From Behind the Camera - Workshop Expectations
e-Newsletter: 060308
The expectations students bring to a workshop greatly influence the benefits they gain from an instructor. Students may overlook details of the process if they are intent on copying a teacher’s painting. A useful goal for a student is to try on a teacher’s technique and thought process, then permit the things that don’t suit the student to fall away. Here are a couple of examples.
Arleta Pech teaches how to build complex color using primary color glazes. This permits incredible control but is rather time consuming. I don’t have the patience to use her approach for an entire painting, but I find it handy when working in a smaller area that calls for a specific color. Her color building technique permits me to sneak up on my goal, and it’s perfect for days when I don’t feel confident with my painting and want a slower approach.
Mark Mehaffey’s mouth atomizer workshop addresses color bounce, the process in which a painter can create a relationship between two sides of a painting by echoing color. His demonstration made the importance of this concept clear to me. I use color bounce all the time when problem solving in my own work. I use a mouth atomizer only occasionally, but color bounce is a mainstay.
Virginia Cobb’s workshop focuses on acrylic abstract painting. I am a realistic transparent watercolorist, but I learned a lot from her philosophical approach to painting. We’ve all hit the wall of frustration and been ready to burn our paintings. Virginia teaches us to recognize this frustration as the perfect time to access new horizons and find new solutions to problems that would have previously stopped us in our tracks.
I don’t paint like any of the artists above, but I paint better because of all of them.
- Lynn -