I recently returned from teaching two one week workshops at Anderson Ranch, both combining paint and collage material. Much of the class is teaching students different ways to add surfaces to their substrates, using photographic images, paint, or material transferred be it paint or marks or photographs or text, to name just a few. There is something thrilling about making a painting by not just painting on the surface with a brush, but by adding to it and not being quite sure what you are going to get. Sometimes you get magic, and sometimes not. This panel started out as a demonstration piece, and there wasn't much magic. I then proceeded to try most of the different techniques I was teaching, including using a students "pure black" paint to create the washes. Still no magic. Frustrated I kept piling technique on top of technique. And then suddenly, there was the magic: the student's "borrowed" black paint transformed into the figure of a woman leaning over at an impossible angle, surrounded by the beautiful chaos of the all "non-magical" marks I had made.
