Book Review: Creative Art Workshop

Postcard from New Hampshire ©2001 (For Sale)

14"x 11" collage
(acrylic, ink, crayon on Indian handmade paper
unframed, 'floated' on archival mat)

I splurged and bought two new books.

I reviewed one of the two, An Illustrated Life here.


The second book I purchased was Ann Baldwin's Creative Art Workshop, a spiral bound, large format book filled with Ms. Baldwin's work, wisdom and recommendations.

In '02, Ms. Baldwin gave a class to some of my Portland (OR) art friends which I missed attending by a few days. When they shared their work from the class I was actually feeling somewhat jealous, a feeling I don't often have. Since then I have wished a class would come up somewhere near me--wherever I was!

Unfortunately in seven years that hasn't happened so when I discovered she had a book out, I immediately put it on my must have wish list at the big "A."

Now I have it and I'm not disappointed.

Ann Baldwin, a self taught artist, has given herself permission to take risks in her artwork, and create intuitively. As I've followed her website, and her career for some time, I see how she has changed, grown and moved on to new approaches on canvas or paper.

She uses acrylics for the most part, but she also does some wonderful encaustics, with oil, and appears to have moved away from her mixed media collages to more abstract work.

The books covers her entire oeuvre, and provides a few excellent projects on how she approaches materials, design, colour and composition.

Although I have a good selection of collage books, I always find one tidbit or another that is new (to me) and in Ann Baldwin's book I found several, including two new suggested ways to integrate collage elements of differing weights onto a page--mixed media crayons, various weights of medium (my preferred method) and just plain accepting the differences by pointing them out with outlining.

I also appreciated reading and seeing her clear depiction of the use of stencils and various other forms of lettering, and how she uses many in the same piece. And I can see some good use of all the stencils Tom gave him a week ago.

Overall I would give this book, a 5 (five) on a scale from 1-5 (one to five), and feel pleased that I purchased this book now as I am finding myself challenged with some of the very issues addressed in Ms. Baldwin's book.