In-Person Class: Nature Sketching at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden

Join the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for a relaxing session of nature sketching at the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens to celebrate our organizations’ collaboration on Rooted in Place, an exhibition of tree-focused works by Georgia O’Keeffe currently on view at the Museum.
This class will take place at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden’s outdoor classroom, where instructor Sudeshna Sengupta will begin with an interactive demonstration of how to capture trees, dry twigs, leaves, seedpods, flowers, and buds using nature-sketching tools like watercolor pencils, graphite pencils, sketch pens, and more. After receiving guidance in a variety of styles and techniques, participants will create their own observational nature sketches inspired by their surroundings with plenty of opportunity for more individual guidance from the instructor.

All supplies and drinking water will be provided. Participants are encouraged to bring their own snacks.

About Rooted in Place:
Many of us are familiar with Georgia O’Keeffe’s explorations of flowers, however, an even more persistent botanical subject in her work was trees. Throughout her life, O’Keeffe returned over and over to depictions and descriptions of trees, in paintings, sketches, watercolors, and even in her letters. She captured trees in drawings and paintings from her travels around the world and from the places she made home.
Rooted in Place offers a collection of her studies of trees, from the piñon and cottonwoods near her homes in New Mexico, to maples at Lake George and palm trees in the Caribbean. In addition, we have partnered with the Santa Fe Botanical Garden to include further information about the botanical nature of a subject that caught O’Keeffe’s fascination again and again. The exhibition will run until August 1, 2024.

About the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens:
The Santa Fe Botanical Garden celebrates, cultivates and conserves the rich botanical heritage and biodiversity of our region.
In partnership with nature, we demonstrate our commitment through education, science, conservation, community service, presentation of the arts, and the sustainable management of our public garden.
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This class is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. Children are welcome to participate alongside their adults.
Space is limited, reservations required. Please email [email protected] or call 505.946.1000 for assistance with event registration.

Weather permitting, this program will take place at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, 715 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505. Registrants will be notified 24 hours in advance if the lesson is to be canceled.

About the Instructor:
Sudeshna Sengupta’s career as a teaching artist spans multiple decades, continents, and cultures that inform her pedagogy for decolonizing studio art. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1985 from Visva-Bharati, an international university founded in India, by the humanist poet Tagore, the first non-European Nobel Laureate (1913). After teaching art and design at college level in New Delhi, Seattle, and California, she taught at NMSU-Alamogordo, where she established its first intaglio printmaking studio in 1995. Since moving to Santa Fe a few years ago, she has been teaching credit courses in online studio art at the Santa Fe Community College. She also conducts workshops and short courses and presents lectures and community-based art events for various age groups with civic, cultural, and community organizations in the US and in India, often with a focus on multicultural and inter-cultural experiences that emphasize human, cultural, and environmental connectedness through creativity. To see her art please visit: https://notes-and-doodles.com
Registration (all supplies are included) Members $35/Non-members $45

Note that all program times are in Mountain Time.