Addressing Your Inner Critic

At Art and Soul this fall in Virginia Beach, most of my workshops are geared towards addressing your Inner Critic - you know, that voice that infuses your art practice with doubt, and saps you of confidence.  There is no question that making art involves a certain amount of angst, effort, resistance, frustration, and other emotions that accompany activities that are ultimately compelling and fulfilling.  For me, the key is to make some kind of peace with these and to align my expectations with What Really Happens In The Studio rather than what I think should happen.  Some of the exercises I do in workshops are particularly suited to this; they seem to get people moving, unstuck, and having fun making art.  This is just one such exercise: Speed Painting. This is an unedited, though short, video of me demonstrating Painting the Paper in Twenty Seconds, then drawing into it and taking prints off of it.

We will be doing this, and other such exercises in Art Therapy for your Inner Critic, Big Fat Art, and a version of it in Drawing Blind. 

On this one I began by making marks with graphite before doing the speed painting and lifting.

This is one of the "prints" pulled from the speed painting.  Ditto the next two.

The process makes a LOT of interesting starting points for further painting and drawing. Stay tuned, and I'll post these again after I've worked on them.

See all my Virginia Beach workshop offerings, October 1 - 3, here.
See all of the Art and Soul Virginia Beach offerings here.

Stacks of Shapes

In my Big Fat Art workshops one of the "tools" we use is shape.  So I demonstrate a bunch of simple ways to make shapes.  Here are a few.

This is sort of a continuation of my 9"x12" Cheap Drawing Paper pieces that I've blogged about here, here, and here.  These are ways to get started, get the ball rolling.  In general, working with a simple set of parameters that does not include making a masterpiece or even a finished piece of art, is a great way to keep your Inner Critic in her place. 

I left most of these pieces as is, but took most of them a step further.  They are just little shape studies, and are meant to generate ideas and engage the visual/intuitive piece of my brain.  See my finished pieces (well, some are in process) based on shapes here.

I had fun adding a little pattern to this one.

This is the collage example in the video.

I gave it some fog.

This one isn't in the video

The scribble/stenciled shapes here look like sheep to me.

Playing with fog and some solid flat space

Last demo piece in the video with stuff added

And then some more stuff.

 I have a Pinterest board of shapes showcasing pieces from many different artists in which shape is a primary element.  Thanks for visiting!