Monday, March 3, 2008
The day is beautiful and sunny and I am energized for my work. Our instructor gives us five minutes to draw each of four objects: a shopping bag, the trigger sprayer from a Windex bottle, a piece of plastic with a bullnose clip and a tape dispenser. We then transfer our drawings on top of one another, to tracing paper & subsequently to the painting support.
John wants everyone to use watercolor on d’Arches paper. Not my thing. I only want to work in acrylic. We reach a compromise; I will do a painting on paper PLUS another on canvas with acrylic. It was my offer but I fear I have bitten off more than I thought.
All day I bounced back and forth between the two pictures. While they both started with the same drawings, each will be unique. After lunch, the teacher demonstrated the next step, after discoursing on it for quite a long time. After a while, I just wanted to jump up, shake him and yell “OKAY, PAINT ALREADY”. Which he eventually did. I stayed late to be up to speed on both pieces. (picture at right - overlaid drawings on tracing paper, folded to be transfered to paper and canvas.)
Salminen, a nice guy with a friendly wife who serves as a teacher assistant, is rather rigid in his approach and inflexible in dealing with students. Thirty three years of teaching art in public school may inform his approach; not only may you use only the materials he specifies, but he doesn’t tell you where he’s going with the lesson, only teaching one aspect at a time rather than teaching the entire project and allowing artists to pace themselves. We’ll see where this will take us,
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