Thanks to Gary Allan @ White Oaks!

It was great meeting all of the students at Gary Allen White Oaks Score, and to have the opportunity to start them off on their portrait projects. I wish we had more time together to see all he students ideas develop.  Let your work develop in a slow and cumulative process  - no rush. Look at your portrait as a study in time-based work and see how it evolves. With that in mind,  if you find you have the opportunity to revisit your work and consider it as ongoing - sort of like a journal of interest and investment in describing - and redefining - yourself (as much as we are all works in progress),  do so - accruing elements and layers, and finishing your school year with a dense and complicated record of your time there and your interests.
Best of luck!
Thank you Tanya and Sara for having me in!

Finishing our 2-Week Painting Workshop

You all really "pushed" yourself to find a way through our project!! Well done.

I appreciate that we don't all work the same way or approach artmaking in the same 'direction', so to speak, so it was really fun working with all of you on your different ideas, and thanks for including mine.

I would like to leave you with the images below by Vincent Van Gogh, painted in 1890. Look for a background, middle-ground and foreground.  Can you identify three distinct regions(depths) to the artwork? Can you see more? Other than colour temperature ie; cool blue, cooler greens or warmer greeny yellows)- can you see other elements of composition or detail that help the painting describe a depth?  Can you find an element that makes the painting seem very flat as well (what about line quality or perhaps style?).  Think about the terms  push (where things come forward) and pull(where things go back) and how they can apply in painting and why that might be interesting.  Lastly, look at your own work again with the above in mind.

Wheat Fields after the Rain (The Plain of Auvers), July 1890,
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (F781)

Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul, November 1889,
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (F722)

Tree trunks in the grass
[Boomstammen in het grass]
Collection: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo    
via    http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/Detail.cfm?IRN=165860

Background, Middleground, Foreground April 8th and 15th

We are well into our paintings for this 2 week workshop.  Lots of sharing and generating interesting artistic challenges for ourselves.

We are creating space in our paintings - thinking about how we create depth with warm and cool colours, and ways of talking about backgrounding and foregrounding as an idea in painting.  We looked briefly at this site for a quick description of what we are exploring in our paintings:

from bigblackpig.com

http://www.bigblackpig.com/painting/back-and-fore.html

And we discovered pure colours vs. shades as an element of contrast, creating unity through our palette of colours, perspective lines and collage elements used to create depth, and reworking our composition to convey the effect we wanted. 

We let go of middle ground for now, but will try to find it again in each of your works when we hang your paintings next week.  You all did a great job creating your own study in foregrounding with enthusiasm and skill. Looking forward to seeing your finished pieces.

A fun art link:  
http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/student_resources/index.html

Thanks for a fun session!

To finish sharing this session I am including S.'s Robot - so determined!!

 And our great sign: how artists say "Thank-you!"

...and a random selection from sketchbooks:  (more to come)

zombie

 monkey friends

ArtClub Selfies

 

These are a great invention by D. and V.
They could become a chain

of friends, a classroom or collaborative group...
like Instagram in real paint:

This:

   

became this:

 

This is my example of random technique for inspiration.
I tend to resist projects led through another artist's style, including my own(!!), but we looked briefly at work by Warhol and Chuck Close for Art History permission to consider our photo-likeness in self-portrait.

ArtClub for Feb.18th: Masking, layering, fields of colour and foreground

We did a great job exploring the watercolours.  We talked about backgrounds and creating foreground images, and how to work resist, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and dry-on-wet too!  You took your time to discover an idea and then work it out without a sketch or a plan, and the results were very colourful, animated and deliberate. We also talked about background and foreground as elements in each of your work. Here are a few examples...(sorry if yours isn't here..I will check my other camera for the rest!!)

 

Helen Frankenthaler was a colour field artist. Here is an image of one of her works(cited below.) And a link: https://www.artsy.net/artist/helen-frankenthaler/works

Helen Frankenthaler Fiesta, 1973
Acrylic on paper
22 ^1/4 × 30 ^1/4 in
56.5 × 76.8 cm
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

ArtClub for Feb.11: Color, contrast, shape, symbol

We did well working out ideas of contrast in colour and in black & white. It was fun to see your ideas about self-expression as we 'exploded'  our Heart symbol.

Our group doodle was fun and we decided it doesn't need colour after all.

I think you all had a lot of fun making mini-movies with the camera - we can revisit that later.

ArtClub for Feb.4th: Starting with choices and goals

It was a fun first studio, with new friends in 2 distinct age groups.  I am looking forward to our conversations around our work!

We started our Painting and Photography Session with free painting with some drawing - talking about what we want to "express" or "represent" using pastel and acrylic....and a bit of liquid water colour.  Moving from black and white paint, we added colours and created hues(colour mixed with white) or shades (colour mixed with black).  We looked a the tripod and learned how to attach the camera.

(I will post week 1 work here shortly.)

We started a group drawing that I will keep up for next week's studio. We will take silly face photos next studio, and have a chance to draw in our sketchbooks and paint again.

We will make character paintings for our final project.  This is very open ended and I am excited to see what we all come up with.

PaDay Art day on Jan. 30th and ArtClub AfterSchool is on Winter Break until Feb.4th

Just a note to say that we have a PA Day Art day coming up - Friday, January 30th. Please sign up by Jan. 28th  if you are interested in joining us. Please also note that we need a minimum of 4 artists to run this month's art day.  We will be connecting popular culture and Chinese-Canadian culture by exploring colours, symbols, and different New Year traditions using painting, graphic lettering(think graffiti to invent your own symbol) and some very cool clay sculpture using my new favourite sculpting material: Critter Clay!  If we have time, we will make a short video too!

Thanks for asking!:) ArtClub AfterSchool is on a Winter Break but will start again on Wed.Feb 4 for 5 weeks(running to March 4th). This next session will find artists working with digital cameras and exploring painting.  Hope to see you there!!