Preview of Working in Black and White

Here is a little video preview of my upcoming online workshop, Working in Black and White.

Working in Black and White

Working in Black and White is opening SOON, and there are still a few spaces available. A six week online class in which we explore everything BUT color.  Read about it here.

Black and White Study #5, 10x10"

Black and White Study #6, 10x10"

Black and White Study #8, 8x8"

student work

Land Line, 12"x12"

Student Work

Working in black and white gives you the opportunity to focus on value relationships, depth, quality of line, edge, scale, arrangement of elements, and other elements and concepts that sometimes get neglected when color is front and center.

Join us for Working in Black and White! Take a look at the supply list too.

Black and White Online Class

Finally, I have figured out an online workshop on Working in Black and White.  It begins next summer, July 19 (sorry I could not squeeze it in sooner).

I am very much drawn to the simplicity and austerity of black and white, neutrals, and shades of gray, even though much of my own work relies on color. Color is a powerful language, and it’s often the element we relate to most immediately in a painting. Because it is such a strong element, we sometimes neglect other possibilities of richness and subtlety in our visual expression.  Read more here.

 Here are a few previous blog posts on working in Black and White:  Black and White and Shades of Gray;  Happy New Year (2015), which includes a video; and Black and White Studies.  Since it is a while before the class starts, I encourage you to do your own studies in black and white.  See what happens!

Black and White Studies - a Few Finished

Thanks for your comments on my previous post.  Here are a few of the black and white studies that, to my eye, came to conclusion.  I still have many in the works, which I'll continue to play with and see what happens.  I may begin others as well.

"Storm Coming" 12"x12"

12"x12", Untitled (so far)

"A Fine Line", 12"x12"

12"x12", Untitled (so far)

10"x10", no title yet.

All of these are available as originals.  They are acrylic and graphite on paper mounted on 3/4" wood panel.  12"x12" are $395; 10"x10" is $295.  E-mail me if you are interested in owning one.  I have them up on Fine Art America for sale as prints.  Or you can PAINT YOUR OWN!!

Black and White Studies

It is always fun to narrow down the focus for a bit, return to what feels like "basics" that turn out to be not so  basic. Working in black and white is a practice I return to periodically to re-set my sensitivity to the spectrum of values (light to dark), quality of line, depth, and other aspects of painting that are more subtle than the strong language of color.  You can view previous posts on the topic here, here, and here. 

I was recently introduced to the video below about Hyunmee Lee, whose work I have admired on Pinterest.  She talks about working in black and white, and then introducing just one color, and working with that for several years.  My attention span is a bit shorter than that (I'm thinking:  hours, maybe), but I loved the concept.

Hyunmee Lee: Gesture and the Flow from 15 Bytes on Vimeo.

Here are some pictures of my studies.  I began fourteen pieces, all 12"x12" except for two of them, which are 10"x10"  I actually gessoed over old work-in-progress that was getting stale (I've never done that before!), so some of the previous painting comes through as texture.

Here are six after only one or two passes.

This was one that spoke to me in its simplicity.

This is after one or two passes with paint, etc....

And then I turned the above piece upside down and painted over more of it.

I think this is the 10"x10" piece that is in the bottom row, middle, of the first photo.

Will keep working on this one....

Definitely need to push back more elements on this one. 

This one may be close to done.  I'll let it rest for a while.

 I love the process of exploring the nuances of veil, gray scale, and breathing room.  I find I am generally putting stuff down on the paper, lifting with cheap drawing paper or a brayer, making marks in graphite and crayon, or scratching through paint with a nail; and then when everything is dry I paint over, paint over, paint over in thin layers of white paint (veils of fog, as I think of them).  I do only one or two things to each piece at a time, not letting myself go so far as to get stuck or even ask what happens next.  Just do one or two things, and move on to the next piece.  It's refreshing.  No pressure to finish anything.  And yet, I think that some of them will come to be finished pieces.  I just have to not rush to get there.

Some of my black and white originals are available on my gallery site.  More are available as prints here and here.  

Extreme Composition is Available as a Download

I have been teaching Extreme Composition online a couple times a year now for about three years.  Time to retire it, which means that now you can download all the content and have access to the videos.  As I develop new online classes, I'm retiring the old ones, making them available as downloadable self-study units. 

Check it out here.

I will be developing new online workshops, as you've seen.  My Advanced Color Studies is full, but I plan to offer it again in the fall.  I'm trying to squeeze in an online workshop on Working in Black and White.  My first offering of Monoprint Collage is coming to a close, and the next version is full.  I'll try to offer that again before too long.  Let me know if you have any suggestions for specific online workshops or downloadable content you'd like me to offer.

Cheers.  Thanks for visiting.

Looking at Work in Grayscale

Lee Kaloidis, whom I've referenced a few times in this blog, has created a Flickr album of his Whale Songs series, showing it in grayscale as well as in color.  He says:

I'm posting the Whale Songs in gray scale so that I have a record of them. But also because studying paintings in gray scale is fundamental to the way I work and why I do so much work in black and white, and anyone who's interested in my work should know that. Throughout every painting session I'm studying gray scale photos of the piece as it develops. I know if a piece is articulate, balanced, well-constructed, legible, and engaging in gray scale it is fundamentally sound. Color is a strange thing and is a little like money in that it distorts clarity of vision and judgment, and so it is good, IMO, to be able to remove it from the equation in order to assess things at a distance that is free from the distortions of the sensational.

