I recently invited Indiana artist and workshop instructor Sue St John to Portland, where she shared her techniques with 22 artists in a 3 day workshop. We'd long admired each other's work and had been exchanging emails for about a year. She used my painting "Speckled Pears" in Volume 4 of her ebook "A Walk Into Abstracts", and she is keenly interested in other artist's painting process.
Like most artists (myself included), Sue started out doing very traditional, realistic paintings, and then she took an experimental workshop and it changed her style and approach completely. As I watched, learned, and practiced her methods and approaches, I found to my delight that I've now got yet ANOTHER way I can paint--by pouring thinned paint under various types of plastic sheeting (including painter's plastic), letting things sit overnight, and then waking up like a kid on Christmas day to see what I've got.
Sue focuses primarily on abstract compositions, but I have found I can adapt her methods to MY preferred subject matter--mostly people, but also florals and still lifes. I've even passed on her methods to some of my acrylic students, who have amazed me (and themselves) with their creatiions. I'm posting some images here--a few "before" and 'after" versions--so you can see how I've turned these amorphous "starts" into paintings that reflect my style and preferred subject matter. In the course of this workshop, and afterwards, I think I've amassed a dozen or so "starts"--I've got my work cut out for me!
Note: None of these paintings is quite *finished* yet--but I'm making some good progress!
Like most artists (myself included), Sue started out doing very traditional, realistic paintings, and then she took an experimental workshop and it changed her style and approach completely. As I watched, learned, and practiced her methods and approaches, I found to my delight that I've now got yet ANOTHER way I can paint--by pouring thinned paint under various types of plastic sheeting (including painter's plastic), letting things sit overnight, and then waking up like a kid on Christmas day to see what I've got.
Sue focuses primarily on abstract compositions, but I have found I can adapt her methods to MY preferred subject matter--mostly people, but also florals and still lifes. I've even passed on her methods to some of my acrylic students, who have amazed me (and themselves) with their creatiions. I'm posting some images here--a few "before" and 'after" versions--so you can see how I've turned these amorphous "starts" into paintings that reflect my style and preferred subject matter. In the course of this workshop, and afterwards, I think I've amassed a dozen or so "starts"--I've got my work cut out for me!
Note: None of these paintings is quite *finished* yet--but I'm making some good progress!
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