The real and the abstract

This past fall I took an art class at the Vancouver Island School of Art taught by a wonderful instructor named Barrie Szekely. We met for three hours on Thursday afternoons for 12 weeks and it pushed my painting in some very different directions by incorporating "the real" into abstract paintings.

Here's some of what came out of this class.

Text abstracted

These are a couple sections of a large painting using text in an abstract way.

Moving beyond the grid

This assignment was to incorporate a grid with something realistic. I chose an orange.

Incorporating something real into your painting.

I chose to use some rotted wood found on the forest floor and cut it into slices. I was trying for a stream in the forest effect.

For this one we had to create some kind of form on which to paint abstractly.  It just got weirder and weirder--but it was fun painting the sticks and manipulating them in 3D.

One of the assignments was to use dried paint to create a painting or an art piece. Some of the participants did sculptures from dried paint by I did this. It's a poor quality image of the painting I did using the wax paper I'd been using on my palette tray.


Our final assignment was to create a series incorporating the real and abstract.  I decided to try to incorporate figurative work into an abstract format. It took me in a totally different direction, never having painted figures before.  I enjoyed doing it but I'm not sure if I'd follow up on much that I explored--except maybe for the second assignment with the grid and the realistic objects.

What I really enjoyed was seeing examples of art by artists I had never heard of before and pushing my boundaries--as well as meeting a bunch of painters, both young and older (like me). It was an interesting experience.