I would not say that a painting can't be successful if color if it is not successful in black and white, but it does seem like a good tool for looking at your work in progress.  Seeing your work minus the strong language of color allows you to see things you won't see otherwise.  This is similar to seeing your work from a distance, through a camera lens, or on a computer screen.  It gives you a different view, which can be revealing. 

I just did a few grayscale versions of some 8"x8" print/collages to see how they looked:

Black and White and Shades of Gray

I am now working on a new online class (thanks for your suggestions and enthusiasm!) in which we will work in black and white, and shades of gray.  I've shown you some of my black and white work, here and here, which involves a lot of line and mark-making.  Recently I'm interested in finding my way with black and white in collage.  See posts here and here. It turns out to be surprisingly challenging to make a strong statement in black and white, though it is freeing not to consider color.  When color is out of the picture, I find I pay a lot more attention to value, scale, quality of line, edge, and so forth.

In the online class we'll be working with collage, with washes of paint (getting varying values from just black paint and water), mark making, and pattern.  I hope we will all become more articulate in our visual languages, even once we get back to working in color.  Here are a couple of samples in cut-paper collage:

In these 8"x8" studies, I am simply exploring black on white, with very simple shapes.

In the top two, I'm using only black and one shade of gray on the white ground.  In the bottom two I'm using multiple shades of gray in addition to the black. 

In all of the above, I'm using painted papers that are meant to be flat color.  No brush strokes, no shading, no nuance.  Interesting exercise. 

I'll have the new class open for registration within a few weeks, and it will be scheduled for 2016. 

More Black and White and a Giveaway

I made a few more papers using stencils with a sponge roller, but also with the GelliArts gel plate.  On these I used Golden Fluid Acrylics (Carbon Black and Titanium White), and also Golden OPEN Acrylics, which have a very long working time (they dry slowly).

Here are a few of the papers I made, using 9"x12" Cheap Drawing Paper:

In this I used a stencil I made myself with Cheap Drawing Paper.

For this I used OPEN acrylic, and made the lines using a Q-tip.

For this one I used a homemade gelatin plate, 8"x8", and then a stencil over it.

 The following two images are digital collages studies.  They don't exist in actual material.  I was fooling around in Photoshop, manipulating the scale of each of my papers as I put them together in these pieces.  As I am investigating the issue of scale, I am wondering if making either digital studies or small paper studies might be useful.  I've never worked from studies, so it's a new process for me.

I am offering a giveaway of the 14-product set of Golden's A - Z Workshop In A Box, to one person, chosen at random from those who comment on this post.  Please say something about working in black and white, and/or something about scale.  I'm interested in your ideas.  Identify yourself uniquely (i.e. "Mary in San Diego" rather than "Mary").  I will post the winner on Thursday, May 28.  It is the responsibility of the winner to get in touch with me.

Stencils! and Online Composition Class

I did a guest post on StencilGirlTalk today, which includes a video.  Have a look.   Here are a few of the collages I made using the papers I created with the stencils.  The first four are 4"x4":

This one is about 9"x10"

Composition Workshop Now Available for Download

Keys to Dynamic Composition, my online class, is now available as a download.  As many of you have found, my online classes have been filling rather quickly, and I've had lots of requests to "squeeze one more in", which I can't really do.  On the group blogs I create for each class, I comment on everything that students post, and give individual feedback and suggestions.  This limits the number of people I can take in a class.  I am working on formatting some of my classes as downloadable self-study courses, and this is the first offering.  Meanwhile, I am developing new courses to be offered in the interactive group blog format in 2016. 

Black and White Studies

Continuing on the theme of a Vocabulary of Elements, here are some of the black and white pieces I've done on 9"x12" cheap drawing paper.  My vocabulary expands as I continue the series.  Beginning with the dark black circular line/shape/scribble, the pencil scribble, the fine line, coarse line, and a pattern or two, I began to add other elements:  the "ink spill" (actually High-Flow paint), the graphite smudge, and more patterns.  Committing to a quantity of studies, and considering them studies, like hypotheses, seemed to encourage a gradual and organic development of vocabulary.

Here are a few of my favorites:

We'll be doing similar exercises in my Abstract Painting workshops this spring and summer.  See:

• Abstract Painting: Series as Process on Whidbey Island in Washington
• Expressive Abstract Painting at Omega (The Power of Process)
• Abstract Painting: Working in Multiples at Dillman's Bay Resort

Out Takes from a Series

My last few posts have been about series I'm working on now:  the black and white pieces, and the neutrals.  For the most part I ALWAYS work in series; I always start with the idea that I will do multiple pieces exploring similar issues, whether it's color, technique, a certain combination of visual elements, or other set of parameters.  It is obvious to me, and perfectly acceptable, that not all the pieces I do come to a satisfactory conclusion.  Here are a few out takes, or I'll call them works in progress, from the neutral pieces I demonstrated in the last  post:

I may need to paint over more of this.  Letting it think a while.

This one is starting to look a little fussy to me.

I like the gestural, raw quality of the paint strokes in this one.

This one might be done, but I'm letting it sit a while before I decide.

Actually, this one is definitely done.  Love the minimal quality.

 Meanwhile, I still have the black and white series going, and started some 20"x20" pieces in addition to the 12"x12"s. 

Table full of Black and White Pieces in progress

Many of you know from my workshops that I emphasize working in series, or working in quantity, or at least working on several pieces at once.  It helps you let go of the preciousness of the individual piece, and explore an idea more deeply.  I am offering a one-day working specifically on Working In Series at Art and Soul in Portland this March.  Check it out here.  In my longer workshops we work on whatever the topic is, but always in multiples.