Today we worked on looking at negative spaces and gesture drawing.
We started with a fun group drawing 'exchange' where 2 of us posed while two of us tried to catch the poses in quick, loopy, gestural sketches - keeping in mind that while the page was quick and sketchy technique building, it was(is) also a composition, so we can take some care and give consideration to this each round in starting the next sketch. After a few rounds we could work into our sheet or start a new sheet. The randomness of the poses, and having so many laid out on the pages made for fun and energetic compositions. After that, most everyone had an urge to create something in a contour format so we tried to create the negative spaces between the branches of our ArtClub tree, or anything in the room that was interesting to us. We looked again at Emily Carr and Henry Moore and talked about the ideas of negative and positive space, and ways of representing space as a volume with mass and contour.
We could then use washes to enhance what we had done - creating some lovely work, and a proto-type for a time-capsule out of found materials.
For the next two weeks we will be creating our own composition, on paper or canvas, using charcoal, crayon, paint and collage that expresses the idea of concave or convex. We are going to use the ways we know of conveying mass, volume, gesture and contour. We can consider all the artists works we looked at for 'permission' to try something in our own work. You can work from observation, or from imagination.
