More Artfest Art

As promised! More Artfest art continues...

My third day of classes was with Alex Shur in "Cast of Characters". Check out her website at wingedheels.com . This was really a fantastic class. The concept of this class was to create backgrounds using watercolor or guache (I used guache). Once the backgrounds were dry, we then sorta cloud gazed into the patterns of the paint to find characters "from our subconcious". I thought this was a really cool concept, very esoteric. I love cloud gazing, and now, I can also gaze into my own paint. Hmmm, starting to sounds a little weird, but not really.

Although I made a TON of backgrounds, I'll just share a few of my favorites. Below is an example of a background where I just started outlining in sharpie my "character". Big surprise here - a tree. What I loved was the funky, big nosed character that showed up in the trunk of my tree. You can see his green face on the left side of the tree trunk. There's also a great profile of a windblown face at the top right of the piece. I can't wait to continue working on this one. This piece is 15"x22.5".


My next favorite piece is "Ms. Thang" below. This piece is 5x7. I had a large background piece that I just struggled with and didn't see anything, so I ripped it into four 5x7 pieces. That's when all the characters came out!

I first saw the eye on the right, and then the mouth. I free drew the nose and then, just started doodling, just like in Ellsworth's class. Whatever struck my fancy. I actually did most of this work on the plane ride home with a few sharpies.

The next piece to come out of the torn up background is this one: The entire piece is painted with guache, a little music paper behind the words, which are written in sharpie: "My looking ripens things" which is an excerpt from a Rilke poem that I love. Aren't those four words just so erotic, powerful and delicious all at the same time? Say it to yourself again: My looking ripens things. Mmmmmm..... Another quadrant came out as below:

This started as a complete mistake/disaster. I was pumping my paint pen on the plane, and it just gushed out everywhere because of the pressure difference on the plane. I used the back of another paper to blot the paint that had puddled all over the page, and when I lifted the paper, I saw these great jellyfish! I simply outlined them and their little bubbles with black sharpie.

I already can't wait for Artfest next year!