The first task was to mix up a neutral grey and cover a sheet of paper - which we then left to dry, ready for the afternoon's task. One thing that interested me was seeing not only the tutor mixing paint - she gave a demo, with washing and wiping the brush before dipping it into another colour, and adding only a little colour to the mix each time - but seeing how the others did it. Technical details like that can be a barrier to getting to grips with the medium - you feel all fingers and thumbs, and can't imagine that everyone felt like that at first.
We had brought along a postcard of a painting whose colours attracted us - a wide range, from Hockney to Chagall, with a few lesser-known artists in between.
The colours on my postcard of one of Picasso's "Meninas" are more subtle than in the image (from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona). I ended up with three reds, three greens, three yellows, the pale background, and the black, painted in stripes on a second sheet of paper, proportional to the colours' use in the original.
Once that was done, the task was to cut up the stripes and use them "somehow" to make a collage of shapes on the neutral background we had painted earlier. Although we had the colours, and could have been picking up clues from our source material, I found this task like being dropped in a vacuum - what, exactly, to do? The idea was NOT to make a picture.
The results are still up on the walls of the studio, and I will make every effort to bring my camera today!
Coming across this image, Peter Doig's "Pelican (Stag)" in the newspaper this morning
my first thought was "what a great colour palette" - so something definitely clicked yesterday, despite (or perhaps because of?) the frustration.
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