A Deeper Dive: Working in Series

 "When you finish a series..." "When I work in series..." "Oh, maybe I will do a series..."

Do you ever not work in series? What is a series? How do you approach a series? Is working in series something special? Is it any different from just working? Do you plan to work in series? Do you plan the series? Often I wonder how other artists think of series when they treat it as something special, something separate from 'regular' work, or as if it is a finished-product goal. To me, the series is the unit of art making. I always approach my work as if I'm doing one of a hundred pieces with similar parameters, even if I stop at one. I have an idea, and I explore the idea over the course of a bunch of pieces. To me the series is the process of working through an idea.

Sometimes a series, or an idea, is pretty well defined, like this exploration of concentric circle/stripes:

Moving Target, Pilot, 20"x20"

Moving Targets, each 10"x10"

Moving Target #?, 36"x36", in process (partial)

Here is another group of "Shape Studies" that I did in a continuous time-frame (maybe not one session, but several successive sessions). The parameters for these are a little looser.

These are each 9"x9" on paper

And more "Shape Meditations" I did at a later date, but I would consider them part of the same series, in that they constitute a similar exploration. These are all 9"x12" on Bristol.

In the above two groups I am putting together shapes that are different from each other in several respects - size, color, value, pattern/texture - and seeing what kind of interesting negative space I can create.

I would love to hear your thoughts on working in series and what it means to you. Please comment. I check comments daily for 'moderation'. I need to do this because of a plethora of bot-generated spam. Thanks for visiting!

Playing with Orange and Blue

Here is a short series of demo pieces I did in Green Valley, AZ, the other week.  We were using paint, collage, and mark-making to explore complementary colors.  These are all 10"x10".

Green Valley Demo #1:  In this piece I have almost equal percentages of blue and orange. I find that the most challenging ratio. 

Green Valley Demo #2:  Here I was playing around more with a range of value and saturation in the orange.  I love the pinks, corals, and salmon colors you can get in this range.

Green Valley Demo #3:  This is probably about 75 - 80% orange.  I am tempted to cover over the whole bottom left section with orange....

Green Valley Demo #3 Alternate:  OK, I just did that in Photoshop to see what it would look like. What do you think? 

Green Valley Demo #4:  Here I let the orange get really washed out.  More desert-like.  I love the contrast of the very light neutralized orange with the brighter colors in the center, and just teeny bits of blue. 

DO try this at home.  Choose one pair of complementary colors:  blue and orange, red and green, or purple and yellow.  Use as many versions of each color as you like, mixing them to vary the hue slightly (orange, red-orange, yellow-orange, but not red and not yellow), and mixing with white and very light gray to vary the values.  Paint, collage, use crayons, scratch into the surface with a razor.  The techniques are up to you.  The key is to do a SERIES of them exploring various proportions of the two colors.  Have fun!

Stacking, or Layering

I've been playing with the idea of stacking marks or lines from the paper (or other substrate) up, one on top of the next.  I think of the elements of a painting in terms of their relationships in space, and that space is both lateral (on the same plane), and three-dimensional (depth).  I like seeing shapes, marks, lines, etc., stacked, in a kind of shallow space, as in the work of Heather Day, Sander Steins, and Lee Kaloidis, and many other artists.

 The following are all studies, just playing around with the idea:

These first four are about 10"x10"

The rest are about 6"x8".

I don't know where this exploration will go, or if it will go anywhere.  In these I'm just seeing what kind of vocabulary of marks develops, or if something starts to happen.

See my guest post on Balzer Designs!

Residency at Vermont Studio Center

Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, offers a Vermont Artists Week, in which I am SO lucky to be participating this year!  A whole week of just me and my Inner Resources, plus fifty-five other Vermont painters, print makers, sculptors, and writers doing same.  We are housed, fed, and generally taken care of, so that we can focus on our work.  So this is my only post this week, with just a few pix.  No videos, no tutorials, no Brilliant Insights or Pearls of Wisdom ; )

Selfie in Studio, first night.  Work behind me is new, in progress, warm-ups.

First morning I did twenty studies, 9"x12"

Stuck a few on the wall and began work on 10"x30" verticals.

In Process, ELEMENTS in the fog

Ditto the above.

More Student Work

I am blown away again by the gorgeous pieces that are showing up on my Keys to Dynamic Composition blog. These are pieces by students taking the online workshop of that name, which I will be offering again in January. These are studies, pieces in progress, and finished works dealing with the abstract landscape:







This is a group of small landscape studies:


And this is one more piece from Lesson 1 about shapes:

Thanks to all of you participating in this workshop, and thanks to everyone visiting the blog.

Compositional Studies - Cruciform Series

For this Friday Tutorial I'm going to show you my process in exploring a common compositional format, the "cruciform". Which merely means a cross shape. The areas that form the arms of the cross are generally busy, whereas the four quadrants are relatively quiet.

In my upcoming online workshop, "Keys to Dynamic Composition", we begin by looking at the bare bones of what makes a good composition: Unity and Variety. Then we look at the elements and principles of composition and how you can use them to create both unity and variety, through the lens of various compositional formats, including the cruciform, the abstract landscape, repeating shapes, and more.

Working in series is a way to explore an idea and try out different expressions of that idea. It also helps you to get in a groove and loosen up. For this series, the idea is Cruciform. I vary the collage materials, the colors, and the arrangements, but the all tell me something about this compositional format.

One way of approaching collage painting is to start with a painting, then add collage elements. In this series I began with collage, and then tried to unify each collage arrangement using acrylic paint, obscuring much of the collage beneath.

Below are the Before and After versions of each collage.

New Gallery

Thanks to all of you who commented on and e-mailed me about my Working in Series post. Glad it was helpful to some of you, and I love your ideas! Yesterday I added a new GALLERY to my web site dedicated to small works. There are only a few so far that have not been posted on the blog, but I'll add to it periodically. Thanks for visiting!!