We had three MVAL members all demonstrating at once for a special holiday experience! Carmen Daugherty, Dilmit Singh, and Mary Archibald. Each artist introduced themselves and the project and tools they would use.
Dilmit went second and painted a lovely painting of a rich red pot in a lush green setting. Dilmit is a self-taught artist who derives inspiration from her natural surroundings. She paints in both oil and watercolors and strives to capture light, shade and shadow. Watercolor allows her to be loose, airy and sketchy and the buttery spread of oil color gives her the freedom to capture the robustness of people, places and things. Carmen went third and showed us the stages she goes through to create beautiful poinsettia greeting cards using negative painting. She painted multiple beautiful watercolor poinsettia Christmas cards and demonstrated the stages of using negative painting technique and how to add lettering using Posca Pens.
No self judgement, just pure absorption; the joy of colour and the feel of the crayon or felt pen or brush on the paper; the power of creating a world all your own. It’s important to get back in touch with that experience, to take a playful approach to learning art. As children we can work intuitively, as adults we can layer on top of that what we can learn about how art works: line, form, composition, colour, value, mark-making, surface… Something I call informed intuition. Working in this way gives us the opportunity to experiment with and really get to know our materials before we head into the nuts and bolts of art-making. We can relax, consult our intuitive knowledge and learn to trust it. Ideally this happens all along the way, making the painting: you make a change, a mark, a brush stroke, add a colour or a value, then you pause and consider the next step. In fact-- the process for me is a constant interchange between intuition and more directive, intentional decisions. Making art is usually solitary and sometimes lonely. I have found a lively community in my students and I try to nurture a sense of “place” for them in my courses. As a self-taught artist who has been painting for over thirty years, I can relate to both the dream of making the paintings we see in our minds, and the frustrations of mastering the tools, techniques, and mindset to achieving them.
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