artist reflections

I was amazed to see the amount of work Mr Doyle’s class had been doing. There were multiples of of everything, inspired from fractals and geometry – paintings and sculptures all about pattern, scale, tones and colour, rhythm and repetition. Impressive. Children had looked at Mondrian and Bridget Reilly and experimented with primary colours and outline, in the process they had found random forms in their palettes. They had made colourful textured pieces from folded, bent and concertina-ed paper  spilling out of paper folded boxes and hanging pieces looking like Mardi Gras costumes, the classroom was an  explosion of colour and creativity.

In our last few sessions together I would like to concentrate on instructions to keep the process really open ended, allowing instructions devised by the children to self generate ideas from the children. And Mr. Doyle likes the idea of a recipe for a drawing. Taking a lead from Sol le Witt it will be fun to develop ideas for making drawings collaboratively and individually, paying careful attention to material properties and pushing ideas to the limit….

I would like the children to make drawings (in pencil or charcoal or pen and ink for now, keeping colour out of it) from the pipe cleaner and straw sculptures to develop these ideas to think about how something ‘behaves’ while drawing, we have built up quite complex forms orginating from fairly random instructions, incorporating ideas from responses, re-making in another material, thinking about material properties and further drawing will involve a further response to this making, a thread of enquiry is being developed, at each stage sharing ideas and then going it alone….how far can we take it?

An aside:

In another project (separate from ours but may have links), Mr Doyle is working on ideas to paint a mural on a wall in the yard. We talked about doing a painting based on an adaptation of Sol le Witt’s instructions….. this is one le Witt painting Mr Doyle has picked out:

Wall drawing 1136 - Sol le Witt
Wall drawing 1136 – Sol le Witt

Working backwards – I think this drawing is not the product of a set of le Witt’s instructions – it would be quite a challenge to devise instructions for Wall Drawing 1136. I think it might be quite an exacting task to complete and see the result.

Mr Doyle also talked  about an artist, Holton Rower, who pours paint over stacks of stuff, allowing it to pool at the base then pouring a smaller amount of another colour on top to create radiating patterns. This sounds like an exciting set of instructions – literally with quite a flow, and potentially fun and do-able…(gravity defies this project for a a wall…or maybe there is a way… thinking about materials for exteriors and changing things from horizontal to vertical)

untitled - Holten Rower
untitled – Holten Rower

 

Untitled 2010 Acrylic on Plywood
Untitled
2010
Acrylic on Plywood

LINKS

http://unifiedspace.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/seven-coats-of-paint-later/

http://johnstonarchitects.wordpress.com/2011/03/

http://holtonrower.com/?page=gallery&section=painting&category=pour

 

here’s a video showing a pour:

 

more about colour

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/05/fordite/

http://www.snedkerstudio.dk/

 

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