It’s all about surface, material and grand gestures! We work on canvases ranging from medium to large formats – we apply generous swathes of colour, discard them, and lay new layers of paint over them. Sometimes we paint with glazes, sometimes we pour the paint, sometimes we apply it thickly, sometimes we work with pigments or ash – or all of these at once. We boldly draw lines to connect areas, or let the line speak for itself.
How about sticking a large scrap of paper into the picture? Should it stay, or will it be covered over again? Or incorporating a whole patch of rust? Materiality meets gesture, and forms emerge that we didn’t know before. Experimenting, being bold, finding your own voice – that’s exactly what makes this workshop so exciting and challenging.
In addition to acrylic paint, pigments, ash, marble dust, paper, charcoal and wax crayons are used. Stroke by stroke, line by line, area by area, a new pictorial composition takes shape – in the tradition of the great informal painters such as Emil Schumacher, K. R. H. Sonderborg, Cy Twombly and Antoni Tàpies.
Exercises on large-format packing paper and a lecture on pictorial composition round off the seminar.