They even had homework - you were encouraged to try your hand at doing a painting "in the style of" these famous painters. I had never made a painting of any kind before. I thought it would be kind of fun. It was.
Most of original artist painted on a scale of, say, 8 by 8 feet. I had some 8x8 INCH panels on hand, along with some very ancient acrylic craft paint. Here's some of the stuff I came up with:
Number 1: Barnett Newman
8” square wood panel primed in clear gesso. Painted with very old acrylic fluid craft paint found in basement. Process:
- Painted entire panel with the cool blue-grey. Masked off one zip.
- Painted the entire panel with cobalt blue. Decided it needed more depth and gloss, so I gave the entire panel another coat of cobalt mixed with gloss medium, then a coat of pure gloss medium.
- Two thin zips, one black and one white, were masked on both sides. (The white was actual student grade acrylic art paint.)
- The red one-sided zip was originally half the width. I decided that was too narrow, and the paint too thin, so I went back and re-masked for a wider zip, and gave it two coats.
Lessons learned?
- That initial cool grey zip needs something…
- The cobalt seemed to have a lot of pigment, but the rest of the found paint was pretty thin, and needed several coats to cover. Decent paint counts!
- I liked the glossy cobalt ground. The photos’s side lighting brings out the texture a bit more than you would notice in real life. Still, I’d like to find a way to get it extra-smooth. Sand & recoat?
- This was fun, and I believe the first actual painting I ever created! And not so bad for a retired engineer whose artistic background is music and photography.
Number 2: Willem de Kooning
This is one of the few I did in a slightly bigger format. 20x30” poster board.
It was a fun, but challenging one. Where to start? When to stop? I did about four all-over layers. I think I managed to make some paint blotches that you could call "gestural", which was the goal. That lighter blue stuff in the bottom half should be reworked, but you gotta quit sometime…
Number 3: Jackson Pollock
Detail
This was also on larger format poster board. The paint I used was all house paint that the previous homeowners kindly left behind for us. So the color palette is, "whatever comes out of these cans". On a black background. It was dripped mainly using a paint stir stick. One trick learned is to do several colors, then let it dry so they don't pool and blend into one giant, muddy blob. The real problem with this style of paining is that it's REALLY, REALLY FUN TO DO. It takes great discipline to stop before you end up with, well, a big muddy blob.
I tried my hand at an 8x8" mini-Pollock. Same color scheme.
Detail
Number 4: Mark Rothko
Rothko is one of my art heroes, so this one was going to be tough. Especially constrained to an 8x8 inch scale and using crappy paint. At least Jackson Pollock actually did use house paint!
I started with a black background with some blue mixed in. There are many layers of thinned acrylic paint in the rectangles. Last layers on upper rectangle were a dirty orange with a very thin red glazed on to break it up. White stripe is a creamy white over a pure white. The small bright fire orange bits peeking through the edges of the bottom rectangle is a Rothko thing that I think I managed to at least create a hint of.
Number 5: Agnes Martin
Detail
This was kind of a process painting, where you come up with an idea and some rules, then just execute it. Started out with two layers of light yellow over a base layer of black. The grid incised with a sharpened metal awl. The light blue lines are two shades colored pencil. I think Agnes would approve of the subtle difference in the blues, and of the imperfections of the awl lines. Clear coated to keep the pencil from smudging.
Number 5: Yakoi Kusama
Detail
Another process painting, of sorts, in her "infinity net” style. White over a non-uniform dark red/brick background. Some paint was straight from the bottle, some with a little gel media mixed in, some with gloss media. Here's where the cheap paint really shows. All these marks looked very opaque white-white when painted, but dried kind of thin and transparent. And I really tried to glob it on.
Number 6: Ad Reinhardt
Reinhardt did lots of unusual things with paint to get that extremely uniform matte black. I went into this one knowing it was going to be a big experiment, that I was venturing far from Ad Reinhardt's already unusual materials, and the chances of failure were great. And fail it did. Long story short: after a couple weeks of trials, I had gone past the point of no return. The panel was sanded back down to bare wood. The world shall never see my "sludge painting". It couldda been a thing...
