Tag: Berlin

Layering and Masking

Layering and Masking. Letting go of the need for certainty. Working on something knowing it can and will change, as it emerges over a period of time. We rarely make time for this kind of thing, yet it often helps us think and do things differently.

During a recent two day art meets organisational development workshop in Berlin, we carried out a number of experiments. One of them involved layering and masking, building up and changing a piece of work over several iterations. Each person in the room was given a blank canvas, and encouraged to develop their work in layers over the course of the time we were together.

I chose to be quite orderly in my attempt – first masking out three lines across the canvas, then applying the first layers of paint. I used different tools to get different paint effects, and each time I returned to the artwork, I re-obscured most of the lines, and added more paint. Here are some photos of the work emerging over a 48 hour period.

Stephanie Barnes was a member of this group, and she produced a completely different work using a variety of different tools, including scrapers, bubble wrap, and a rubber comb to apply paint. I love how this artwork changes throughout the process – barely any traces of the original layer remain.

This was a really enjoyable process, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to experience something emerging and changing over time in an improvisational way.

 

Preparation : The Colour And The Shape

This month has a lot of creativity, art, and culture in it. June kicked off with The Art of Innovation talk at the HR Inner Circle, followed by an Art of Innovation election night special at the offices of BDG. Over the next two weekends I am participating in the inaugural Carshalton Artists Open Studios (CAOS) event (my first exhibition), and sandwiched in between the CAOS, I’m in Berlin artistically interpreting a conference. The output from the Berlin event will take many forms, one of them being a 13 metre wide canvas. Go big, or go home!

Last week I got together with my fellow artists to talk about, and prepare for Berlin. Most of our work is improvisational, and that is something we choose to role model, so our preparation has been deliberately loose. We experimented with materials and a few basic ideas and colours.

The Colour

Here I have taken (an approximation of) the client’s colour palette and abstracted it. We will be using some of these colours in our work, so this piece is a way of playing with different tones, and it may serve as a guide to people in the room who wish to abstract something for themselves during the event. We shall see.

The Shape

As well as playing with colour – we discussed how we want to be together as a group. This has been a really enjoyable process of listening and distilling, and we now have a short statement which describes us at our best. It’s a useful guide for the three of us and for anyone else we interact with before, during and after the event.

When we are at our best, we are taking care of each other, and our guests. The concept of leadership in our group is a fluid, dynamic force, flowing to where and to whom it is best suited at the time. We listen and respond to prompts from the floor, hand written notes, 1:1 conversations, and to things we spot while wandering about. Our intention is to record and illustrate and abstract key points, not every single detail. Over the days, a body of work will emerge, developed improvisationally, and using a variety of mediums. The pace and rhythm of what we do will ebb and flow, and we welcome participation in our work. 

I hope this look at how we are preparing is useful for you. More to follow…