West Wind School of Continuing Education: Offering Individual Instruction in the following activities, avocations/pursuits:
Painting and Drawing: Because our approach is about individual instruction, students will be helped and supported based on their involvement with visual art. The fundamentals are about learning the elements and principles of visual art and that particular vocabulary so there is common ground for the discussion. Next is practice in drawing using a number of proven exercises to develop skill in both seeing and execution. The next phase is a discussion about color and paint and the methods and techniques of oil painting. After using oil pastels and finishing some exercises using them, the student may like to move into oil painting. Along the way will be discussions about the history of painting using slides and books to support the important ideas behind it all. Perhaps the most important idea is that each person has something special to bring to the pursuit of art. A good finger painting by a child will be strong in many of the elements and principles of visual art. We may want to aspire to be a Rembrandt or Velasquez or a Jackson Pollack or someone in between. There is plenty of room for you and who you are within that broad context! Furniture Design and Fabrication: Students will be taught and supported according to their knowledge and experience with wood and woodworking techniques. Fine woodworking and joinery is based on knowledge of wood and how wood moves as it absorbs atmospheric moisture and then dries out. One needs to know about this first. Next comes the design process and the ability to draw what it is you want to build. Students will want to have a project in mind that we will build together- a cabinet, table, bench and, maybe later, a chair. Chairs are very interesting and challenging. Once the drawings are done and we are sure of what we are doing, the student will learn about the machines and hand tools and about the importance of chisels and planes and how to sharpen them. This is a critical skill. Anything can be built and built properly using a step by step approach. No shortcuts! Guitar There are many ways to play the guitar! So many styles! The fundamentals have to do with learning chords and the fundamentals of chord theory. Most songs are based on three chords! Not so complicated! It is easy to get started on the guitar and play songs you and your friends can sing . And yet, the guitar is also complex and difficult because of its physicality and because the notes run across the strings and not in a straight line like the piano or flute. Our specialty is finger picking, where the thumb keeps an alternating bass going while the melody notes are played on the treble strings. One of the effective ways to teach this is to use guitar tablature, a form of notation that is easy to follow and provides the moves for both the right and left hands. Folk music, jazz standards, country blues, and bossa nova can all be played using this approach and almost all other kinds of music as well. Fishing and Fly Fishing/Casting From the spawning runs of perch in the spring right through the ice fishing days of winter, fishing is a part of rural life, a joy of the outdoors whether it is casting a fly to a rising trout you will catch and release or trolling a spinner and worm for a feisty yellow or white perch for the frying pan. They are good! Here in the upper valley we have all the fishing one could want- bass, pike, perch and trout as well as hornpout,(brown bullhead) at night. We have had half a century’s experience doing this plus three years instructing at the Joan and Lee Wulff fly fishing school on the Beaverkill River in the Catskills, where fly fishing began in America! Joan and Lee are both in the fly fishing hall of fame and were my great teachers even as I was one of their instructors at the school. If you want to learn how to fish or get better at some aspect of it, now is your chance! Photography, Digital Photography, and Photoshop The elements and principles of visual art also apply to photography. It is important to know about composition, contrast, and all the rest of the visual vocabulary mentioned in the painting/drawing section. The next thing is learning how to operate your digital camera! The principles relating to the old mechanical gear are still true. One has to know what the shutter speeds do and what the aperture openings do- the f stops. They control motion and depth of field. This takes some time and practice. Today, instead of film development and printmaking in a darkroom we download the pictures from the camera to the computer, adjust them using Photoshop, and then printing them or sending them out as email attachments. We have long experience teaching all this. Basic Website Design using Dreamweaver In our digital world a website is a wonderful way to communicate what one does and wants to share with the world. It is not rocket science, especially now that programs such as Dreamweaver create the html code for the designer so that the designer can concentrate on how things look to the viewer without being limited by knowledge of the code. Using Photoshop and Dreamweaver the student will learn to create and maintain his/ her own website. The Teacher My name is Ricker Winsor. I was born in Illinois and grew up in New York where my father was a television producer. I moved to Lyme, New Hampshire when I was twenty five years old back in 1970 and fixed up an old house. My curriculum vitae will follow but I want to say something about how I qualify to teach all the activities/pursuits I propose to teach. Learning is a passion. It has been the priority of my whole life- to follow the artist path and to try to learn more and get better at the things that interest me. As a young man I worked as a photojournalist for magazines including Time and Newsweek and many others, and was an associate at Magnum Photos, an international photographic agency started by Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa. In graduate school I studied with photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, among others, and began painting and drawing. I was also able to take Tage Frid’s woodworking class. He was one of the most influential woodworking teachers of the last fifty years, maybe 100! My partner, Francine Vidal, who was one of the original directors of the AVA Gallery, and I moved from the Upper Valley to the Catskills in New York in 1985. That’s where I started Winsor Custom Woodwork and Design and worked with the Joan and Lee Wulff Flyfishing School. My furniture business was successful for 10 years before I decided to go back into teaching, which I had done both in graduate school and at the New Hampton School in New Hampton, N.H. I started their first photography program. My cabinet and furniture customers included Lawrence Rockefeller Jr., Louis Auchincloss, Jud Hirsch and many others, both in the Catskills and in New York City. The Auchincloss house was featured in Architectural Digest back in 1990. In 1994 I was hired to become the Chair of the Art Department at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington ,where I stayed for 8 years and then taught for another 2 years at the American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I