We were so blessed to have the incomparable Yelena Lamm as our inaugural Workshop Instructor,  Oct. 18-20, 2024 in Centerville, TN at McCampbell Art Studio

Yelena flew down from Pittsburgh for a 3-Day workshop teaching floral painting in oils. She was amazing!  Yelena did some fabulous demonstrations, painting freshly cut flowers both from Nashville and  locally sourced in Hickman County at “Flourishing Field Farms,” run by female farmer, Kristina Mosemann. 

Artists flew and drove from Nebraska, Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Columbia, Franklin and Nashville. They were an eager group of ladies excited to learn from this award-winning artist and Russian native Yelena Lamm.

Several of the artists stayed in our nightly rental apartments here in the building on the square above the workshop/studio. Everyone really enjoyed being a part of the town square and eating at Centerville’s eateries and shopping at the cute stores too!

At one point, we went after class on a field trip to eat homemade Ice cream at The Local Place then to Joy of the Hunt, a local antique/art/jewelry store, where we bought a pair of super unique silver earrings as a gift for Yelena. She loved them. That was fun!

Everyone enjoyed learning how to break flowers down into shapes and color fields. Yelena has such a unique way of painting using a limited palette and cleaning her brush almost after every stroke. Her colors remain clean and fresh looking. She paints alla-prima, which means wet-on-wet. The oils don’t get thick and dry this way, the colors remain as bright as the flowers themselves. Yelena sold every painting she brought with her and the ones she painted while she was here. I think she sold 12 paintings at last count which is phenomenal for any artist–that shows how much her work was loved and appreciated!

Yelena has promised to come back in early March, 2025. Please sign up for my newsletter to be informed first about her workshops and others down the pike that I have planned. I have some fabulous artists in the works!

Brad Martin, editor and writer for the Hickman County Times, stayed for a good portion of the first day of the workshop with us to write about the experience. I want to share what he discovered that day. Here’s the published article below.