Artist to add color to league's workshop

     Elizabeth A. Yarosz-Ash, a Wichita Falls artist and educator, will spend three days with local artists next month in a watercol­or workshop that focuses on classical color techniques.

     The workshop is a program of the North Texas Area Art League, and officials say the well-known artist and educator is a find for Denton area painters looking to improve their technique.

     Artists of all levels are invited to spend Sept. 22-24 with the artist in an intensive look at the use of red, yellow and blue, the primary colors that are the foundation for a painter’s entire palette.

“The use of those colors is quite traditional in terms of using it to make a lot other colors,” said Rob Erdle, a regent professor at the University of North Texas School of Art and a contemporary of the visiting artist.

“It’s interesting that, over history, artists have been successful using very few colors.  It sounds as if she is really going to work the value scale and how to use them to create a lot of other colors in an artist’s palette,” he said.

Ms. Yarosz-Ash had a solo exhibit in the East Gallery of the Center for the Visual Arts in February. The exhibit showed a range of work, from her irreverent and humorous dealings with the sacred to hex work in printmaking.

She returns to Denton seven months later to bring her perspective as both a painter and an educator to local artists.

       Ms. Yarosz-Ash is on the art faculty of Midwestern State University, but keeps up a busy exhibit schedule that brings her to small towns like Denton and far-off places like Taiwan.

In her artist’s statement, Ms. Yarosz-Ash says that her art is a dialogue with herself that “reveals my upbringing as a Catholic, and my independent lifestyle as an adult since I became 21.”

     She confirmed the autobio­graphical role of her painting in an interview prior to the solo exhibit. Ms. Yarosz-Ash paints with bold color and with a keen sense of the imperfections that make life and her subjects worth a viewer’s second glance.

The artist received her bache­lor’s degree in art in 1975 as a painting major at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.

She then cut a path through the Chau­tauqua Institution in New York, West Virginia University and finally to Ohio University in Athens, where she earned a mas­ter of line arts degree in painting in 1981. Her years in Ohio were pivotal, and the artist says she discovered a penchant for teach­ing art in addition to making art during that time.

She took a teaching position at Midwestern State University in 1981. She has flourished there, winning the school’s highest honor, the Hardin Foundation’s Distinguished Professor Award, in 1991.

     Mr. Erdle said Ms. Yarosz-Ash established a reputation for her­self in watercolor by working on a large scale. Until the 1970s, watercolorists typically painted on 22-inch by 30-inch paper. Then, the medium took enter­prising artists like Ms. Yarosz-­Ash larger, working on 30-inch by 40-inch “elephant paper,” Mr. Erdle said. She’s continued to grow, he said, dabbling in two-and three-dimensional work and printmaking.

     “She is quite a respected educa­tor in a sense that she is very well-rounded in terms of her theory and methodology” he said. “She does a lot of research, not only for her ideas but her methodology as well.”

     Mr. Erdle said local artists are sure to benefit from time with the demonstrator.   “Well, I think that she’s able to quickly target areas for each individual, for analysis and for opening up their own sort of paths for ideas,” he said.

     Ms. Yarosz-Ash has taken part in a total of 277 exhibits.

     In her workshop, Ms. Yarosz­-Ash will demonstrate her tech­niques and tips, show slide pre­sentations and give participants a chance to see a little-known process of making watercolor monotypes, a printing technique.

The workshop will be in the arts center, located at 400 E. Hickory St. in Denton.

     The reservation deadline for the workshop is Sept. 15. The cost is $130 for league members and $150 for non-members. A non-refundable deposit of $50 is required. For a complete work­shop schedule and supply list, and to make a workshop reserva­tion, visit the art league Web site at ntaal.org.

—Lucinda Breeding