Rubia Homa, the Art of Scent

Last Saturday, we welcomed perfumer Rubia Homa of HURO Fragrances to Studios Colibrí for an afternoon devoted to something we rarely stop to study closely: scent.

Rubia took us on a sensory journey along the Silk Road and through the materials, rituals, and traditions of scent in Islamic cultures.

And we smelled A LOT:

Ginger, lemongrass, jasmine, rose, black cumin seed, camphor, frankincense, saffron, oud, musk, and I’m probably forgetting a few more.

We washed our hands with rose water, drank cardamom green tea, learned about bakhour and incense traditions, and spent the afternoon paying attention not only to the scents themselves, but to the histories, places, rituals, and material culture surrounding them.

Rubia had brought many of the raw materials with her. We handled pieces of frankincense resin harvested from trees, crystalline camphor traditionally obtained through the distillation of camphor wood, pieces of resinous agarwood used to produce oud, and the charcoal used to burn aromatic materials.

The materials led us in all sorts of directions. We talked about where they came from, the processes that turn them into the fragrances we recognize, and the different meanings they have acquired along the way. Camphor, for example, has been used for its antiseptic properties and plays a role in Islamic funerary practices. We also talked about jasmine and the very different associations a scent can acquire from one culture to another, from sexuality and sensuality in the West, to purity and virginity in the East.

And then there were our own associations.

As we passed everything around, people kept recognizing things they hadn't necessarily expected to recognize. A particular smell would suddenly remind someone of a place, a person, or something from childhood. Camphor, strangely enough, took me straight back to Cuba and the little anise candies I used to eat when I was a kid.

That became one of my favorite parts of the afternoon: moving back and forth between the history of these materials and our own histories with them.

This was also the first workshop at Colibrí led by a guest artist, something I have wanted to introduce since we opened the studio.

One of the ideas behind Colibrí has always been to bring different kinds of knowledge and practices into the same space. Drawing and painting are obviously part of that, but so are printmaking, textiles, natural dyes, pigments, photography, scent, sound, food, and other practices that might not ordinarily be taught alongside one another.

There are precedents for this kind of education that have been important to me. The Bauhaus made material experimentation fundamental to its preliminary courses, while Black Mountain College created an environment where artists working across different disciplines lived, learned, and worked in unusually close proximity.

I'm interested in what a small contemporary studio can take from that history.

Our block printing workshop approached pattern through repetition, rotation, and the physical act of printing. Our drawing courses have concentrated on observation, structure, light, and the relationship between the eye and the hand. Rubia's workshop took us somewhere entirely different, through resins, woods, spices, smoke, ritual, and memory.

These subjects are very different from one another, and that's precisely the point.

I want the guest workshops at Colibrí to continue expanding in that direction, bringing in people whose practices allow us to spend an afternoon looking closely at something we might otherwise know very little about.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, and especially to Rubia for sharing so generously with us and for inaugurating this part of the studio's program.

This was our first guest workshop.

Definitely not our last.

See you at the studio

An Introduction to Drawing

Our first drawing course at Studios Colibrí began with a question that sounds almost too simple: how do we learn to see?

Over four weeks, we worked our way through some of the foundations of observational drawing, but one of my favorite moments came when everyone suddenly found themselves standing in fencing poses in front of their easels.

We were working on large 18 × 24 inch sheets of paper and trying to get away from the small, careful movements that drawing can sometimes encourage. Instead of drawing from the wrist, we began drawing from the elbow, the shoulder, and eventually the whole body. Marks got longer. People became less hesitant. The drawings started feeling more alive.

That's something I love about teaching drawing. Technical knowledge matters enormously, but drawing isn't only a collection of techniques. It's also attention, movement, proportion, memory, judgment, and learning to trust what you're seeing.

By the last week, everyone's drawings had changed. Not because we had discovered some shortcut to drawing well, but because people were beginning to understand what to look for and how to translate what they saw onto the page.

Thank you to everyone who showed up every Friday, worked through the frustrating parts, laughed through the stranger exercises, and helped inaugurate our first drawing series at the studio. The room felt a little lonely the following Friday.

We're continuing this fall with Drawing II: Structure & Light, where we'll move from observation into structure, volume, and the way light describes form.

Block-Printing Infinite Patterns by Hand

In July, we discovered how a single block-printed shape can produce countless different compositions simply by changing its orientation.

For the workshop, I designed a collection of modular shapes that could be rotated, repeated, and recombined into countless patterns. I wanted to see how much complexity we could create from the simplest possible forms, and how those forms would change once everyone began carving, inking, and printing them by hand.

We started by carving our own printing blocks, then experimented with repeating and rotating them on fabric. As we printed, patterns slowly began to emerge. Some became geometric and orderly, while others developed in completely unexpected directions.

That unpredictability is one of the things I love about block printing. Even when everyone begins with the same basic system, the pressure of the hand, the amount of ink, the placement of each impression, and the decisions made along the way make every result different.

By the end of the workshop, everyone had created their own pattern and hand-printed a cotton bandana to take home.

Sunday Sessions

Sunday Sessions started with a very simple idea: sometimes what you need most is a place to work and a reason to show up.

Every Sunday afternoon, we open the studio for a few hours of unstructured making. There is no assignment and no particular medium. Some people draw, others paint, bring something they've been working on, or begin something completely new. I work on my own projects too, and I'm around if anyone wants another pair of eyes or some feedback.

What I've enjoyed most is how different this feels from a class. There is no lesson to finish and nowhere in particular that everyone needs to arrive. People work at different speeds, conversations start and stop, someone gets up to make tea, and gradually the room settles into that peculiar quiet that happens when several people are absorbed in making things together.

In a city where so much creative work happens alone, I wanted the studio to offer a small alternative: a place where you can have your own practice without always having to practice alone.

Sunday Sessions happen every Sunday at Studios Colibrí. Bring whatever you're working on, or simply bring yourself and figure it out when you get here.