Workshop 1 – Painting The brief
with Bernadette O’Toole
PAINTING AS STRATEGY
Damian Mead, Talcum, Oil on Linen, 65.5 x 44.5cm, 2011
SESSIONS
Monday Oct 11th (3 hours: 2-5pm) Making – between sculpture and painting.
Friday Oct 15th (3 hours: 2-5pm) Colour – chromatic grey workshop.
Monday Oct 18th (3 hours: 2-5pm) Colour – creating small painting studies using chromatic greys.
Friday Oct 22nd (3 hours: 2-5pm) Hybrid paintings somewhere between sculpture and painting.
WHERE
S1 Artspace, Unit 10 (Parkhill Flats)
OUTCOMES
You will develop your understanding of materials, processes, and conventions considered specific to the medium of painting, and practices that break with these conventions.
You will develop a more sophisticated understanding of colour and its application.
BRIEF
Art-historian Isabell Graw writes, ‘painting has long since left its ancestral home––that is, the picture on the canvas––and is now omnipresent, as it were, and at work in other art forms as well.’
The painting workshops will explore some of the formal and conceptual strategies employed by artists to challenge an established understanding of the medium of painting. We will consider examples of work that operates beyond painting’s traditional boundaries, operating in what is described as the ‘expanded field of painting’. We will examine the materials, processes, and conventions considered specific to the medium of painting, and practices that break with these conventions. The workshop will demonstrate how processes from one medium, when applied to another, can generate new forms of expression.
Through a playful re-working of the American sculptor Richard Serra’s Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself’ [1967–68], you will produce a series of three dimensional hybrid forms based on Serra’s verbs. The verb list including actions such as, ‘to remove’, ‘to mark’, and ‘to suspend’, could be interpreted in many ways, and, through different media. To fold, for example, could refer to paint folding on to a surface, or to the action of folding paper. Similarly, the act of folding and unfolding might inspire a more figurative approach to painting, and representation of the human figure.
In the practical workshop exercises, you will re-articulate Serra’s verbs, firstly as ‘simple sculptural objects’ – without using paint, secondly as small painting studies re-interpreting Serra’s verb list through the medium of paint. The process will encourage you to reflect on what might be considered specific or unspecific to painting, at the same time demystifying the terms, ‘medium-specificity and ‘post-medium condition’.
In the second workshop you will have the opportunity to develop a more sophisticated understanding of colour through exercises in the use of chromatic greys. In addition to this experimental approach to practice you will have the opportunity to discuss and reflect on your expanded painting vocabulary and how this could develop your studio practice.
I attended all but one workshop (I had infection in my eye) but I learnt a lot from this workshop. Bernadette gave us a rundown on artists.
As a group we did all that is mentioned above.
I was really pleased with the end result I don’t usually work with acrylic and it was a challenge to stay within the parameters of the chromatic greys.
I must admit I was sceptical of the processes but I produced a good piece of work and it was a struggle to get there but Bernadette did assist and help immensely in getting me to paint exactly to the brief.
I think the painting came out really well.
Rusty'sArtWerk 