Here Goes With The Abstracts!

 Literally Shapes
acrylic on paper
© Nicki Ault, 2012

Okay, I've spent two weeks decompressing after my week at Emma Lake and I am ready to "put it all out there"! First I have to say that I could not have had a better week- for lots of different reasons. The Kenderdine Campus is truly one of my happy places. Alicia Popoff had been on my radar for awhile as being someone I wanted to learn from; I had heard such good things about her as an instructor. She is a wonderful abstract artist who sees the world in a gloriously quirky way. She builds layers of textures in her work through different mediums and various techniques and I love her colour choices. Anyway, when I saw she was teaching a class called "Abstract Expressionism" at Emma Lake I decided my time had come to learn from her.

The first day she sent us out to explore the forest around the campus looking for shapes. We were to focus only on the outlines of shapes and hopefully find one or two shapes to focus on. We took our sketch books and had roughly half an hour to gather some information. I reverted to my school day "good student" mode and took her very literally, wanting to stick to the rules! I immediately got stuck thinking solely about geometric shapes - organic shapes didn't even enter my mind!!! Honestly! For someone who enjoys using her right brain, I sure got caught up in the left hemisphere for this exercise! I did a sketch of the rectangular boards of the dock and the circle shapes of the buoys and then I wandered in to the forest and did a couple of sketches of trees... focusing of course on the rectangular trunks, long thin branches and even the rectangular negative shapes between the trees. Back at the studio we were to then take one shape that appealed to us and create a piece of art by repeating that shape in a composition.

I spent a good chunk of time staring at my blank paper not wanting to make a wrong move. Sometimes there is nothing more daunting than a white sheet staring back at you! Finally, just to get started, I decided to put a wash of yellow on the paper and then it made sense to choose a limited palette otherwise I would have been there all day staring at all my tubes of paint. Eventually I began with the rectangles, thinking about the tree trunks, negative shapes of the forest and the horizontal branches.

Afterwards I had a good laugh with another artist in the class- the only male and a lawyer- because we were the only two who were so literal with the rules. Everyone else was much more free and interpretive and, well, abstract-y in their thinking! Ahhh, day one jitters got the best of me!