FIVE POINTS OF VIEW

 I grabbed a seat at Arches, a local art store, for their afternoon class with Natalie Cole to make marks with sumi-e ink. We spent the afternoon spraying Canson Bristol Vellum first with water; and then with a fine pipette, we dropped and scrawled sumi-e ink across the paper.

I love how ink spreads when it comes in contact with water. It balloons out into blooms of various shades of grey. We let the paper dry so that we could add strokes of the black ink across the grey areas we had made before. We used various tools: a silicone brush, a Japanese style bristle brush, stamping tools, and resists such as crayons and oil pastels. 

Mark-making tools

The result was a batch of papers with lines, blotches, washes, and various marks across the pages. I picked up the artist's corners that Cole provided and moved them across the paper until I found a pleasing composition within the haphazard splatters. I cut out the shapes and adhered one or a combination to a page in a 60-sheet, mixed media 9" X 9" sketchbook. 

I used flexible artist's corners to find a composition within a larger page.

Four small designs from one page of marks
made with Art Graf water soluble chalk

When we all finished, we had the beginnings of an artbook that could be filled with many small pieces of art to display. Using the sketchbook as a repository for these small pieces of art is a brilliant idea. I have a collection of scraps from many other projects that had languished because I hadn't decided how to use them. With the pieces adhered to the sketchbook pages, I could turn them into small art pieces which I could display within a book.

At the end of the day, we gathered around each book and discovered how differently each of us responded to the supplies. I had covered most of my pages with large areas of grey-to-black marks and found small compositions inside them. Another person drew three-inch brush strokes in a series across the page with none of the strokes touching each other. Another person used watercolor as a background instead of grey and introduced small amounts of sumi-e strokes. Someone else drew long thin shapes over a mottled background. The dark images looked like groups of trees or people.

In all the similar workshops I've attended, I haven't seen that much diversity of expression. Usually, the workshops are longer so we all have time to walk around to see what others are doing, but during this short class we didn't have time to look at other people's pages and I thought we ended up being more creative because of that. A surprise to me since I've often thought that creativity is often enhanced by the exchange of ideas where a simple idea can be enhanced by collaboration or suggestions producing something greater than the original. In this workshop I felt I was looking at the core of each person's creativity.

Four small compositions put together to make a design.
The red dot unifies the composition

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