More Gerry Chase

It's been a wonderful three days with Gerry Chase, and everyone in the class did really impressive work.

You'll remember from the last post that we experimented with painting using acrylic paints and loose, spontaneous line drawing with the tjanting. Some of us (including me) were having such fun with this that this is what we did most of the time.

Here's Judy, working on another one of her pieces today:



Then, Gerry suggested that we tear the pieces up pretty randomly, with attention to the scale of the gestures and shapes on the painted piece. The idea was not to fussy cut interesting areas from the pieces, but to just tear into squares and then look for the accidental amazing compositions.

Here's Diana, comtemplating hers:



Then the task was to start using the pieces in compositions. Gerry suggested thinking about the relationships between pieces ... how they interact with what they will go next to.

Here's one of Diana's compositions (you can look at her squares above and see how she's used a few of them here):



I love what Holly started here :



But look how she separated the pieces a bit later in the day, which changed the relationships a lot (and for the better, we all agreed):



Marjorie set up three striking, simple compositions:



But Marian jumped right into fearless piecing, with gorgeous results:



Juanita worked for a long time with various compositions, and then at the end of the day managed to combine several of her drawings together in a really striking way:



Pam just loved one big section of one of her paintings, so she found some amazing background fabric and is working on framing it:



All in all, it was really fun and I feel like I took a few huge leaps conceptually. I came away with one tiny composition (I just wasn't in the mood to compose and don't generally do that well in a group setting) so I focussed on painting a lot of interesting components for future use.

By the way, if you're inclined to try a tjanting, order the "Better tjanting" made from copper from Dharma Trading for $4.95 as opposed to the cheaper one. We all tried them both and unanimously agreed that the copper ones were vastly superior, easier to use, and gave a much better line.