Lisa Pressman

Featured Class:
Where the River Meets the Sea: A 4-Day Art Intensive
Tell Me What You See Out The Window

Thursday, August 6th - Sunday, August 9th

$1,100.00 for 18 hours of instruction

Set at the confluence of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, this intimate 4-day retreat invites artists to slow down, pay attention, and respond to the subtle drama of the landscape. Through mixed media, drawing, acrylic, and collage, you’ll explore how the outer world and the inner world inform one another.

This is not landscape painting in a traditional sense. Instead, we will work from sensation, weather, rhythm, atmosphere, and the quiet things you notice when you take time to really look.

Each day we will move through a process of look → respond → transform, building a body of work grounded in observation, experimentation, and personal interpretation.

This retreat offers time, space, and guidance for deep creative engagement — with no pressure to produce finished masterpieces. The goal is to discover new ways of seeing and translating experience through material play.

All levels welcome. Limited to 8 participants for a spacious, supportive experience.

A woman with glasses and short brown hair creating abstract art on a table with black and gold paint, holding a handful of mixed materials. The table has various art supplies, and a blackboard and whiteboard are in the background in a classroom setting.

DAILY SCHEDULE (10–4 each day)

Day 1 — Arrival & Noticing

  • Slow warm-up: guided seeing + simple drawing

  • Atmospheric mark-making

  • Studies based on light, sound, tide, and what’s “out the  window”

  • Building a library of textures and beginnings

Day 2 — Layers & Responses

  • Acrylic explorations

  • Working in multiples

  • Collage and paper play, gel printing

  • Responding to yesterday’s marks in new ways

  • Letting rhythm, movement, and weather influence choices

Day 3 — Revision & Depth

  • Editing, cropping, reworking

  • Strengthening composition

  • Exploring contrast, space, pacing

  • Building a series, not single works

  • One-on-one conversations with Lisa

Day 4 — Cohesion & Reflection

Bringing pieces toward completion

Pulling threads of connection

Gentle group share and discussion

Developing a “back-home” plan to continue the work

 

Materials : A fee person person $25 for added materials 

Some R&F Pigment sticks and Drawng oils will be supplies.

Students bring:

  • 8x8 watercolor paper. I prefer hot press that has no texture( at least 20 sheets) tea paper …https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71kXZ69jP5L._AC_SY240_.jpg

  • A few sheets of mixed-media or watercolor paper (11x14 or 9x12)

  • Acrylic paints (basic colors) combination of transparent and opaque. I like Golden fluid,, Liquetex or the Amsterdam. will list some colors

  • Brushes, brayers, squeegee, palette knives and small gelli arts gel plate

  • Glue stick + matte medium and gloss

  • Scissors + craft knife

  • A variety of water soluble drawing materials 

  • A small collection of papers to collage (old drawings, text, recyclable scraps)

  • Tape (masking/artist tape)

  • Baby wipes, rags, apron

Provided by host (or shared among students):

  • Tables, water containers

  • Newsprint or butcher paper

  • Extra collage paper, alcohol, murphys oil ( for cleaning acrylic stuff)

  • Spray bottles

  • A few cutting mats

  • Trash + recycling

Abstract painting with dark blue, black, and white splatters and streaks.
A woman with short dark hair, glasses, and a black shirt standing in front of an abstract, textured painting with warm tones of yellow, orange, and brown.

About Lisa Pressman

Lisa Pressman is a visual artist and educator whose abstract paintings explore memory, materiality, and transformation. Based in New Jersey, she works across encaustic, oil, cold wax, and mixed media, layering and manipulating surfaces through scraping, burning, stitching, and mark-making. These tactile processes reflect an ongoing engagement with themes of impermanence, grief, and the passage of time. Pressman's compositions often feature luminous color relationships, gestural energy, and excavated textures that evoke both ancient manuscripts and contemporary artifacts.

Group of women standing and sitting in an art studio, with paintings on the wall, some wearing aprons, smiling for the photo.

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