Listowel Arts Festival
June 20 – 24, 2018
Workshop Prices Vary
Coinciding with the summer solstice, this inaugural international fine art festival will celebrate the work of local and visiting visual artists, and harness our collective energies to collaborate, learn and create.
Belgian mosaic artist Mireille Swinnen will teach two workshops at the festival while in Listowel for an artist residency with Irish artist Olive Stack.
Work by Student Brenda Pokorny
Workshop: Mosaic – River of Smalti
Instructor: Mireille Swinnen
Date: Friday June 22 – Sunday, June 24, 2018
Time: 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Skill Level: All Levels
Venue: Olive Stack Gallery
Fee: €400 (includes materials)
Maximum Participants: 8
In this three-day workshop you’ll get a chance to experience what it is like to work with smalti in a painterly style, but more importantly how to work with a full palette of colors in smalti. Starting out from an image you bring in or one we find together, the instructor will help you translate your image into mosaic by explaining one-on-one and every step along the way what choice of colors to use, what shape to give your tesserae, what andamento to use, where to put your lights and darks, why to use warm or cold colors, why big or small pieces, etc etc., until you achieve the desired result.
This is a fool-proof procedure. No matter what your skills are, you will go home with a serious understanding of what smalti can do for your mosaics and the piece that you walk away with will be a work of art, not just a sample.
As a surplus and to further your better understanding of good mosaics, each day, the instructor will show a vast array of mosaics on powerpoint for you to examine and for her to demonstrate how these powerful techniques are used in the very appealing works of the Spilimbergo students, one of the major mosaic schools in Italy.
Workshop: Micro Mosaic
Instructor: Mireille Swinnen
Date: Wed 20th & Thurs 21st June 2018
Time: 9.30am – 5.30 pm
Skill Level: All Levels
Venue: Olive Stack Gallery
Fee: €150 (Includes Materials)
Maximum Participants: 9
In this two day workshop, you’ll learn how to cut and manipulate pre-shaped filati in order to create a unique pendant. Various shapes of filati will be introduced and the different use of the petals and shapes will be demonstrated to form a variety of flowers. Mireille will discuss possible types of adhesives and traditional filati cutting, as well as the resources to obtain these kinds of materials.
Listowel Visual Arts Week welcomes the return of many former Olive Stack Gallery Artists in Residence to teach workshops, exhibit and reunite with friends in Listowel – the creative home of this growing international family of artists! The festival will mark the 20th anniversary of Olive Stack Gallery (Est 1998), celebrate the residency and the growing and thriving visual arts scene in the heritage town of Listowel, Co Kerry, Ireland.
See the full list of classes offered or register here.
About Mireille:
Mireille is Belgian by nationality but has lived abroad all her adult life. She spent the past four years on a tour through California teaching workshops on how to use smalti in a painterly style, her preferred medium of expression. Mireille is a proud and celebrated member of Society of American Mosaic Artists and Contemporary Mosaic Artists. Her work his widely coveted and collected.
Over the next three years, Mireille hopes to bring much-needed foreign exposure and new techniques to her most dedicated students in her Belgium based studio, the Orsoni studio in Venice, Italy, and through sporadic tours to the US East and West coast.
Mosaic Art Retreats 