Sawdust Festival artists take on teaching in seminar at Sage Hill

Los Angeles Times

30-05-2025

Ron Shearer's artistic journey began at home, but it wasn't until decades later that he reconnected with those roots through a chance encounter while abroad.
Shearer recalls cutting tile for his mother's mosaic hobby in his youth. While abroad in Italy in 2009, he walked into a shop of a mosaic artist, and it brought those memories back to the surface.
'I didn't foster it then, or I didn't fall in love with it [as a child],' Shearer said. 'I was 8 years old, and I wanted to go out and ride my bike. About 52 years later is when I went to Italy, and I walked into this fellow's shop, and I said, 'Wow.' This reminded me of what I did with my mom.'
The Santa Ana native came back from that visit and taught himself how to do mosaic art, using what he observed in that shop and a few of the mosaics he still had from his mother's work in the 1950s.
Shearer, who said he has exhibited at the Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach for 25 years, started in metal sculpture. He has since rededicated his efforts to mosaic and often teaches classes or works out of his booth while on the grounds.
This week presented an opportunity to offer some inspiration to others, as Shearer was one of a handful of Sawdust artists to give students a hands-on experience at Sage Hill School.
'The biggest hurdle that I have to overcome from teaching someone, whether it be kids or whether it be adults, is that it is a deferred gratification,' Shearer said of mosaic art. 'It takes time to do a mosaic, and it's something you can't hurry. A lot of people want to sit down and finish it in an hour and a half, and it's really hard to do. It takes time to do it.'
Needing to make the task manageable within school hours, the students worked on mosaic coasters that were approximately 4 square inches on Friday. Shearer came prepared with 10 different colors of cut tile, glue and coasters to serve as makeshift canvases. Students had a chance to cut and arrange tile pieces, then come up with a design before attempting to glue and assemble a finished product.
Some packed geometric shapes into stars, while others placed living things such as fish into the body of their design.
The workshop was part of the inaugural Sawdust Art Festival Survey, one of nearly two dozen seminars offered to students at the school through the Spring at Sage program.
'Sage Hill and Sawdust Art Festival are natural partners as institutions of creativity and excellence in Orange County,' said Daniel Langhorne, a school spokesman. 'We're very grateful for these professional artists inspiring our students to explore new media and express themselves.'
AnnJo Droog, director of art education at the Sawdust Festival, said other participants in the week-long collaboration included Hedy Buzan, Gabe Sullivan and Julie Setterholm. The program also exposed students to copper enameling, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and sketching.
There wasn't much work to do in terms of securing artists for the workshops, said Droog, who added, 'Everybody wanted to come.'
'What my job really was to do was to be mindful of what we were going to give the students,' Droog said. 'So try to give them really diverse art experience, so that's why we've jumped from printmaking to painting to mosaics, so they get a taste of a lot. They've had a lot to learn this week, but they're an amazing group, and they're really into it, as well. They're really intent and focused on their work. It's fabulous.'
Preserving the artists colony is often a topic of discussion in Laguna Beach, which is home to three art festivals, including the Festival of Arts and Laguna Art-A-Fair.
Droog dreamed about the possibility of building the colony with more artists.
'Sharing [art] with the younger generation and getting them enthusiastic,' Droog said. 'If we have created inspiration in somebody in that room who wants to make art a career, 'Wow,' what an achievement.'