Return to the Current

The Experience

Return to the Current is a five-day studio intensive created specifically for art educators ready to turn their attention back to their own creative practice.

The week begins by identifying each artist’s intentions: what you want the work to do, where you want it to go, and what questions you want to explore. From there, Gail introduces a series of systems and steps designed to help build complexity, clarify the painting’s intentions, and move the work forward without prescribing what the finished work should look like.

Color will be an important part of the process. Participants will work with carefully curated palettes, exploring how limitation, relationships, and deliberate color choices can strengthen a painting and open unexpected directions.

Quillan and the surrounding Aude Valley become part of the studio. We’ll gather visual references, explore the town and surrounding landscape, meet local artists, and use what we encounter as source material. The goal is not to simply paint what is here, but to bring those observations together with your own memories, experiences, and visual language.

Days will move between demonstrations, guided exercises, individual conversations, critique, independent work, and sustained periods of studio practice. There will be room to push. Some days may extend well beyond the normal workshop schedule when the work demands it.

The group is intentionally limited to 10 art educators, allowing Gail to work closely with each participant and respond to the individual direction of their work.

The week concludes with a participant exhibition and reception at River Aude Artists Lab.

The intention is not simply to leave with new paintings. It is to return to your own practice with new ways of seeing, questioning, and moving the work forward.

About Gail

Gail Borowski is an artist, educator, and member of the Board of the River Aude Artists Lab. She holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies and an MA in Art Education from Michigan State University. Her career has moved between studio practice and teaching, with a longstanding commitment to helping artists develop confidence in their own creative voice.

Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Michigan, including the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, the Scarab Club in Detroit, Crooked Tree Art Center, and the Anton Art Center, and nationally at Target Gallery in the Torpedo Factory (VA) and the Morean Art Center (FL). She is a multiple-time participant in the Michigan Fine Arts Competition and has created public murals in collaboration with the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Gail is also a published art educator and illustrator. Her teaching is grounded in curiosity, exploration, and what she describes as a “passion of reaction” to color, place, and lived experience.

Her relationship with RAAL grew from her own time working in Quillan, and she now helps shape the Lab’s developing residency, workshop, and artist-support programs. Return to the Current brings those worlds together: her life as a working artist, her experience as an educator, and her belief in the importance of making space for artists to pursue their own work.

Quillan, France

Tucked into the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Haute Vallée de l’Aude, Quillan is a small town shaped by mountains, river, forest, and changing southern light. It is a place that invites you to slow down, look carefully, and notice what might otherwise pass unnoticed.

The River Aude runs directly through town. Within minutes, streets and cafés give way to river paths, wooded trails, open valleys, and the Pyrenean foothills. Medieval villages and Cathar castles are scattered throughout the region, giving this part of southern France a powerful sense of history and place.

Life here moves at a different rhythm. Markets, cafés, local food and wine, and a strong connection to the natural world remain part of everyday life. There is time to walk, to look, to talk, and to work.

For an artist, that change of rhythm can be important. Return to the Current is about creating the space to turn your attention toward your own work again, and Quillan becomes part of that experience: a place to observe, experiment, wander, and see what begins to emerge.

Come for the experience. Leave having found your way back to something of your own.