Oil Pastels with Liz Mowry - ArtShop Instructor Highlight

“Artists have come into this world to live out loud.” This is one of Liz Mowrey’s favorite art quotes. Liz is teaching our Oil Pastels class at ArtShop this week. She has been in the Artist-in-the-Schools program for ten years, working all over the state of Idaho while making her primary living as a graphic artist in Moscow. She then worked with Richard Young on the Art Bus out of the Boise Art Museum/Art Gallery for a year, teaching art at small schools within a 40 mile radius of Boise. She taught Language Arts and Art at a high school in Huntington, Oregon for three years, then moved to teach at Weiser Middle School in Weiser, Idaho, teaching Language Arts for eight years and then Art for fifteen years (with a high level writing class added in the last four years). When ask why she likes teaching this class and medium, Liz said, “Oil pastels are one of my favorite mediums to use, because I can ‘paint’ with drawing tools. I like to use a dark or black background because it makes the colors pop and I can let the lines in the art be the black of the paper and that gives it a depth.” Liz is inspired by patterns in nature: hay bales, sheep in a pasture, lines in fields, telephone lines with blackbirds, wheeling pigeons overhead, and so on. Liz is a special ArtShop instructor as she has taught at ArtShop since it began in 1981, skipping only the years 1985 and 1986.

ArtShop is this week, July 28-August 1, 2014, and is for kids grades 2 to 8. What makes ArtShop unique? It is a full week of art classes, each student participating in one visual arts class and one performance arts class, ending with the children performing at the Art on the Green festival.