Nancy Crow workshop: Lines, Curves, Shapes; days 4 & 5

By Wednesday afternoon I wanted to totally leave behind everything I had done so far and I was eager to start the final project. Nancy gave us our final assignment, and once again I just couldn’t wrap my head around all of the variables. I will definitely sleep all day and all night for an entire week before the next workshop I take here! That’s okay, though. I was determined to learn what I could, and I decided that I wouldn’t worry about the other stuff for now. I have my notes, so I can go back to them time and again at my leisure when I am well rested in my own studio and on my own mattress!

So, the final project had three parts, although they were supposed to merge with each other so they didn’t look like three parts. She wanted us to be “wild” and “energetic” — all the things I wasn’t feeling at that moment! Ah, humility is a good thing… At least my mind could grasp the three-part thing, right? So, I placed markers on my design wall so I could see how big she wanted the piece. Each section was to be roughly 2 ft by 4 ft.

When I’m mystified about something, I go back to my comfortable and familiar. In my mind, I know I want to learn to work more abstractly and non-representationally. In times like these, though, all I can think of is people — I know how to draw people, so I thought I’d try to abstract a few bodies. I sketched out one panel, thought it had possibilities, so I sketched out two more.

At that point, I wondered if I could actually sew something like this, so I decided to give it a try.

It suggested possibilities, but I wasn’t really liking how choppy it looked. Nancy didn’t like the “stained glass window” effect, meaning the dark outlines filled in with color. She suggested that maybe the part that I had done really fit the second part of the assignment better, so maybe I should move it over and recreate the first part. Around this time, I decided to lop off 6 or 8″ from the bottom. It wasn’t really adding anything to the piece anyway.

I moved the one section over, and I did like how it was interacting with the third part, but it was around this time that I decided, since I wasn’t fulfilling the assignment anyway, I would just make this three-part piece into a two-part piece. I started in a new direction with the third section, and it wasn’t long before I decided that I’d dump the two part idea and make this a one part idea.

As I sit back and look at this piece now, I see lots of areas I would change, but I won’t. I’m leaving this as it is. There are things I really like about it, and I think it suggests ideas that I could actually explore, so I find that rather exciting.

So, even though the workshop wasn’t successful in a traditional sense, I think it was highly successful as far as inspiring me to get my act together and start taking all this “art stuff” seriously. If that’s all I got out of it, that would make everything worthwhile, but I also think it has given me ideas to explore and challenges to conquer, so I am extremely excited about that!