Watercolor Wednesday: Abstract Art

More accurately, this is Watercolor Week. Our local art association is opening its annual art show and sale on Friday. In conjunction with this event, the association invited the judge, teaching artist Jan Brieschke, to give a three-day class.

https://www.janbrieschke.com/

Jan is teaching me and 10 other students how to compose and paint in the abstract style using watercolor and ink. Her work in this form of mixed media is stunning.

The first two days have been great fun. Jan is soft-spoken and low key. Her lessons on how to get an abstract composition started are inspired by four modernist painters:

PIET MONDRIAN

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/mondrian-piet/

MARCEL DUCHAMP

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/duchamp-marcel/

PABLO PICASSO

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/picasso-pablo/

and JACKSON POLLOCK

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/pollock-jackson/

We haven’t got to the Pollock yet (dripping and throwing paint at paper will be pretty darn exciting for a bunch of conservative Oklahomans!) Today I’m posting my work resulting from the first two days of class.

We started with Mondrian and geometric abstracts. Jan’s method was to have each student to suggest a shape. We then had to incorporate those suggestions into our initial drawings. Here is my work after drawing, inking the lines and painting washes.

To finish, we were asked to stipple our paintings using black Micron pens. I limited my stipples to the red circles, as you can see in this slightly wonky photograph.

The next technique involved the organic shape of a leaf. We started by making directional lines on our papers. Then we traced the leaf many times, overlapping the shapes in the direct of the lines. Color was added to the spaces made by the lines crossing. I chose to use warm colors on the leaf shapes, keeping the background in mixed shades of green.

Tomorrow I hope to finish by drawing more lines and some texture in black ink.

Our technique this morning involved soaking a string in one or two colors of paint, laying the wet string on a paper, covering the paper with another piece, and then pulling the string out while rotating it. I pulled two strings through mine, one twisted one straight. This is how it looks after the paper dried and I added a few twisty lines in a pale color of paint.

After studying the result for a while, I decided that I will crop it down, maybe like this.

Tomorrow is the last day of class. Hopefully I will finish my leaf and string paintings. And who knows what other crazy things Jan will show us using paint and ink.