by leslieakf | Sep 23, 2015 | Kid art, Watercolor
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
— Pablo Picasso
I’m pretty sure I heard that on Jeopardy recently, and I can’t believe I hadn’t heard it before. Or maybe I had, but it hadn’t resonated with me the way it did last week, because as I have been painting with my nephew Lyle lately (who turns 4 this week), I’ve been learning how to think less and just follow an idea. There is much to be learned by watching a kid just fire stuff off.
Last week when I was visiting, I brought another set of watercolors. We have a routine now where we work on a piece together. (He insists upon it.) We knocked out a bunch of butterflies and moths like this one:
Water was spilled. We had a giant wet piece of newspaper we were working on, then Lyle got inspired to run his wet hand across the watercolor set and went berserk making this piece while I watched in horror (for the watercolor set), then fascination.
I had to restrain myself from just immediately trying to reign him in, but I did try to explain that the watercolors would probably all be tinted with black from now on. However, I ran a quick mono print on the set to reclaim it a little. Then we did seven more of these.
by leslieakf | Sep 16, 2015 | Collage
These go way back (as you can probably tell by their style), but I still find them very entertaining (although it is basically the same joke in each one). I should do more of these.
by leslieakf | Sep 9, 2015 | Paper marbling
My friend Deedy and I spent another great day marbling paper on Saturday. Here are my favorites of the day (of the ones I made). The materials are hard to control, so I have a good time experimenting. These are for the most part happy accidents.
Full size downloads of these and other previous marbling efforts can be seen on my other website at clippingfile.com.
by leslieakf | Aug 28, 2015 | Collaborative Art Project, Kid art
It’s been a collaborative summer all in all, and this little piece is a result of watercoloring with my almost 4-year old nephew Lyle. While on vacation in Maine, Lyle and I did a lot of watercoloring together, and what can I say, I just particularly like this piece.
Lyle’s contribution is the blue – he primarily works in blue – which I think is the most exciting part of the composition.
The biggest challenge was trying to drill home the idea that you want to wash your brush before switching to another color, unless you want mud. “I like mud!” he would defiantly proclaim. But I got him to come around after a while. The kid shows promise.
by leslieakf | Jul 28, 2015 | Mail Art
Cynthia Ryan Kelly and I have been collaborating on a mail art project since 1992, sending postcards back and forth to each other to work on. These are just a couple of the ones she has sent to me. I could never touch these two.
by leslieakf | Jul 24, 2015 | Collage
We did a collaborative project in collage class, where we worked on a collage for a while and exchanged it with a partner for each to finish the one the other had started. This is one that I started and my collaborator Fern brought on home.
I really like what she did with it.
by leslieakf | Jul 17, 2015 | Collage
I’ve been taking a great collage class for the past few weeks. We work in class and create collages in a couple of hours. It’s a challenge because of the time and materials constraint, but it makes me work and think a little differently than I normally do, which is exactly why I took the class.
For our first assignment, we drew with scissors from a live model. At the end of the night I’d produced these, which were not at all finished. They were totally unresolved in this state.
I finished the first one at home, which I think is a massive improvement. I wanted to try and keep some of the gesture of the live model but give it some kind of theme.
It’s tough to salvage a bad collage when you want to preserve the one interesting shape in it. I gessoed over most of it, but had to scrape some of it off the figure on the left. Now I just have to finish the second one.
by leslieakf | Jul 6, 2015 | Collage
Sometimes when I’m shuffling through collage stuff, I spot a great composition created out of a random pile. It’s almost impossible to glue these down exactly as they are arranged, so I just take a quick photo. Here are two recent random collages.
by leslieakf | Jul 3, 2015 | Art, Collage
I’m taking an excellent collage class right now, and our assignment was to do a narrative collage. I made these two collages in class.
I’d been inspired earlier in the week by an exhibit I saw online at the McNay Art Museum called Recycled, Repurposed, Reborn, in particular, a piece by Alexandra Exter titled Scene Design for an Unidentified Production. I just thought that would be a great concept for a collage series, so these are a really early attempt. They ended up being more surreal than dramatic, but they were pretty fun to do.
by leslieakf | Jun 29, 2015 | Art
As I was going through a bunch of collage stuff lately, these two clippings surfaced. To me, it is as if my past self was telling my future self that this might be interesting: Save it and throw it in a box.
I looked them up and they are both pretty interesting:
Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban
Jonah Freeman – Museo Magazine
And weirdly they go together:
(Joseph Urban on the left, Jonah Freeman on the right.) I’d say they are both architects of urban dreams.
