Mad about art?

Salvador Dali would probably have had a good laugh that his words are immortalized on pencil souvenirs at the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida. (Who knew?) But two weekends ago, when I had my art class on Saturday and a separate 5-hour art workshop Sunday, I ended up feeling a little Dali-esque myself. (Think sagging watches....) 

It's all been good, though, and here's a quick recap. In early February, we did a cool in-class exercise, outlining reproductions of masterworks on acetate sheets and then analyzing their compositional components. Given a spread of choices, I opted for Seurat's "Bathers at Asnières" while my class buddy, the tattoo artist, went for the Dali.

The following week, we slogged along on the subject of the Golden Mean, or Golden Section, or Golden Ratio. 

Oh, I shouldn't say "slogged;" it's just that my eyes glaze over with the math part of it. But it's another one of those things that I knew about theoretically but had never worked with -- until this very useful course. That week's homework was to photocopy a number of images and use them to make a composition using the Golden Mean.

I controlled my impulse to use a whole bunch of stuff and selected just two images to work with - sunflower petals and a painting artist figure (which, yes, could have benefitted from an added pair of boots).

After a fair bit of fiddling, I settled on five repeats of the figure, contributing to the key vertical and horizontal lines that are placed on the Golden Mean.

The next class, we honed in on line itself as an element of composition. Our assignment was to find or make images in which the composition depended on vertical, horizontal, diagonal, organic and implied lines. I sorted through my stash of postcard reproductions and then went totally crazy. With coloured paper and cutouts, I created a gallery exhibit for them in a scrolled format -- an April Fool's spoof, with a sneak preview in February, as the exhibit was being installed. (With a tip of my new ear-flapped cap to my friend L, who professionally installs gallery exhibits with flair and authority).

First, the Vertical Room:

Next, the Diagonal Room (with the paint barely dry on the walls):

Then, the Organic Room. Can't you see those draperies writhing along with the paintings?

On to the Horizontal Room:

And finally, the Room of Implied Line -- where the repeated shapes of Altdorfer's magnificent horseback trumpeters create dynamic curved lines that cut forward into space.

With a Canadian holiday and no class that week, we were given double homework. The second assignment was to use ruler and pen and -- in no fewer than 200 (yes, two hundred) straight lines -- create an interesting composition.

And now hold onto your pencils for that extra mid-month workshop at the City of Burnaby's Shadbolt Centre, where our session was held in one of the older buildings in the lovely park.

Our instructor in "Anatomy and Figure Drawing" covered lots of ground, and we did lots of drawing. Here's a quick sampler, starting with the traditional quick poses:

Then a contour drawing, trying not to look at the paper -- a sure way to create a vanishing wrist.

A focused drawing on the lower back torso:

A neat and challenging project placing the model's poses in perspective:--

WHEW! It was a wonderful experience but good to have that weekend behind me and get back to my tranquil early morning weekday hours in my studio. Here's the view as I walked in the door, the week I was working on my "On the Line" exhibit. What's that saying that used to be posted in every workplace? "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."

All we have to do is....wait for it

For a while there, it seemed that it would never end. The snow that usually breezes in for a day or two before Christmas was like the visitor that just didn't know when to go home -- called up their friends, in fact, and invited more of the same.

Still: It *was* an excuse to go outside and play. My best memory of the endless snow shovelling was the morning that the sidewalk ice was beginning to loosen enough to pick up shards, which I had fun placing along the fence top of The Yellow House.

Beating me at my own game, my pals down the block exceeded all expectations the next day when they excavated huge ice slabs from the street in front of their house and ringed their corner of the block with a mini-Stonehenge.

Remarkably, this looked very like the medieval stone fortifications called cheval de frise that we saw years ago in Ireland around the remains of old forts.

The snow was also an exercise in patience. All one had to do was sit tight and wait -- something I thought about on my studio mornings as I worked on the fourth in my Flash Mob Series -- "Sit Tight." For once, I stuck successfully with my original sketched plan.

Again, I worked over an old painting and found the early stages eerie and fascinating.

In fact, even as I continued obliterating the old stuff, I found that I couldn't quite let go of some of its patterns.

And here it is -- a bright sunny day in the future when the Winter of 2017 is just a memory, the finale of "Sit Tight" (copyright 2017).

For the work in progress, click here and repeat the mantra, "Flash Mobs are everywhere."