This immersive five-day workshop invites artists to embrace a materials-first, process-rich approach to image-making. Through an intuitive sequence of creating, layering, and transforming, you’ll generate a large body of work while exploring the expressive potential of surface, texture, and mark.
We begin with acrylic monotypes—using plate-based techniques (such as gelli printing) to produce a library of vibrant, textured papers. These become the foundation for collage-based compositions that evolve through tearing, cutting, assembling, and rearranging.
As your surfaces take shape, we’ll shift into embellishment: working back in with R&F Pigment Sticks®, pastels, graphite, Posca pens, and other mixed media to deepen contrast, rhythm, and personal gesture. You’ll explore both intuitive and formal strategies for building depth, movement, and meaning.
Expect to:
• Work in multiples to loosen perfectionism and discover recurring motifs
• Use color, line, and shape to build dynamic compositions
• Explore your personal visual language through guided prompts and experimentation
• Receive individual feedback and engage in group dialogue
Whether you’re an experienced artist looking to refresh your process, or new to mixed media and ready to dive in, this workshop offers a generous, supportive environment for exploration and discovery.
All levels welcome. Curiosity required.
Please note there is a materials fee of $25 payable to the instructor.
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.
Her work invites close observation, revealing traces of language, symbolic marks, and richly worked surfaces that suggest both presence and absence. Since the loss of her son in 2019, her material choices and rituals—burning, sewing, layering—have become deeply connected to mourning and memory. Each painting becomes a meditation on what remains, where discovery unfolds through process and perception.
Pressman earned her MFA in Painting from Bard College and a BA in Fine Arts (Ceramics and Sculpture) from Douglass College, Rutgers University. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., including at Susan Eley Fine Art (New York and Hudson, NY), Addington Gallery (Chicago), The Painting Center (NYC), Causey Contemporary, and R&F Handmade Paints. Notable solo shows include Messages (2023), Downtown Debut (2022), and Passing Through (2015). Her work has also been exhibited internationally and appears in numerous corporate and private collections, including Hyatt Regency, McKinsey Financial, Omni Hotels, and Sun Chemical Corporation.
In addition to her studio practice, Pressman is a sought-after educator and workshop leader, teaching nationally and internationally at universities, art centers, and conferences, including The International Encaustic Conference (Provincetown, MA), where she has also curated and presented digital studio tours. She has served as a juror and curator, most recently for The Blue Show at The Painting Center (NYC) and Sense of Place at Monmouth University.
Her work has been featured in Cold Wax Medium by Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin, the Huffington Post, Art Speak, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
She is represented by Susan Eley Fine Art (NYC and Hudson, NY) and Addington Gallery (Chicago).
Rates & Enrollment
Day Student Tuition: $1,170.00
Full 5-Day Package*: $2,887.85 – $3,101.69
*5-Day Workshop Package includes: Tuition for 5 full class days, 6 nights of dinner, lodging, breakfast, daily cookie and fruit breaks, unlimited coffee and tea, and welcoming wine and cheese reception. Your choice between a room to yourself (single occupancy) or bring a friend and split a room (double occupancy).
Get more information about your options to enroll here.