I ended yesterday’s blog thinking about a book I need, and acknowledging that I received three new art books for my birthday. One of those books has been carried around with me from studio room to sofa to bedside ever since it arrived. I am smitten.
The book is Drawing and Painting People A Fresh Approach by Emily Ball, and it’s fast becoming one of my favourite books about art process and practise.
I was attracted to this book because I wanted some ideas and for developing my process, particularly with making abstract faces, so I am looking forward to seeing what the exercises entail, and how I integrate them into my practise.
I spent some time clearing my spaces, and rearranging some things, as I am still finding out how I want my reinvented studio room to work. Once that was done, I decided to try the first exercise of the first chapter of the book, an exercise on mark making.
I used and A2 sheet of paper, and oil pastels. The exercise suggests A1 paper, but the only paper I have that size is expensive watercolour paper, so the smaller size is fine. I chose the oil pastels because it’s a supply I rarely use, and I want to start using them more.
The exercise involves making a series of marks in one cluster, and then repeating the exercise a further five times to fill the page. By the time I was half way through the series, I had decided this is a fun exercise I want to add to my arsenal of Art Practise Essentials.
I made a two page spread of notes in my A5 sketchbook, filled with observations about the process…
The sensation of intentional mark making, and thinking it through before making a mark! so different from the messy art style process, but still intuitive… intuitive can be slow… I wonder about how consuming time-lapse art reels affects people’s process… do we internalise the speed and start working at speed?
As I was working, I thought about one of the ways I work with my abstract fast faces, and the way speed is part of the fun, and I make interesting little paintings, but I often don’t see them as finished pieces, they are more process pieces, so time will tell with how these processes merge into that part of my practise, if at all. Maybe it will manifest elsewhere.
This is a photo of the whole A2 sheet, and the six different clusters of marks. Some of them are more interesting to me than others, but they all have little moments, and the last two on the right I really like.
Of course this process is not about making finished Instagrammable art (and neither is this blog, as you may have noticed), it’s about playing and making discoveries.
The same exercise done with different media will produce different results, so aside from observing your own mark making, and finding your language, it can simply be an exercise in exploring a new, or rarely used, supply.
And I thought I was going to spend the day doing a charcoal portrait class response 😉
Til the morn,
Suzanne
166/200
Thrummie Bizzum 
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