ART and Nature with Lynda Reeves McIntyre

Week of April 11, 2026

Earth Art, Environmental Art, Art and Nature!
Throughout time the power and beauty of the natural world have inspired artists, shamans, everyday people and they have often responded by art making. This dialog between the natural world and the artist is sometimes a collaboration, sometimes a confrontation, sometimes a questioning and often reveals inspired beauty, power and insight. Join recognized artist and Professor Dr. Lynda Reeves McIntyre in an engaging slide presentation of compelling and celebrated works demonstrating this artist/nature/spirit collaboration. Join her, too, in three separate but related art workshops engaging participants (novice to professional) in seeing, drawing and art making in the remarkable landscape of Rancho La Puerta.

Exercise your eyes, hands and spirit.

Materials will be supplied (but participants may bring their own favorite media, if they wish.) Space is limited.

Art Workshop I
SEEING and DRAWING
In this workshop we will focus on the process of observation and drawing. We will attempt to really “see” the relationships between objects, their boundaries, their shapes, and their edges. We will be working outside, weather permitting, and attempt to not only see and draw natural and botanical forms but to give line “life” and to explore qualities that can enhance or expand the sense of shape and form. We will work toward fluidity and shaping space. We will be learning a way of looking that will assist us in capturing where and how something sits in space.

This is fun, fluid, surprising and relaxing. This is a skill you can take effortlessly on your morning hike or use while observing your environment wherever you are. Absolutely no experience is necessary, the approach and workshop is appropriate and engaging for skilled artists, also.

Art Workshop II
DRAWING- SHAPE TAKES FORM
Focusing on observations of light and dark, values and shading, we will look beyond the simple edges of objects in space and really begin to “see” how light and shadow help us perceive and express form. How do you make that outline of an orange become a sphere, become textural? How does one capture the shadowing on rocks or the cast shadow of a tree? We will work outside, weather permitting, and focus on this powerful landscape, rocks and tree formations. Participants will merge looking, seeing, placement, form and shading as they explore and express the spirit and depth of the landscape through a variety of techniques and materials. Fun, active, and totally engaging, the practice itself is meditative, energizing, focused and very relaxing.

Absolutely no previous experience is necessary, yet skilled artists should enjoy this workshop. Participants in the first drawing workshop are enthusiastically invited to attend this workshop. One can simple explore this new approach or can integrate it with approaches from the previous workshop.

Art Workshop III
GESTURE DRAWING and MOVING MEDITATION
This workshop is about energy and movement and their translation into drawing. Gesture drawing is a lively, quick and active approach to drawing. This drawing goes beyond the shape of an object in space, towards how one can express weight, energy, movement and relationships through active line quality. We will hopefully work with a Tai Chi or Yoga class but the approach can easily be applied to landscape and figurative work. How can a line express the active twist of a torso, the transition from posture to posture of many active meditative practices or the craggy fingers of a grapevine as it reaches toward the sun? How can a simple line express a blade of grass swaying in the wind or a dense and heavy boulder weighted to the ground? How can we use a variety of lines to reveal not only where things are but also how they feel or where their energy is placed or moving?

This process of drawing is itself energizing, immediate, direct and almost scribble-like at first. We may take a small hike to an inspiring site or work with a moving figure. These exercises will energize us into “active” seeing that is reflected and expressed in active drawing.
No previous experience is required yet; again, this workshop will be appropriate for skilled drawers. All participants in drawing workshops II and I are enthusiastically invited to attend. One can simple explore this new approach or can integrate it with approaches from the previous workshops.

 

Lynda Reeves McIntyre, Ph.D., trained as a painter and a dancer at the University of Massachusetts, Hunter College and Yale University. Her doctorate is in Aesthetics. She weaves her training in painting, dance, Buddhist study and aesthetics into her teaching. Dr. McIntyre had her first major show in New York at 21. She has since received numerous awards, including those from the NEA, the MacDowell Foundation, the JFK Center, the ICCE, the VCCA and the Getty Foundation. She has been awarded art fellowships abroad to Australia, the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Bhutan, Cuba, France and Italy where she often teaches painting in the summers and, most recently in Bonaire and New Mexico. Her work is shown throughout the U.S, Europe and the Pacific Rim and is in corporate and private collections in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Dr. McIntyre is Professor Emeritus in Studio Art and the former Chairman of the University of Vermont’s Department of Art and Art History.