Abstract painting workshop, Part 2

Another major assignment for the recent Jane Davies Abstract Painting workshop was to work with neutral and muted colours.

We learned how to make neutral colours by mixing complementary colours (yellow and violet; red and green; blue and orange) and then altering the mixes by adding black and/or white. We produced lots of swatches of neutral colours to use as collage papers, looking for darks, lights and mediums, warm and cool.

As well as neutrals, we included "muted" colours. It might still read as green (or blue, or violet, or rose) but very greyed down. The results could be seen as "having low saturation" or "minimal hue".

We made neutral and muted backgrounds on 6" x 6" paper, adding collaged shapes, lines and texture. Then we added a small touch of bright red for contrast. Additionally, we made interesting backgrounds in orange and red, and added enough neutral and muted elements to almost cover the paper.

Again, we used the opportunity to try out different approaches to applying paint, achieving various effects. The objective was to create areas of interest, while leaving other areas in the composition more quiet, as a counterpoint. The compositions shown above and below were created in part with the use of "masks" to create distinct shapes.

Finally, we chose one of these 6" x 6" compositions to reproduce in a much larger size, say 20" x 20", or 24" x 24". We were asked to consider what was demanded of a large work that was not required in a smaller one. More interest? More detail? More depth? (Though I attempted this, my results still need some work so I'm not including their images here.)

Once again, a really interesting assignment, and something I might well repeat at home, on my own.

I'm looking forward to taking an on-line class with Jane Davies, beginning later this month. The class is titled "100 Drawings" and participants are expected to produce 6 - 10 small drawings (or paintings) every week, for 10 weeks. They don't have to be finished. The idea is that producing in volume will be liberating, that the results will not be "precious", and that we can be more experimental. The other aspect of the class is to learn to really "see" the composition, to present it and to describe it in a forum. I plan to share some of my results in these posts.