We went in this past Thursday and did a visual arts oriented workshop. I was thinking that after the last color workshop, there was a gap between skill-based learning and the motivation to think about art at all. I thought that bringing in some reproductions of paintings and just talking about them, looking at them, would spark some interest that would perhaps lead to a desire to learn more about color. I think of it as analogous to reading and talking through a poem before taking pen to paper and writing a poem yourself. I also wanted to think about color in a different way, using the medium of small bits of colored paper as the mixing tool, as opposed to actually mixing color. The advantage in this is that you don't muddy up the paper. What you "mix" will stay pure.
These are the paintings we brought in, in chronological order. I made a handout to accompany them.
Justinian and his Attendants, a mosaic made in the 1500s in Ravenna, Italy
Georges Seurat's "Les Poseuses"
Van Gogh's "Starry Night"
Oscar Kokoschka's "Bride of the Wind"
The latter 3 were all made sometime in the late 1800s, and Kokoschka's was early 1900s. They all use fragmented color to different effect, and mosaic is a tiling medium, so different from paint, but the thing about these painters is their unadulterated color, their separation of each stroke/dot of paint so that the unity lies in walking back from the painting, not from standing up close. "Starry Night" has always looked mosaic-y to me, and Seurat is a practitioner of pointillism, which has a whole scientific ethos behind it as to why dots of color should be used instead of mixing.
We started out asking for names and what kind of art people liked. Most people didn't have anything particular in mind (we had 5 people maybe at the beginning of workshop), but someone mentioned liking cartoon art and someone else was really into pop art/Andy warhol, although the kind of stuff she herself liked making was "trompe l'oeil" (trick of the eye... a sort of illusionistic realistic art). So we began with that, then had a conversation about the first two pieces of art which lasted for 35 minutes... Some people left because they had to, and then we felt we should probably get started on the activity. We had torn colored sheets of construction paper into bits (not small enough bits, I felt... a shredder would've worked better, probably). We just told them that they could play around with it or copy a picture I brought in, but I think if I ever hold this workshop again, I'll make the time frame more rigid and have enough time for them to copy a simple color study (that way they are actually mixing the colored fragments in a way that makes them think about color...) A similar activity would be to bring in markers and have people copy a color picture but without making broad swathes of color-- they have to create it by making points only (a version of pointillism without ever having to bring in paint.)
Rachel can talk more about the dynamics of the group, which I thought were totally mellow compared to other workshops. I don't know why, but looking at art was pretty calming, so was playing with little paper bits. The two women who stayed through the whole workshop said it was fun and they'd like to more visual arts workshops. It's hard because I hate to lose anyone on account of which type of activity we bring in. last week a woman didn't join us because we were doing writing only, and then this week a old-time writer didn't join us because were doing visual arts (I think that was the reason, may've been something else.) But I guess you can't win them all.
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