In name only

Name Game

I have been very busy lately. My weeks seem to fly by -  filled with planning and teaching and taking art classes.

My Saturdays have been fabulously filled by a painting class, Dynamic Abstracts with Illa Guttman at PCC. This class is six hours of feeling like a fool followed by the elation of actually creating a painting. Some weeks are better than others - and it is wonderful to be part of a group, and especially, to have such a wonderful teacher.

I am also planning to teach an abstract painting class for kids next week, Spring Break. I am ready - bursting with ideas to share and things to do. I find myself poring over books of paintings in the library and visiting galleries - just looking at how abstract artists work, thinking about ways to express what I want my students to know. All of this causes me to think of about lines and color and shapes in different ways, and to experiment with varied projects to see what results.

I will be teaching my students to create abstract images with tempera, and I use acrylic in my PCC class, and frequently in my own studio, yet, I often find myself returning to these line drawings. They are fun to do, relaxing, more accessible than paint and far neater, and they are a different way for me to explore flow, color, overlap, shapes and ... some kind of grace - maybe the unexpectedness of finding shapes and forms I do not plan - which somehow feels to me like the very heart of abstract expression.

This image is based on a painting project I did earlier this year - the lines are my name, written in different sizes and directions, always crossing, forming new shapes. It is 9x12 on watercolor paper, done with fine tip pens.

Building to a Conclusion

I have worked on this same canvas four times - building layers of paint and color without arriving at a satisfactory result, until today when inspiration struck (in the bathtub).

I am currently intrigued with understanding how to develop texture and interest under the layer of paint that shows. As I study the abstract images I find most successful, I am becoming more aware of all that appears to be going on under the surface. So, I thought I would use this much painted canvas to create a color field painting. I applied a surface pattern with tape, and just for the heck of it, added a thin layer of gold paint to the existing (now under) painting. There was already lots of texture in the paint, and I thought it would work through. I chose a limited palette of blue, turquoise, yellow ocher and white.

I used my new fat brush to lay thick paint in the taped areas, mixing on the surface of the canvas, dried with a hair dryer, untaped, retaped the areas that I wanted to work on next, and repeated the process. I added a touch more gold, and thickened some texture. If you look closely, you can see lines and swirls, darks and light subtlely through the stripes. Finally, I think this canvas is done ... at least until the next inspiration strikes.