Towards Abstraction
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Towards Abstraction
Tricia Gillman
Do you want to move your work from the figurative towards the abstract? Whatever your level of experience this course will be challenging; perhaps you are just beginning or you want to take apart and re-examine your practice or you need a burst of stimulus. Working from a still life set-up you will be encouraged to make the journey from looking and drawing towards a personal abstraction. We will start by freeing up your relationship with seeing and attitudes to representation. We will begin by looking and responding, using drawing, collage and then paint to explore the expressive power of line, tone, space and materials. Then we will focus on colour interaction, abstract colour space, subjective colour and paint handling. Issues of personal expression and imagery will be addressed throughout via dialogue and individually set-up subject matter. Basing our dialogue on your work and the developments that have shaped contemporary painting, from the early 20th century onwards, we will encourage the journey of transformation from depiction to abstraction.
Tricia Gillman taught for 15 years as a senior lecturer in painting at Central Saint Martins, and for 10 years as a tutor in painting at RCA, also other postgraduate teaching at royal Academy Schools and Chelsea School of Art. She is now working as a freelance artist. http://www.triciagillman.co.uk/
Alternative Dates and Times
Many of our courses are repeated throughout the year. If the above dates is not suitable for you,
or there are no dates showing for this session, then please choose an alternative session.
Please bring with you to the first session:
- A cardboard box. It needs to be deeper than a shoe box (ideally a supermarket box about 20cm deep by 30cm wide).
Some small objects to put in your box - some bits and pieces. These could be totally arbitrarily accumulated; (the first five things you lay your hands on, the contents of your handbag, ten objects the names of which start with the letters of you name etc) or they could be things that you love (not in a narrative sense) but visually and sensually; a flower, a ring, a feather, a fruit, a small vase, a ball of string, a seed pod, a cork screw, a mirror, etc. Please don't feel you need to justify or understand the selection of your objects - the more intuitive the selection is the better! - Drawing pencils
- Compressed charcoal
- Putty rubber
- Masking Tape
- Later in the course you will need:
- A black and white oil pastel
- Graphite stick
- Black and white collage materials (tissue paper, old magazines, newspaper, painted paper, etc.)
- Acrylic Paints. Reasonably good quality colours are essential for successful colour mixing: Rowney System 3 is fine, Winsor and Newton, Liquitex, Golden. White, purple, deep violet, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow, cobalt blue, ultramarine, ceruleum, crimson, red, emerald green/permanent green.
- Brushes - 2cm or 3cm SYNTHETIC brush for spreading colour flatly, and smaller ones for mixing.
- Palette(to mix paints on; could just be a sheet of thick polythene to tape to a table.)
- PVA glue
- Jam jar for water
- Kleenex roll and rags.