beep...beep...beep...(annoyingly)...backing up..

Cog   watercolor/mixed   9.5 x 13

These days you can hear all sorts of vehicles backing up....dump trucks....public transportation buses and even cars. The sound is annoying to be sure. But necessary. I am backing up here to our first watercolor class. This one is the very first, where artists come somewhat prepared, but what to paint? For too many years I used apples because they were easily portable....and cheap. We cut them in various ways to make it interesting. This year I was certain I needed a change when one of the participants came prepared with an apple....just too predictable. I decided that we just needed to experience the joy of mucking around with paint...in a restricted non-objective manner. I felt some perimeters were in order:

* we attempted to preserve sparkling whites
* we had to work in the traditional watercolor way....light to dark
* we needed to use both organic and straight line (forms with those lines), with one or the other
being dominant

My hope was that we could all enjoy the freedom of painting spontaneously and non-objectively without the concerns of reality-painting, and more importantly, that we would be able to transfer this freedom to painting from reality during the subsequent lessons. All went very well. The results were admirable. "Cog" is the result of my work that night. I finished it off at home with a fat dark water-soluble crayon. I guess my brain was telling me that I need to get in gear. Get that vehicle in drive!