Sketching with Ken is an adventure in seeing the world with fresh eyes. You will learn to work portably, quickly, and with an eye towards capturing fragments of wonderful experiences. The sketchbook is your portable studio and your portable history. The spirit of the rough sketch is to see simply and to learn to draw and color that vision. You learn to see by sketching, and fragments become dream catchers for whole experiences.
Artists throughout history have used sketchbooks to make notes and work out drawing problems for their work in other media. Today we bring the combined benefits of sketchbooks with journals, notebooks, scrapbooks, and practice a regular use of the sketchbook so it becomes a companion and partner in our basic connection to experience.
La Romita has had a long, wonderful friendship with Ken O’Connell, a collaboration spanning over 20 years. We consider him to be the godfather of Urban Sketching. Though perhaps he is not as well known in that global community as he should be, he was actively pursuing that approach to art and teaching it years before the community “officially” formed.
Ken O’Connell has worked in his sketchbook/journals since 1961. He has filled over 107 books with images from Japan, Germany, France, Mexico, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, and the USA. Ken was a professor of Art at the University of Oregon for 28 years – 12 years as the Head of its Fine and Applied Art Department. For the next 25 years he taught over 55 Sketchbook Workshops; 2025 marks his 56th.
For decades, people have associated Ken with sketchbooks and Workshops along the Oregon Coast and in Italy. But he was also a painter, photographer, printmaker, animator, potter, and pastel and charcoal artist. He has worked and taught all these art forms.
As of August 2025 he is working on his 108th sketchbook – evidence of and testimony to a life in art. Find out more in this article in Oregon’s largest daily.
As La Romita School caters to multiple levels of instruction and various forms of the arts, prices will vary by session, season, instructor, and offerings.