scissors
• a 4”or 6” brayer
• white gesso
• acrylic paints (suggested colors--primary or napthol red, primary or cad yellow, pthalo or primary blue, magenta, yellow oxide*)
• Whatever drawing materials you like, from sharpies to Crayola crayons to pencils and charcoal, and sketch paper. (Mary will sell you at cost 5 sheets of rag mixed media paper -- $35.)
• Two paper grocery bags—one for trash, one for scraps.

Mary will provide black gesso, glue, oil pastels, Kleenex, and paper towels.

Highly suggested—you bring an apron or wear old, stained clothes. You may want latex gloves and a sketchbook.

*Material available online at :

• brayers
• Ebony Splendor or other good synthetic brushes (#6 and #8 round, 1” bright, #2 liner brush suggested)
• Soho acrylic paints
• gesso

A list will be provided on request, but if you already have acrylics and gesso, bring them.

Liquitex and Golden and other brands are fine. (SoHo Artist Acrylics Basic Colors Set of eight 75 ml tubes is simply a good student grade for about $28.)

About the Artist

A self-taught artist working in mixed media and collage, Mary Boxley Bullington taught English and the Humanities during the first half of her adult life. After finishing her doctorate in English medieval literature at Indiana University in 1993, she moved back to the Blue Ridge Mountains to her native city of Roanoke, VA, and rented her first studio. Seven months later she had her first solo gallery show in Charleston, WV. Since 1998, she has painted and collaged full-time in her home studios. She is a founding member of The Market Gallery in downtown Roanoke and of the Roanoke Open Studios Tour, which she directed from 2005-2015. Her award-winning work is included in the collections of Virginia Tech, Carilion Hospitals, UVA Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health, and private collections across the country. Bullington is the author of the text in Native Grace: Prints of the New World, 1590-1976 (Charlottesville: Thomasson-Grant, 1987).

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