Friday, June 13, 2025

Nicholas Wilton Free Workshop, post #5 / March 13, 2024

Nicholas Wilton Free Workshop, post #5

The fourth pre-workshop countdown prompt: #2 We do our best work when we feel most connected to the freest version of ourselves.

When there are no planned outcomes particularly and we are just playing, experimenting out of curiosity and personal delight and wonder, we tend to make highly authentic and powerful art.

Write about what you are most excited to play and experiment with along the way in your future art-making, paying attention to how you feel as you write; let feelings lead you.

If I have a “ready response” to this prompt, I must be carrying it subliminally because it certainly isn’t sitting front and center in my consciousness, so I think I’ll use the keyboard command for a bullet point, start shooting from the hip, and see what I discover …

In my future art-making, I want to play and experiment with:

• fused fabric in my mixed media work
• more cutups
• another inquiry, and then another
• image transfers
• blending abstract and representational
• drawing
• self-portraits, faces
• disruption
• imprecision
• blind contour drawing
• color mixing and color harmony and color contrast
• using desaturated colors and quiet conversations to highlight saturated and loud
• taking steps, while I’m in the act of creating, to direct a viewer’s eye around a painting to points of my choosing—like placing a shot in tennis!
• layering
• painting on large canvases
• editing to make clear what I want a painting to be ‘about’ (e.g. shape? color? emotion?)


OK, pre-workshop prompts ran 2/28, 2/29, 3/1, 3/2, and 3/3. Workshop itself ran 3/4, 3/5, 3/6, 3/7, 3/8. I ran all over the place on all those days!

Here at my blog today, along with my response to the penultimate pre-workshop prompt, I’m posting a cropped portion of a workshop assignment given two or three days later. I think, but could not swear to the fact, that the assignment was to play loose and fast, use contrast of all sorts, and aim to take the viewer’s eye to all four quadrants.

I opened my art journal and let impulse and intuition run the show. I used this assignment to break away from my CutUps series.

detail, assignment #1 re contrast and movement 


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8 responses to “Nicholas Wilton Free Workshop, post #5”

  1. Isn’t that the truth…that the best stuff sometimes comes with no planning and we can just let our “impulse and intuition run the show!” Love that little corner view of your class piece.

    Your future art-making list is impressive….and I look forward to seeing some or all of it come to life in your art.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. MaryAnn, I sit here shaking my head at the irony of having an extensive list of identified art-making ideas I want to play and experiment with—while for a few days now I’ve felt lost and directionless each time I’ve gone to my studio!

      It helps to have just put that in writing, so I thank you doubly for commenting here today. Bottom line, which I occasionally lose sight of, I have trusted my art experience to unfold organically of its own accord; I do not need to MAKE it happen. It will happen exactly as it happens.

      Whew! I feel better now!

      Liked by 1 person

  2. Mission accomplished! Loose! Contrast! My eye drawn to all four quadrants! (apologies if this comment appears twice – WordPress is wrestling with me today!) xo

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    1. Ha! You pinned WordPress to the mat—comment only appeared once, and it was JUST EXACTLY what I needed to hear. I thank you, dear Lola!

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  3. Wonderful experiments, and the close up is startling!

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    1. Thanks, Simone! It’s definitely a shift to be playing in this way after my weeks of making CutUps. I’m finding my way back, one mark or scribble or brush stroke or collage at a time : )

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    1. And checking it twice … haha!

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