I’m at a Claire Benn surface design workshop at the Crow Timber Barn in Ohio. This first week we are in ‘free fall,’ which means we are to have no intentions but simply follow the guidelines Claire gives us. The idea is to explore our tools and media and work in a kind of “call and response” way. We respond to whatever mark we make on the canvas. We are working with acrylic, a medium I have rarely used, so that we can work quickly and not worry about batching.
We were asked to pick three images or a piece of writing that resonated with us. We then spent time journaling words and phrases that the image or writing evoked in us. We were provided with a 10 foot by about 3 foot scroll of muslin that had been pre-primed with a 1-1 solution of liquid gel medium and water. We were asked to pick a six-color palette plus black and white.
I started with an image of a banana flower, an angel’s trumpet, and a poem, “Reasons to Live: the Color Red.” I loved the plum colors of the banana flower and the jumble of green leaves beyond it:
I loved the star-like shape of the Angel’s Trumpet as well as the soft, subtle peach and apricot colors:
And I wanted to find a way to evoke the emotional power of the reds in this poem:
Reasons to Live: The Color Red
cowboy boots, scarlet suede
still in the box, smelling like sex
pomegranates, the seeds plumped open
their dark juice seeping into the butcher block
whole cherries in preserves, full
in your mouth, a thick spoonful,
fat raspberries, autumn apples, the memory
of a rich Cabernet or spicy Shiraz,
sun-warm tomatoes from your garden
thick steaks rare and soft,
their blood speaking tongues in your mouth,
your flannel nightshirt, tartan-frayed and forgiving
the dresses from your youth burning
in the closet like coals from a good fire,
salmon when they are dying,
maple leaves when they are dying,
your favorite color before you knew
any better, first color you sang,
the color you love in your mouth,
color that announced your birth into the world.
After journaling we were asked to write words on the cloth. I used a thick graphite pencil to write mine.
We then drew our images first by memory and then by copying directly from either the image or a photo onto the fabric, again I used graphite. and than outlined them with color. I used a couple different sizes of paint brushes. I didn’t like the way the shape of the banana flower was coming out so I decided to drop it from future considerations. The pale colors of the Angel Trumpet as well as its shape proved difficult for me to handle and I decided to drop that as well and focus on the imagery from the poem.
Above you see me playing with shades of red for a fruit-like shape, and chartreuse for what had started out as banana leaves. Below I’ve added some deeper greens that I decide I don’t like and will later get rid of.
I did quite a lot of manipulations including pleating, cutting and inserting paper, etc. I was beginning to think of this as a whole cloth, sort of totem-pole like, though Claire had warned us no final pieces might come from this series of exercises, that it was about exploration. Here, above, I obliterated much of the red as it felt too overwhelming. Using masking paper resists I left enough of the red to suggest the circle that had been there before.
Here, above, you can begin to see what it’s starting to look like. I also obliterated some of the dark green I didn’t like with a Titan Buff heavy body acrylic that I then scratched into to make wavy marks. Later I will paint over this in chatreuse. You can also see the pleat in this photo.
Here, after more manipulation and adding scribbles with a needlenose bottle, doing some monoprinting and beefing up the chartreuse, I decided to cut off a few feet off the bottom–I had been working with trying to evoke plaids from the poem but it wasn’t working out so I decided to cut it off. I also decided to cut the whole thing in half. I wanted to break up the circle up top, which felt too dominating.
First time I hang it. It feels like there is too much going on, although I like the colors and movement. I decide to edit and cut more out.
And here’s what may be the final edit. I’ll have to wait til I get home to sew it up and I may make a few more tweaks. I’m happy with pretty much everything in this final edit, although it has moved so far from where I began as to be unrecognizable. What a wondrous process.
