Mixed Media – Page 10 – The Consulting Artist

In Response to Flow

A group of us were discussing constraint as a driver for creativity at Art for Work’s Sake last week. An offer was made for people to write a haiku based on flow (one of the words suggested earlier in the evening for the desired mood of the session), and Alex Hyslop came up with this lovely poem:

Streams can gurgle slow
Rivers can thunder faster
Lakes just sit and wait

Next we drew and painted some responses to the haiku, and the evening moved on. After the session had finished, a few of us were clearing up at the end and someone handed me this sketch:

I really like this picture, I think it is a mix of paint, pen, pencil and charcoal and it’s a great partner with the haiku. A lot of my work is about bringing different people together to see what we might learn from each other and I really like how two people who hadn’t met prior to the workshop came up with these two lovely pieces of work. I put a photo of the sketch on Facebook and found out the the artist is Robert Ordever. So – here it is – the first ever piece of guest artwork on the artsensorium. Thank you Robert for agreeing to let me share this here.

Acrylic Printing

November 2014.

I facilitated an Art for Work’s Sake session recently which produced some interesting and unexpected results, including the first print ever made in one of these workshops.

Inspired by these printed works I thought I’d give the technique a try today. At first I had it in mind to try printing a skyline in acrylic onto a water colour wash. I had a few attempts, using way too much paint at first:

A couple more attempts followed – this time with less paint, producing a very different effect. The print either barely copied or splurged.

Something I observed from this session is the effect that a heavy load of acrylic paint makes when you pull the original away from the print surface. I’ll see how I can use this in future.

I found this afternoon frustrating so I scribbled some angry wax pastel and crayon onto cartridge paper before packing up for the afternoon.

I thought I felt in the mood for some art today – maybe not?

Update: Jan 2016. I reflected on writing this post and playing with using acrylic paint to make these prints – and I’ve come to really like the work. I ended up cutting out sections of the purple and white printed paper and made four small pieces of art from it. Together they are ‘The Art and Soul of Better Work’. I kept one – and I gave the other three away.

Update: Jun 2016. Several people have remarked on the skyline painting/print, saying how much they like it. I’m in the process of producing a limited edition print of the design.

To The Sea

Some of you may remember, on our 2014 Summer holiday to France I had a frustrated attempt at making a travel based collage, a la Kurt Schwitters. I also had a couple of abstract attempts to represent water, and at the time I wondered if I might combine the two ideas.

Last weekend I came across the bag of travel tickets I kept from the trip and decided to pursue the combination idea. I cut and played with a number of shapes and thoughts, before deciding on this:

The tickets pieces are intended to represent the journey itself, and the kind of plant life you might find in the sea – that’s the idea at least!

I had several attempts at playing with this design and it changed a lot on the way. The big spray of tickets in the middle took a while to form in my mind, and once it did, the rest came quite quickly.

Unfortunately I can’t find most of the earlier photographs, but here are the final tweaks as the design came to life. This piece is on 24 x 32 cm 270 g/m2 water colour paper.

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