Summary: This retreat invites artists to move beyond their primary disciplines and uncover untapped dimensions of their creative voice. From merging text and image and writing to short films, you’ll awaken new ways of seeing and making.
Full Course Description:
This workshop will focus on freeing one’s inner visionary. We will approach this ambitious task from a variety of vantage points, which include: working outside of and beyond one’s primary discipline, genre-defying collaborative projects, immersive drawing experiences, merging text and image, sound bowl meditations, and reflecting on pressing questions that arise out of one’s practice as a working artist.
We will consider what remains untapped within each of our creative lives, and how we can recognize and articulate this hidden potentiality.
After a week of creating in beautiful settings, from seafront arcades to mountain hikes and rooftop writing sessions, the week will culminate in a presentation and celebration of participant works, as well as short films showcasing each participant's artistic practice.
MEET THE ARTIST
Kristina Darling and Joalida Smit
Kristina Darling is an internationally recognized writer, editor, and educator whose work is distinguished by its intellectual rigor, formal innovation, and deep commitment to literary community. Her writing is widely known for challenging conventional boundaries of genre and form. As an editor and mentor, she is especially known for championing innovative, hybrid, and experimental work, and for fostering spaces where dialogue, curiosity, and artistic risk are central.
Joalida Smit is a former Clinical Psychologist and Pediatric Neuropsychologist. She started painting as a way to cope with the isolation imposed by the COVID lock down, resulting in her first solo exhibition at The Gallery in Lake Forest, Illinois in 2023. This sold out show marked the pivot from clinician to artist. Her large, oversized oil on canvas paintings captures the austerity of the natural world and contemplate existential themes of passing time, transformation and the inherent fragility of life.
EXAMPLE ITINERARY
Day 1 | Arrival
Participants will begin the week with a welcome to the Chateau and Gardens at 2pm. After aperitifs on the terrace, the instructors will lead an informal introductory discussion, where we generate questions and prompts arising out of the participants’ own artistic practice. These driving questions will be addressed in future meditations and interdisciplinary sessions. Participants can also look forward to an introductory tutorial on documenting their artistic practice and their experience at Chateau La Napoule.
Day 2 | The Inner Sabateur & the Inner Visionary
After a seafront walk at the Chateau and breakfast, participants can look forward to a soundbowl and guided meditation followed by an immersive drawing session in which we examine what is holding us back in our creative life and ways of freeing our inner visionary. After lunch and a LNAF museum tour, the day will culminate in a free writing session where we explore the morning’s discussion further. The day ends with a delicious dinner at the Chateau.
Day 3 | Unknown as Material for the Unconscious
The morning will begin with breakfast and guided meditation, followed by a contour drawing session. Then, using the contour drawings as a foundation, we will create collaborative texts that defy categorization. In doing so, we will imagine the untapped potentialities of ourselves and our collaborators. Participants will be free to respond to their collaborators’ works in written, drawn, cinematic, or image-based form.
Day 4 | Collaboration & the Individual Artistic Practice
The day will commence with breakfast followed by guided visualization on the Chateau rooftop, overlooking the sea where we free ourselves from our inner critic and embrace our inner visionary. The day will be spent on individual practice focusing on merging image and text. Find a spot that resonates in the gardens or by the ocean and set your creative self free. After lunch at the Villa, participants can look forward to a stunning hike to San Peyre and dinner in Theoule.
Day 5 | The Dialogic Imagination
The day will begin with breakfast and sound bowl meditation, followed by a morning creative session focusing on collage and collaboration, then lunch and afternoon time to polish participant process videos and an evening celebration and screening of work from the week.