Nicholas Wilton Free Workshop, post #2
The second pre-workshop countdown prompt:
#4 Look at your favorite piece of art you made in the last 12 months. Come up with one word that best describes the particular aspect of the art that you love. Another way to access this world is to describe how you feel when you look at the work. Let us know why you chose this word.
My take on this prompt: Look at three pieces of art I’ve created in the past few months. Come up with specific language that pinpoints the aspects I love in those pieces and the way they make me feel:
• the printed text that peeks through paint in several spots, but not uniformly—it keeps my eyes/brain happily moving around the piece investigating and it hints at messages being embedded, messages that are teasingly not fully revealed
• the organic shape that represents nothing concrete but tickles my imagination—seaweed? amoeba? a child’s toy?
• the chaos-layer background—it feels intuitive and loose, and it provides sharp contrast to the central shape, evokes the freeplay of childhood
• the figure-ground puzzle of the central shape—is it superimposed on the patterned background? is it created by the cutting away from the patterned paper? my eyes delight in the visual conundrum
• the grid format—it provides structure/order/containment for what is otherwise very loose and abstract, pleases the left side of my brain
• the limited palette—it keeps the palette simplified and lets complexity emerge through other elements, ties the four images to each other, activates the look-for-patterns-look-for-differences part of my brain happily
• the sense of freedom of self-expression—each piece feels spontaneous, intuitive, exuberant, uninhibited
• the markmaking—asemic writing, hatch marks, repeated dots, spirals, splatters, scribbles, scallops all pull my eye in for closer inspection and keep me moving from one detail to the next; makes me feel open and playful
• the suggestion of landscape and weather without being photographic or authentically representational—I feel drawn in as though I were physically present in each scene, taking in all the sensory detail
• the way each image has incomplete edges—I like the way my eye gets called in to inspect, the way my mind is invited/entrusted to imagine the edges
• the contrasts: torn edges/sharply cut edges, dark foreground/light background, precision in cut edges/chaos-layer quality of petals—the contrasts and the invitation to the mind to explore them energizes me
• the soft haziness of the background is relaxing and pulls me into the depth of this piece
• the chaos-layer quality of the petals feels freeing and playful and impulsive
• the suggestion of representational without really being representational, coupled with the way cut-out pieces ‘bleed’ off the edges engages my imagination
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6 responses to “Nicholas Wilton Free Workshop, post #2”
Yes, hooray for Nicholas Wilton! Plenty for me to learn—and happily so—by looking at my art in the way suggested by the prompt!
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