recent class work - second directive

These pieces are from the first section of directive 2 of Jane Davies' class on working in a series. This time my series topic was to continue working spontaneously with the leaf prints along with pushing line and mark work, adding direct paint application with washes and then keeping the palette to a more neutral or subdued color range.

At first everything came easily. I loved experimenting with the washes which got me really interested as I dug into the still wet overlays with pencil and mark making. I felt more involved with the surface and loved painting within the collage, bringing a feel of movement and freedom from the restraints of mono printing. Numbers 1 through 6 show this flow as I very gradually brought in darker colors.

Then I decided that if I wanted to really stick to the plan, I'd need to work with a lot less color. So in came more black and less color. Number 6 is the beginning of this change with it's swath of black along with a fair amount of pinky reds. I found this exciting and edgy. 

Wanting to push the black further I went on to nos. 7 and 8 and several others not posted here.These pieces felt heavy and barren and I wasn't sure about continuing at this point. I really wanted to bring in more color but decided to stick with this very narrow range to see how that felt and what might happen.

I'm really glad I did. I decided to see what happened when I brought in a small amount of color, this time a very quiet, soft pink. The pieces still felt quite raw but I was satisfied and curious too. Number 11 is the most surprising and satisfying as I brought more color back in but with a balance of the darks. Very gradually I began to feel okay using this very subdued range. It has a depth, like the quiet of winter which is growing on me. I plan to do more in this vein.

Here are those pieces - all 8.5 x 11.

no 1

no2

no 3

no 4

no 5

no 6

no 7

no 8

no 9

no 10

no 11

recent class work - first directive

Here are some pieces of work I did for the online class I'm taking with Jane Davies. It's a self directed class that's organized around the idea of confining yourself in a series to a particular topic or method so that something unexpected can emerge.

For the first segment I decided to push engaging a spontaneous flow in my work process. I'd been feeling stuck in trying to control the outcome of my work, so with this project I wanted to feel how to put a piece together without so much mind influenced decision making. I wanted to feel how to allow a flow and not deliberate over the next move but to quickly respond.

As a starting point I chose collage with mono prints using the Gelli plate and leaves, something I'd been working on all summer. You can see the two pieces I used as starts in an earlier post. Instead of assembling all the parts and then putting it all together, I decided to abandon any kind of planning and only go forward one step at a time with no idea of what would happen next. I also found loads of freedom in not trying to decide whether a piece was finished, something Jane suggested as a way to keep things more open and less influenced by our usual aesthetic or discomfort.

As I kept at it, relying on energetic, intuitive responses, I realized this was something I was teaching my body how to do. There is a special "feel" to relying on a different way of putting things together, a different feel for being in the flow. And I found that meant bypassing the mind and all of it's usual creative dampening assessments. It was a non mental way of making art. Wow!! What freedom.

Here's some of this work from the first segment which is called Direction 1. These aren't necessarily finished pieces, just inspirations for moving on to the next piece. I have some preferences but that feels unimportant to the process.

no 1

no 2

no 3

no 4

no 5

no 6

no 7