taught painting and drawing, furniture design and construction, and digital photography and all the while, over all those years,continued to paint, draw, and make photographs. The digital program in photography and video I started in Dhaka, Bangladesh is now in its 6th year, having been taken over by one of my colleagues. I moved back to the Upper Valley in 2004, built the West Wind Studio in Bradford, primarily as a big painting studio space and big woodworking shop on ten acres on the Fairground Road. I am on the board of Vermont North by Hand, a local group of artists sponsoring a studio tour in October, and am a member of the Vermont Craft Council. Also, I am a member of the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Mass. and my paintings are for sale at Stowe Craft Gallery in Stowe, Vermont. Last year my drawings were featured in Bert Dodson’s new book, Drawing from the Imagination, available at Amazon and in bookstores. For the last three years I worked part time at Dartmouth as the administrator in charge of the Individual Instruction Program. I sang with the Handel Society in their 200th anniversary year. About guitar, I started as a teenager and have been performing for the last twenty years. I have recorded 3 CD’s and 3 audio tapes before that. I perform regularly at the Canoe Club in Hanover and at the Elixir Café in White River Junction. These interests have been the focus of my life and they have enriched my life greatly. They can do that for you too! The School Facility The West Wind Studio and School was built in 2004 on ten acres of land in Bradford, Vermont on the Fairground Road, just a mile and a half above Main Street. It consists of living space plus a gallery/ studio of 650 square feet and 8 foot ceilings and a fully-equipped woodworking shop of the same size. Moreover, a pond of 300 feet was dug and has been wonderfully successful in becoming a natural part of the landscape and good home for rainbow and brook trout! Purpose- The Students Continuing education has been the inspiration of my life, both in the learning and the teaching. There are many adults, particularly in our area, who have had successful careers and now have the time and the means to see what else there is of interest to pursue. Many times at my gallery shows I have heard people say, “I always wanted to paint”, or “I wish I could paint”. Or I hear at my concerts, “I used to play the guitar but gave it up” or, about woodworking, “I have an idea for a bench I want to build but I don’t have a shop”. The West Wind Studio and School can help with that, particularly because the instruction is individual. That makes all the difference, because the teacher doesn’t have to try to figure out where the common denominator is as when dealing with a group. The teacher can learn about the student, his/her abilities and interests, and start building from that place. Fees The fee is $25 an hour plus materials, a cost which is negligible or substantial depending on what the student wants to do. ! Ricker Winsor 802-222-3389 rickerw@yahoo.com (continued- the curriculum vitae) The Curriculum Vitae:
Ricker Winsor (continued below) West Wind Studio PO 383 Bradford, Vermont 05033 802-222-3389 Education: Northfield Mount Hermon School 1959-1963 Brown University 1963-1967 Rhode Island School of Design 1975-1978 BFA and MFA I am a member of the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts and the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, New Hampshire. My work is also on display at Stowe Craft in Stowe, Vermont. I am on the board of Vermont North By Hand, a group of regional artists who offer two studio tours every October. Also I participate in the statewide Vermont Craft Council Studio Tour on Memorial Day every year. In 2000 I received a painting fellowship and residency at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain. My drawings are featured in Bert Dodson’s new book titled “Keys to Drawing from the Imagination”. It is the sequel to his classic “Keys to Drawing”. I do ink drawings using reed pens and brushes and I paint in oil, almost always starting the work outside in the “plein air” tradition. Exhibits: I have exhibited in galleries in New York, Seattle, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island for the past 30 years. See separate exhibition list. Teaching: 2002-2004 I was the high-school visual arts teacher at the American International School of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a K-12 private school of about 650 students. I taught Foundation Art with an emphasis on drawing and painting, Advanced Art and AP Art. I also taught digital photography and digital video. 1994-2002 I was the Art Department Chair at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington. There were six visual arts teachers in our department and during my tenure we built the 1.5 million dollar Brown Center for the Visual Arts. I taught painting and drawing and photography as well as furniture and directed the exhibits program at the Brown Center. 1975-1978 As a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design I was granted a teaching fellowship. 1971-1974 I was a member of the Art Department at the New Hampton School in New Hampton, New Hampshire where I created and ran a photography program. During this time I completely renovated an old house in Lyme, New Hampshire and began learning woodwork and building skills. Other Experience: I am a painter and have regular exhibitions of my work at regional galleries. I also sing and play acoustic country blues on the guitar. My first CD- Mama Don’t Worry, was released in 1999. A new one- Blues from Bangladesh - was released in 2004, and another, Shades of Blue, with harmonica ace Keith Friedland, in 2007. I perform at local venues and festivals. 1985-1994 I started and ran a woodworking business in Neversink, New York. We designed and made fine quality furniture and cabinets for such clients a Lawrence Rockefeller Jr., Louis Auchincloss, David Halberstam, Judd Hirsch and Amanda Burden. The Auchincloss house was featured in Architectural Digest. 1985-1988 I taught at the Joan and Lee Wulff Fly Fishing School on the Beaverkill River in Lew Beach, New York. 1985-1986 I taught Art at New Hope, a residence of mentally disabled adults, in South Fallsburg, New York 1980-1985 I was the Exhibits Designer at Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and also a photographer for the college. 1980 I designed, edited, and produced the coffee-table book, Harry Callahan:Color for Matrix Publications in Providence, Rhode Island. This book won the U.S. Graphic Arts Association award for Best Illustrated Book of 1980. 1979 After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design I lived in France and continued painting and studying painting. 1967-1971 I had a professional career as a photojournalist and was affiliated with Magnum Photos in NYC. I had many magazine assignments between 1967 and 1971 and was the still photographer on two feature films. In 1970 I studied with Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park. 1963-1967 At Brown University I was in the English Honors Program and was very active in the theater. I worked in summer stock for two summers and appeared in TV soap operas and commercials as an actor. |