Workshop with Peter Griffen

I attended a workshop run by Australian abstract artists, Peter Griffen.  My work is far from abstract, but I wanted to attend to stretch myself a little and enjoy the dialogue that goes with these sorts of things. Get 15 artists in a room and SOMEONE is going to say something interesting! Well, stretch I did. I felt like I was primed to twang off on a tangent!

I drove up to Tairua on the Coromandel peninsula early on Thursday morning and we met at the Tairua Rugby club. The juxtaposition of sporting memorabilia vs artists and life model was quite fun. Anyways, the agenda was to draw the figure and then the face for 2 days  after which we moved onto landscape, ALL within the parameters of abstract art. It was challenging (thats the nice way of putting it). I only cried once.

I still have a headache. I tried really hard to just "go for it" as Peter encouraged, but I could not get my Francis Bacon on. But I did learn some truths about the way I work and think and I don't think there is any "One Way" to work . I have a renewed interest in acrylic paints( Especially the chalky nature of the Matisse heavy body paints) and watched the technique of many of the artists and learned some clever tricks.

I enjoyed meeting the other artists, hearing how they work, witnessing some great work and sharing some abysmal defeats. But 4 days is a long time to concentrate as hard as I did and I was exhausted on the last day. I am still not recovered and have taken today off to fold laundry and caught up on my emails etc.

This was the best of the weekend's work.

Artists shoes and landscape