WITH KEN KEWLEY
September 19 – 23, 2024
Thursday – Monday
IN PERSON AT BLACK POND. This is a workshop for getting back to what we already knew. Back to those wooden blocks that we could pile up into worlds that thrilled and surprised us. Many of us were taught that representation came before abstraction. That we start with something, then we abstract it. This is backwards. Abstraction must come first. Otherwise, there is nothing to build representation with. No wooden blocks. We may ask ourselves, what is wrong with our work? What did we not get?
One day (spread over several years) I realized what I had left out. It was the abstraction. I had left the art out. No matter how well the subject is observed, it is the shapes within things, the arrangement of the light and dark shapes, that must make up the representation.
Collage is the quickest way to make shapes. I think of collage as painting with dry paint. In the workshop we start by arranging shapes without subject. Then we will work from our own work, and each other’s, finding ways to shift the shapes to strengthen our representations. Lunch is included in the workshop fee.