“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at — not copy it.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

Join us for a special collaborative watercolor workshop with artists Sean Hudson and Deborah Stein sharing their ideas and teaching together in celebration of LDBA’s newest exhibition I Am Just A Visitor, their new two-person show in our gallery!

Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s touchdown into Northern New Mexico and the ways in which she observed and memorialized its landscapes, flora and her collection of bones into the American imagination, Deborah and Sean will take you on a journey into the high desert, via their unique perspectives.

Deborah will fill our studio with wildflowers, antlers and bones and, through the lens of color and close looking, illuminate the ways Ms. O’Keeffe looked at a flower, saw form in blanched bones and breathed life and energy into these subjects belonging to the land as she helps you to explore ways you might translate the same with watercolor and gouache on paper. 

Sean will guide you in expressing mood through landscape, with exercises to render light, weather, and landforms, inspiring you to develop a personal emotional language in your work: consider the melancholy of a rainstorm, the sense of luminosity and optimism in a sunset, or the fortitude of towering cliffs. 

Classes will be divided into two groups so that each will enjoy a 90 minute session* with each artist. Between sessions we’ll break for refreshments in the gallery to explore their show before switching between atelier and courtyard classrooms. 

Sean and Deborah will build upon each other’s teaching so you will leave with a composition exploring each of their perspectives on Georgia’s world and a deeper understanding of her works and the different ways she used paint, especially watercolor, to express the relationship between landscape and object in her beautifully rendered worlds. 

We’ll leave time at the end to show work and ideas between both groups and share a celebratory drink together to end this special workshop and exhibition!

These workshops are both instructional and exploratory, combining watercolor technique and intentional art-making. You’ll get a glimpse into Sean’s and Deborah’s creative minds and learn how to take watercolor to a new level of artistry for your own practice and curiosity. 
Sean Hudson is an Albuquerque based painter with a great love and curiosity for art and its ability to transform our perception of the world. He’s a working studio artist and a passionate teacher with a particular aptitude for encouraging and inspiring personal narratives and unique styles at all levels in the artistic path.

Deborah Stein lives, paints and writes in the Embudo Valley in New Mexico and sometimes in New York City. She studied the passing on of art traditions with a family of toymakers in Northern India, worked with NYC school kids as a museum educator at the Museum of Arts & Design and has traveled and taught alternative arts education workshops about seeing and translating the world in new ways for adults and children for a lifetime

All Skill Levels welcome! 

Limited to 24 participants, divided into two groups. 

*Please let us know if you are taking the class with a friend or family member(s) and we’ll be sure to keep your group together!

Saturday, August 23, 2025
1-4:30 pm

Class limit: 24

La Petite Ecole
717 Canyon Road Unit C
Santa Fe, NM 87501