‘Push pull’ collaboration workshop.

On the 25th Feb I participated in a group painting workshop, four big sheets were nailed to the wall in the life room, each with a category of painting; landscape, figure, organic forms, and architecture. As a third year student who had experienced this type of workshop before, as my role was to guide our assigned first and second year students through the process and advise them. I and other third year students who specialise in landscapes chose what picture our group should work from beforehand; we chose landscapes of Britain by Brian Cook as we thought it wasn’t too minimalist, yet not too detailed, looking back it wasn’t really a great choice because it was very stylised and graphic with no texture, which seemed to limit our interpretations in a way, as we were imitating his style from the starting point. At first the group was pretty slow trying to get the composition of the picture down.

The groups then swapped canvases and moved to work on the piece on the left, each group received an instruction. Our group moved to the ‘figures’ canvas and our instruction was to draw patterns onto the picture, some parts looked better than others, but it was quite interesting the way they looked like they were behind a screen or something.

The

group who were working on our landscape painting had the instruction to draw shapes, they managed to make it far more intriguing I like the surreal, modernist feel to this, my favourite part of the picture

The picture still looked a bit bare though, you could still see most of the surface of the paper, and we needed to add more coverage, more opaque layers. We elaborated the parts of the painting which looked good, such as the circles in the trees, while adding layers of paint, particularly painting the foreground in dark to add depth

Next the groups moved to the left and we started working on the architecture piece, with the instruction to add shapes. We made sure have a variation of sizes of shapes.

The group who worked on our landscape painting had the instruction to use opaque layers of colour, it took away some of the details I liked but it created an interesting misty effect.

We aimed to add some more definition and depth, painting the foreground in solid black and redefining the shapes, though this had taken away the obscure misty effect I admired.

The final Piece

I like the

way this turned out, particularly the field in the foreground, with the flowing lines giving it a surreal sense of depth and form. By using a very graphic looking reference to work from, we have maintained

that quality even though it looks very different to the original.