Turn Her Upside Down

Isn't it funny how you can say something over and over and yet when it applies to you, you may not necessarily realize it until someone else brings it to your attention?  I am constantly telling my students to turn their work upside down.  I believe it helps students to recognize spatial distances, appropriate colors, accurate shapes, etc that they may simply overlook when they work to make their work look like something/someone they "know".  

And so Kit suggested to me after a while that I get a different perspective by looking at my subject matter and painting upside down.  I knew I still had a lot of lights to plug in, my nose was too small, my mouth was too dark, but somehow looking at it upside down made it even more glaringly obvious.  I appreciated the change in perspective as I continued my Friday.

When we returned from lunch, we began our discussion about the questions Kit asked us to explore.  We sat in a circle and used our phones to show our picks for Trite, Traditional, and Innovative, as well as what we liked best and least, and how important subject matter, medium, and style were to the work.  

These were the pieces I shared as we went around the circle expressing our findings.

I don't want to focus too much on the artwork we spoke about, but I will say that this piece above was probably my favorite piece out of the group of work that was shown.  The piece was called "poolside" and I thought the concept and the humor in this image were really amusing.  I also used this image as my "innovative" choice.  

Over the course of the afternoon, I played with the forehead, the eyebrows, and the cheeks quite a bit.

One thing I realized was that I kept winding up wanting the same silly color that I would run out of, so I finally made a bigger pile of it to work with.

After dinner, when I came back a little early, I took a couple pictures in the hallway.  I liked the concept that from grade school, to college, to teacher workshops, we are still playing with color theory, we are still, in some cases, working with a single shared concept.  Yet, there is always more to learn.

Here is one of Kit's paintings in progress.

I worked in the studio with Colleen until close again this night.  

The week was a marathon, and it wasn't over yet.