Watercolor Painting Workshop credit Wave Hill

Art
Workshops + Demos

Trees en Plein Air

When

Sun, Jul 20, 2025 9:00AM – 1:30PM

Where

On the Grounds; Rain Location: Armor Hall and Kate French Terrace

Price

Materials fee: $10 for adults; $5 for children 12+, including admission to the grounds

As part of Wave Hill's 60th Anniversary and our summer exhibition Trees we breathe, artists of all levels are invited to express their creativity during a day of outdoor painting and drawing inspired by our grand old trees and magnificent summer gardens. Try your hand with pencil, charcoal, and watercolor, no experience required! Artists Wennie Huang and Rebecca Allan will guide participants to observe and create work though demonstrations, gentle feedback, and group sharing at the end of the session.

Create with our Teaching Artists!

Observe and paint Wave Hill’s stately trees using the luminous and versatile medium of watercolor. With Wennie Huang as your guide, work from direct observation while exploring various compositions, techniques, and visual approaches to rendering trees and the surrounding landscape. Using special handmade charcoal made by artist Rebecca Allan, as well as pencil, learn to look closely and capture the habits, growth patterns, and textures of the venerable trees cared for by arborists and gardeners at Wave Hill.  

Basic workshop supplies will be provided at check-in. Additional materials available for purchase in The Shop. All artists are invited to bring their lunch or purchase it in The Café and socialize in our air-conditioned Armor Hall at the end of the session; cool drinks and light snacks will be provided.

This event will take place outdoors; program will move to the Kate French Terrace and Armor Hall in case of inclement weather.

Registration is encouraged but drop-ins are welcome! Registration can be made online or by calling 718.549.3200 x251. Drop-ins will be accommodated (as space allows) until 12pm. Ages 12 and older welcome with an adult.

Questions? Please email us at information@wavehill.org or call the telephone number and extension above.

Schedule of the Day:

9:00AM-9:30AM: Participants arrive, check-in
9:15AM: Introduction by Wennie Huang and Rebecca Allan
9:30-12:00PM: Instructor demos and instruction
12:15-12:45PM Rebecca Allan Gallery Tour – Trees we breathe (optional)
1:00PM: Group review and sharing
1:30PM: Event ends

Plen air workshops make use of a variety of garden areas that are accessible via flat, paved paths, as well as a variety of mixed-material pathways and varying elevations. The restroom on the ground level of Wave Hill House is all-gender and ADA-compliant. Additional ADA-compliant restrooms are available on the lower level and are accessible via stairs or an elevator. The instructors use a portable speaker in all locations.

Rebecca Allan

Rebecca Allan

Rebecca Allan is a Bronx-based artist, horticulturist and writer whose work is informed by her longstanding interest in botany and land conservation. Exhibiting in the United States and abroad for more than 25 years, she has been awarded residencies at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; Hermitage Artists Retreat, Sarasota County, FL; Monson Arts, Monson, ME; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA; Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Temecula, CA; and Centrum Foundation, Port Townsend, WA. In 2018, she established her design firm Painterly Gardens. Dedicated to the dialogue between the arts and environmental stewardship, Allan is a Board Member of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust. She earned an MFA in painting from Kent State University and is certified in sustainable garden design by the New York Botanical Garden.
Wennie Huang

Wennie Huang

Wennie Huang is a teaching artist living and working in Brooklyn, and Part-Time Associate Teaching Professor at Parsons School of Design. She leads plein air, watercolor, and pastel workshops throughout the New York City area at the 92nds Street Y, Wave Hill, and the Pastel Society of America. She has created mixed media and site-specific installations as well as works on paper through artist residencies at the Center for Book Arts, Sculpture Space, Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donne Papermill, and the Ragdale Foundation, and she is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School's Innovations in Education Fund, and a permanent art commission through New York City's Percent for Art Program. In 2020, she became a brand ambassador for Royal Talens North America, and her live watercolor and pastel demos appear frequently on social media and in annual international online conventions including Watercolor Live and Pastel Live. In 2022, she received the Presidential Award from the Pastel Society of America where she is a Signature Member. Her recent work consists of works on paper and collaborations exploring relationships between identity and loss, material, landscape and collective memory. As a second-generation Asian American woman, she is interested in the impact of cultural myths on preconceptions about ethnicity and social inheritance; how nature, land, and the urban environment act as symbols of national identity, as well as private markers of time and place. By relocating these myths as visual bodies within local environments, new metaphors, meanings and narratives emerge.