Experimental Collaboration and Interaction with fellow Albuquerque artists

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Experimental Collaboration  and Interaction with fellow Albuquerque artists

Begun in the Spring of 2007, we (Betsy Greenlee, Fred Yost, Jaci Fisher, Leila Hall, Jeanine Allen, Elaine Scott, Gaye Garrison and Jeff Potter) were inspired by previous artist/ writer collaborations, most notably the "Scribes Eight" and we strive to explore artistic genres we generally have not thought about attempting.  Abstract art came to mind and we chose to meet every six weeks and share our individual efforts at "making" abstract art from a commonly agreed "project" scope discussed at the previous meeting.  Herein describes our journey.

Below is a chronological listing of web pages made from our past meetings.  Click on any meeting to see our efforts.

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Previous - 4-28-07 Art Group meeting

Previous - 6-09-07 Art Group meeting

CURRENT - August 26 meeting - The project was another series of 4 works exploring zooming in on a portion (25% of area) of the original representational work in subsequent steps and pushing the abstraction of the resulting smaller and smaller field of view.
Betsy Greenlee project 8-26-07       

     Notes from Betsy (8/27/07)    "One of the problems I’ve always had in trying to do nonrepresentational work is that I am not good at inventing interesting forms.  The process we followed in this project was to discover and isolate forms that were already there, then recreate them on a different scale.  The painting I started with is one of a long series of the Rio Brazos.  I’m not at all satisfied with the painting, but thought there were some interesting passages that would lend themselves to this process.   The first painting is a segment of the lower right hand corner of the original painting.   I chose that area because there was a variety of colors and shapes and a sense of the movement of the water, which I wanted to keep.  I liked some of the atmospheric effects but decided the overall image was too busy and lacking focus.  The second painting is the upper half of the first one, which eliminates some of the busyness in the bottom half.  I think it’s more successful, but there’s still sameness about the marks.  On both of these I used Nupastels on Rives BFK.  Although I like the way the hard pastels layer on this paper, the number of layers is limited and it’s difficult to get really intense, opaque color.
The third painting is a small area of the lower right hand corner of the second painting.  Here I decided to forget that the image had anything to do with water and instead concentrate on strengthening the abstract structure.  For this painting I used Wallis professional grade paper.  Both the application and the removal of the pastel are much easier on this surface.  Being able to get the opacity I wanted in some places without filling the tooth of the paper allowed me to keep working back in with a greater variety of marks.  I’m pleased with the boldness of this last painting, which I think is due partly to the surface but also to a stronger compositional structure."

B. Greenlee's starting pastel painting

   B. Greenlee Image 1                                                         B. Greenlee Image 2                                                      B. Greenlee Image 3

Leila Hall project 8-26--07
     Leila's Notes (8-26-07)  "The first painting of the house in the orchard appealed to me because of the light and colors........a bit mysterious to me. It fed into my fascination with paintings of houses that are" blank" ala Edward Hopper and Robert Cottingham. I am not sure if the word is "surreal" or not..........So I zeroed in on those planes of color and really played with them. Perspective be damned! The last one was really liberating. "

 L. Hall Image 1                

                           Leila Hall Images 2, 3

Jeff Potter project 8-26-07  

J. Potter -1 J. Potter -2

J. Potter -3  

J. Potter -4

   Jeff notes (9-1-07):  "Starting with an aerial photo of a interesting place SW of Albq, I began by executing an oil pastel using only 12 colors of CrayPas pastels on Bristol 300 series illustration paper.  I tried to achieve my usual degree of detail and color which I anticipated would be difficult due to frustration with oil pastels in the past.  Surprisingly, I was able to blend using Turpenoid via a small brush.  There are many areas in the photo that intrigued me by their unusual shapes and colors being juxtaposed.  Image 2 approached the dark shadow shapes in the lower left. Image 3 was conceived by turning the reference point 45 degrees which made an interesting new shape.  Image 4 becomes almost like a Navajo weaving design motif.  I enjoyed doing these approaches as well as re-visiting oil pastels!"

Jaci Fisher project 8-26-07

          J. Fisher Image 1                                                                   J. Fisher Image 2

Jaci's notes: "I began this exercise with a pastel of a still life keeping in mind the shapes I thought would work abstracted. The exercise was to do an original piece in a style in which each of the artists generally worked, and then proceed to do 3 more pieces each being one forth of the previous piece to get to a very abstracted form of the original art work. I did take this literally and made a view finder of one fourth the size of the art work - so each of the 3 pieces were a fourth of the one before it. I did not alter the color combinations of the original and each were done in the same sketchy pencil, pastel technique. I did turn the pieces to find an interesting composition before doing the next piece. In the original piece, one of the objects – a small chair- did not really add much to the pastel composition and would have been better to leave it out all together. As I proceeded in the 3 abstracts that small chair image that did not work in the original really did not help the abstract pieces either. The exercise did result in an abstract, painterly pieces – and one of the abstracted images (third one) seemed to work the best."

               J. Fisher Image 3                                                          J. Fisher Image 4

Fred Yost project 8-26-07

         F. Yost Image 1                                                                                            F. Yost Image 2

   Fred's notes:  "I started this exercise by repainting a scene I had painted earlier, but at a smaller scale. The painting is entitled “Near The Crest” My first abstraction started from the center of the painting where the rocks are inclined at an angle. The painting went well; I felt free to modify the original colors but kept the overall shapes. The second abstraction, again a magnification process, resulted in a painting that reminded me of “Minimalism”. In the next abstraction I felt that if I simply went further, attaining an even more minimalist image, it would result in a boring painting. I went ahead and did it anyway and realized that my prediction was accurate. So, I varnished the whole painting and glazed over the result with oil paint. Again, I felt free to modify colors but, in addition, I added expressive strokes of additional colors along with some scraping marks."

      F. Yost Image 3                                                                                      F. Yost Image 4
 

7. Next meeting Sunday October 14th at 1 PM. Meeting location: Jaci & Fred's new studio. New Project – dual works of same subject using 1)  2-dimensional medium and 2) collage.  Clarification from Jaci: "I thought a different approach to abstraction could be to do a painting or a pastel in your normal way then take that image and do it as a collage using other materials( and perhaps, in some cases, simplifying the design before starting the collage would be helpful in terms of time). It does not have to be 3-D, but adding other materials ( wood or metal or glass or paper or???? anything) would make it more dimensional than the original. "