Animal Reduction Relief Prints
with Monica James
Saturday, October 17
9 am - 12 pm
Intermediate - Advanced
Observational + Conceptual Relief Printing
Students begin with an animal of their choice and create a relief reduction print focused specifically on the patterns across the animal’s body. Rather than illustrating the full animal in detail, the emphasis is on translating surface structure—fur, feather, scale, markings, and value shifts—into simplified, intentional relief carving.
The goal is to reduce the animal into a visual system of pattern, rhythm, and material logic, where observation becomes abstraction through print.
Meet Your Instructor: Monica James
Monica Lynn James is an art educator and interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between abstraction and narrative, engaging histories of land, memory, and collective responsibility. Her work is informed by Indigenous American histories and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, with a focus on how these narratives continue to shape contemporary relationships to place and power.
Recent bodies of work were prompted by forest fires in California that threatened ancient sequoias, raising questions about land sovereignty, stewardship, and environmental loss. Working primarily on canvas, James employs an intuitive, research-driven process that treats painting as an act of listening rather than control. Layers of gesture, texture, and mark-making function as traces of inquiry, mapping both personal and collective histories.
James holds an MFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a BFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited and taught nationally and currently serves as Professor of Art and Program Lead for Art, where her studio practice and pedagogy remain closely intertwined.