Abstracting the Figure workshop!

This week, in an attempt to shake things up, I took a 5-day workshop entitled “Figurative Abstraction in Acrylic” taught by the accomplished Brian Smith. Brian is a very good teacher who is eager to share his extensive knowledge of art and composition. Each day began with two slide shows introducing us to new artists and to some important concepts of abstract painting.

Both abstraction and acrylics were intimidating. It wasn’t easy to let go of the control that I cherish as a realist artist working in oil. So much of the mark making and medium application is random, and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that. On the other hand, working with house painting brushes and slapping on thick layers of quick drying paint has a certain appeal. How much of this I’ll be incorporating into my work is hard to say.

Here are two of my better paintings from this week. Each is acrylic on watercolour paper — the first has some chalk pastel in there as well.

For this first one, we had to work on an active ground, which meant painting a figure on top of an abstract coloured pattern that we painted beforehand. We had to leave some of this ground show through in the final work. Here you can see the active ground in the torso of the figure (the gray-green, yellow-orange, and black), the white and purple stripes in the leg, and in some of the background.

For the second one, a dancing model served as inspiration. She danced continuously as we sketched her on newsprint. From those, we had to compose a painting. As she danced, I had this vision of clouds in a blue sky and so went with that kind of colour scheme.