Gia Whitlock is a mixed media painter living and working from her home studio in Portland, Oregon. In 2025, Gia earned an MFA in visual studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. For the last 13 years, Gia has shown her work in galleries and at festivals around Portland and on the Oregon Coast. Whitlock’s paintings place nostalgic objects in domestic and commercial interiors in the spirit of playful absurdity and social commentary. Her found object sculptures, called “Shelfies,” bring some of these objects to life in 3D and situate them back into tiny, two-dimensional, worlds that live on the wall. Color, humor, and play center Whitlock’s entire artistic practice across media.
Art Camp For Grownups Supplies List
For this class, we’ll work on a different project each week starting with an artist book and ending with a memory/alchemy box. With acrylic paint and gel plates, we’ll make a pile of collage papers and use them to freshen up materials like cardboard packaging, thrift store vases and cigar boxes.
Supply List
For this session, I’ll provide the boxes that we’ll turn into artist books. Bring a vase to collage to class 2 and a cigar box or similar to collage for class three. We’ll talk more about contents for the box while we are working together. In addition to these items, you’ll want to have the following at each class.
Bring to Each Class
- Any recycled paper you wish to gel print
- (ideas: junk mail, catalogs, newspaper, it’s all going to get covered in paint!)
- 1-2 Canvases – no larger than “18×24”
- Gel Plate – 8×10 or larger
- Brayer – 2 inches or larger
- Palette knife for mixing
- Plastic palette or palette pad- can be small
Acrylic paints –
I recommend a 4 oz tube or larger of the following:
- Cadmium Yellow Light or similar
- Yellow ochre
- Cadmium Red Light or similar
- Quinacridone magenta
- Pthalo Blue (any shade is fine)
- Raw umber
- Titanium White
A Basic set of paint brushes