Click here to see this email on the web |  | Wednesday, October 19th, 2022 | | Sequencing: a Creative Exercise | By Christopher Volpe | Share this article:     |  |  | The River Gallery School sells a booklet on the process. | The River Gallery School, a 45-year veteran institution of the art school world in Vermont, teaches an exercise called "sequencing" that's great for total beginners and veterans alike.
|  | — advertisement — |  | When sequencing workshop leader at The River Gallery School, Lydia Thomson, explains the process, she stresses that the medium itself will lead the way if painters let it. "These are oils, and therefore …. they're beautiful," she once told a group of students.
Sequencing involves painting three small pieces at once. She's often had her students make seascapes on card-stock – the cheaper the better, as this is about enjoying the process.
It goes like this: put on latex gloves, scoop up a dollop of COLD WAX MEDIUM, and kneed it into the surface of three small pieces of canvas paper, card stock, or whatever. Made of bleached bees wax and a binder, cold wax is wonderful stuff. It's smooth to the touch, takes paint in a manner that allows good control of layering and blending, and acts as a drying agent to boot.
Using this medium makes possible a meditative, tactile experience of physically massaging your lush oil colors into the silky wax medium. Tape down three small "canvases" in a row. Start on the one furthest left, and work to the right, making similar – but different! – gestures each time. |  | Here's the setup: a stick, a few rags, a razor for scraping off "mistakes," three pieces of card stock taped to a sturdy surface and latex gloves, if you like, as your fingers do the painting. The palette consists of your favorite colors – generally, a spectrum of paints surrounding two transparent earths (raw sienna or Indian yellow, for example, or even more colorful transparents like Prussian (or phthalo) blue or green, Viridian, or iron oxide red). |  | As soon as someone finishes a sequence, he or she tapes all three to the wall. | Once you've got a generous layer of transparent cold wax on all three panels, you can begin rubbing on colors. OR you can tone the base wax layer with the transparent earth color, blending until it's mixed into the wax and the surface is covered completely, and then add and blend more colors on top of or into it.
Whether or not you've toned the paper, you improvise, using whatever colors you feel, working them over and into the wax on each separate piece, moving from left to right, doing roughly the same thing each time. Tell yourself you're making a seascape if you need an anchor in representation or just go totally abstract. |  | At work at the River Gallery school | There's a meditative quality in the repetitive nature of working on the three pieces at once, introducing a color to the first one, then the same color to the second and then the third, and so on, leaving traces of the same gestures on each painting. The process really brings out the lustrous depths of the oils.
It's great for beginners because it involves no solvents, no brushes, no mixing, and minimal mess. Experienced painters will relish it as a reintroduction to the sensuous nature of oil paints and a fertile field for the development of new ideas for larger work. |  |
|
|
|
This one has a Gerhard Richter-like vibe. | Working fast is good - as in 15 minutes max for each sequence of three. It's an excellent way of unleashing creativity and a very refreshing, incredibly fun way of experiencing the medium. | — advertisement — |  | The Case of the Missing 18K Gold Toilet |  | It's one of the world's most notorious unsolved art heists and one of the oddest tales in the art world.
The Collector reports that as of 2022, investigations into artist and prankster Mauritzio Cattelan's missing gold toilet are ongoing, but that officials have largely concluded the artwork has probably already been melted down into untraceable gold bars and sold on the open market.
The artist intended the piece, titled "America," as anti-art - a dig against a comercial art world that cares more about the money than the art. Nontheless, as a result of its effect on the art world, its fame and the controversies surrounding it, it's estimated to be worth $6 million as a work of art. So, a work of art whose sole purpose was to make the art world look ridiculous has indeed succeeded in exposing the art world as little more than a money-grab. Mission accomplished.
Nonetheless, apparently it was the $2 million in "materials" - that is, GOLD - that generated the most interest: The work was stolen by thieves who tore it from a museum using plumber's tools and two separate getaway cars just days after it was installed in the former family home of Winston Churchill.
In 2016, New York's Guggenheim Museum temporarily installed the lavish, fully functional toilet in a fifth-floor bathroom, allowing visitors to make use of it freely. In 2019, when then president Donald Trump refused to accept it as a gift for the White House, the work travelled to its short-lived stint at the Churchill site, the grand Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England.
Dominic Hare, the CEO of Blenheim Palace commented, "It's deeply ironic that a work of art portraying… the idea of an elite object made available to all should be almost instantly snatched away and hidden from view."
Maybe it's a stilly story, but it says volumes about today's money-driven world.
Well played Mr. Cattelan.
In the Paint,
Chris
| — advertisement — |  |
|
| | |
|
Inside Art is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to Streamline Publishing delivering regular email issues and advertisements. To end your Inside Art e-mail subscription and associated external offers, unsubscribe here. To learn more about Streamline Publishing events, products, and offerings visit StreamlinePublishing.com
Copyright 2022 Streamline Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Inside Art® is a registered trademark of Streamline Publishing, Inc. |
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment