Passion

When asked to create a piece of art on a particular emotion, in this case passion, I started with a colour theme. Colours that immediately came to mind were red, maroon, purple and black. Yes, I realize that's a bit dark, but besides the warm and fuzzy feelings, for me passion also contains some risque, spur-of-the-moment elements. Once I assembled my tubes of paint, I searched through magazines for images that either contributed to the colour or images theme. These images were torn and placed on my background paper. Once happy with the layout, I started adding acrylic paint, both to unify the images and to further enhance the colour theme. I like to use a large flathead paintbrush and a stencil brush to get the initial colours down. At the end, to finetune things, I use various smaller brushes as well as scraps of diecut papers as stencils to add extra spot colours.

Nick Bantock Workshop

This summer I was able to take a workshop with Nick Bantock. The 2-day workshop was in his new studio/gallery on Saltspring Island, aptly named The Forgetting Room. This was not a beginner course, and all 12 participants had some art background.



Nick is a great teacher and very generous with his knowledge and supplies. Throughout the weekend, we raided his store of magazines, postage stamps and rubber stamps, and constantly picked his brain. It was so inspirational to be creating your own art while surrounded by like minded people amid Nick's fantastic art.

The workshop consisted of a number of collage exercises, each increasingly complex, all a la Nick Bantock.

One such exercise ....
1) We were handed an 8-1/2 x 11 section of a nautical chart
2) And then a small image (mine was a fish stamp)
3) Next we cut a triangle window in the chart
4) And found a simple magazine image to add to the back to show through the window
5) Then we found a number in a magazine to add to our artwork
6) We then created another window (any shape, I chose a triangle again)
7) And added another magazine image to show through
8) And then added postage stamp
9) Then from Nick's rubber stamps, we each chose 2
10) And stamped each once onto our artwork
11) Last we added a 1/2" border of our choice

And here's mine ...