Turned Inside Out
By Julie Horner
Boulder Creek Art Lab has left the building. In fact, Sarah Nielsen has moved operations completely out of doors to her newly acquired 20-acre property in the hills across from Camp Joy Gardens where the trees part and the sky opens to painterly fields of flowers and dandelions dancing in summer breezes. The former horse property has ample barn space and loads of expansive outdoor areas to explore, and shady nooks to occupy. Already several weeks of outdoor classes in, Art Lab resumes on August 24 with easels socially distanced and outlooks sunny side up.
Nielsen said that Art Lab was just reaching cruising altitude in the downtown space when the pandemic hit. When maintaining the indoor studio became an impossibility, she thought, “Our weather is perfect, we could move Art Lab up here!” She wanted it to be an inner sanctum for the kids. So a few emails went out, and the resounding response from parents was “My kid has not seen anyone in months!” A day on the farm earlier this summer looked like this: paint in the morning, take lunch, ceramics in the afternoon. “We have this great workshop and another barn on the property, and we’re hoping to start a music studio and concert space. Ideas are brewing up here, it’s a great spot for creative stuff,” Nielsen says.
Nielsen started Art Lab with Diana Robertson in October 2015 setting up shop in downtown Boulder Creek on the same side of Highway 9 as Joe’s Bar and Boulder Creek Hardware. When Robertson returned to teaching first grade at Boulder Creek Elementary, Nielsen continued to host after school art classes as sole proprietor, an endeavor, she said, that was “challenging but great.” Because kids don’t get enough time to explore art in public school classrooms, she said, her vision in creating Art Lab was to allow children ample uninterrupted studio time to explore their unique expression using a variety of art mediums.
“We started it on a gut feeling. We are also makers,” she said. So they understood the necessity for that time to follow the creative journey. Not rushed like school. “We found there was a real need, that kids want it. We lined up our ideals about encouraging process-based art in a non-judgmental setting and created a space where kids can work on their pieces for a few weeks if they want to. Their ideas haven’t been tainted yet – they’re pure creatives. It’s been so cool to leave their paintings up and follow along in their process.”
Art Lab classes help build confidence. “A lot of kids who aren’t so strong in reading, writing, and arithmetic are amazing artists. We don’t serve the end product to them on a silver platter, they have to come up with their choices.” And the results, she says, are often so much better.
“I feel misty about leaving downtown. I love Boulder Creek, and I feel sad about Main Street. I wrestled with leaving, but you can’t do rent with all this uncertainty. And parents were feeling nervous about everybody being together inside anyway.” When they found the nearby acreage to move to, “it was a magical thing,” she said, “to be able to stay here and do our businesses here.” The pandemic, and the move, and the resulting evolution is “turning us inside out.”
“These times are really heavy for the kids. They see their parents stressing, and they need a place to express that, to offload their emotions in a creative way.” As facilitator rather than art teacher, Sarah Nielsen hosts outdoor art classes for ages 7 and up through the middle of October. Over the winter she plans to hold special events like afternoon ceramics, pumpkin carving, and making ornaments. Outdoor art classes of all kinds start up in earnest next year.
Art Lab: bcartlab@gmail.com | 831-227-3311 bouldercreekartlab.com
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