While we spend a lot of time creating patterns and doing drawing exercises to warm up our creative juices, I thought I'd write first about one of the most exciting parts of beginning a painting: the pour! If you've seen Katherine's work, you'll soon realize how coordinated and designed it truly is despite the randomness of the individual elements. Yet, she --and now us-- lets gravity and water do the initial heavy lifting.

First, we mix our desired colors and thin the acrylic paint with water. Then, we pour! Sometimes we splash, splotch, or splatter, and other times we toss, hurl, or dribble. Our movements create a moving field of color on the paper as the watery pigment pools or forms rivulets. The paper buckles into hills and valleys, and we've suddenly got a living landscape at our feet! We allow the paper to dry, which may take several days, and the unique geography of the paper creates the forms into which we work additional masses of color and pattern.





--Emily

Labels: paint, process