We did monoprinting in class this Saturday. I considered teaching technique but decided to just let everyone play and discover their own way forward. I don’t know that much technique and believe that art is all about exploration anyway. It’s more important to explore than to learn to follow instructions or to get things right. So, I hope I didn’t let the class down but think interesting things emerged.
I didn’t know myself what it was I wanted to get at when we began but just sitting together at a huge table gave me ideas. All any of us had to do was glance over our shoulder at our neighbor’s work and get new visions for our own.

I asked what people’s goals were for the class. One student wants to dive into art so that when she retires she’s in the swim and can live the next chapter of her life as an artist. I love that the next chapter is a vital one. Another wants to overcome the inner critic, a good and necessary goal for us all. Another wants to get more into the abstract.

That got me thinking about what it is that makes the abstract work. For me great abstract work takes me into the realm of meditation like a zen koan or a haiku. It bites off an edge of the mystery and gives us something concrete upon which to reflect. But how to get to the clarity? I don’t have an answer.

I didn’t see much in my monoprints. I had no clear vision of what I wanted to do and I needed one. I just kept playing for the sake of exploration. The image on the left above is one of my monoprints. It said nothing to me but later I found a wee corner of it that held a small gift. I like the intense center in the field of magenta, a color of passion, and the hints of light. I inverted the image in Photoshop and got a brilliant center of light in a field of green, nature’s color, with hints of darkness on the side. This holds possibility for further exploration but I didn’t pick up on them in the moment.

Instead I started painting—pink and yellow stripes, inspired by one of the other students who was doing dots and had spoken of the color pink. I loved the stripes—happy Rothkos. These are small, just nine inches, and I wonder what they’d be like huge. There’s a great group of Rothko images in a room of their own at the Tate Modern and they invoke in me a sense of powerful presence and stillness. I encountered them first when I was about twenty and had a near religious experience. Palpitations and all. Their soberness seems to give strength. It’s stately rather than hopeless.

I wonder what pink and yellow stripes would be like large. What would they invoke? It’s still cold and grey and raining here in Boston and I suspect I’m thinking of tulips. Anyway, I love these little stripes just for being there. Enough for now. More painterly and printerly explorations next week.