Mark Making in January

 My online course, Mark-Making, begins January 6. Here is some student work from a 2019 class. See details and sign up here.

We get to fling paint, scribble, spatter, drip, and more. Make your own tools, layer patterns over scribbles over spills.... All fun and lots of learning. See details here.

Handmade Brushes from Mark Making Class

I want to share with you a few images of mark-making tools people have made in my Mark Making class. I love seeing what people come up with!

Making brushes from plant material is fun when plants are abundant. But don't forget the household items like Q-tips, sponges, fabrics, netting, ribbon, string, and more.  Use chopsticks, popcicle sticks, tongue depressors, or paint stirrers for handles. Or just sticks. Have fun!

Wall Collage, or Making Marks

I usually have a bit of a creative slump at this time of year. Perhaps it is because it's the end of my teaching season and the days are short. In any case, it's often a time of year at which I have to dig a little deeper to find inspiration. The Inner Critic seems to like November and December, and she is ready to come into the studio and tell me how bad my work is, and how I may never make another piece of good art again.

This is a good time to dip into Cat Bennett's book, "Making Art a Practice". It was "Practice 5: Loosen Up" that did it this time. It's similar to my 30-minute mark making practice, but without the time frame. She suggests just making marks, with focus on process, not product. Sound familiar? So I decided to prep some newspaper and brown wrapping paper with a coat of white paint, gesso, or matte medium, and then just draw. I made Marks That I Like, marks that I enjoy making, which is a good place to start. Graphite, crayons, marker, pen, paint - all were welcome.

My studio walls are covered in homosote, which takes push pins easily, so I'm pinning my marks up on the wall. Here are a few pix from this week:

I started with just black, white, neutrals, and a tiny bit of color.

Here you see paint, crayon, and graphite on brown wrapping paper.

I added a bit more color - quinacridone gold and a bit of yellow ochre.

And then red. My wall began to 'compose' itself, and I played with moving things around, filling in gaps with smaller pieces of collage paper.

Now I am really seeing this as a kind of 'quilt' - a piecing together of different materials.

I am trying to stay pretty loose here and not overthink it. My only 'finished product' will be whatever documentation I do. My intention is just to play around with marks,  and to arrange and rearrange them on the wall.

Making Marks

I usually need a break after my busy teaching season, which ended this year with a workshop in Pensacola, FL the first week of November. Then there is Thanksgiving, for which I take time out to see family and cook.  Getting back into the studio for any kind of regular painting practice always takes some time and effort. It's a shift from teaching-traveling mode to more inward-looking, solitary, exploratory mode. The key is to align my expectations with the reality that this is a transition. As enthusiastic as I am to get into my studio after a long season of teaching, it's never easy.

I've been laying pretty low this week with a bad cold, and just poking my head into the studio to push paint around for an hour or two each day.  Works In Progress are great for this: I can just do one or two things to a few pieces with no pressure to finish them, but just to move them along somewhere.

Yesterday I did a little Mark-Making exercise: on a stack of cut-offs from my paper cutter, which are all about 5"x8", I used limited tools to make lines and patterns, paying attention to creating variety and leaving some breathing room.  Here are some of the results:

You can see from these that there is some overlap in the kinds of marks I made. For example the arch or half-circle shape appears in four of them, with variations in a couple of the others. The awkward scribble makes an appearance in a few of them. There is a pattern of irregular dots and dashes in some of them... And yet each one is unique. Each one has something - a color or a mark - that it does not share with others.

I think this kind of working-in-a-group, WITHOUT trying to make anything specific, often reveals some of our default marks, suggests new combinations, and generally greases the wheels for visual exploration. To me it is important that these "studies" have no pressure on them to BE anything other than the result of a process. If they went directly into the wood stove now, it would be fine; their purpose has been served. I've made them, and I've looked at them.