15 Jun 9 June, 2020: “Seeing & Drawing” with Lyndie Wright
For the first instalment in our 10-week series for Curious alumni, artist and maker Lyndie Wright led an online class in “Seeing & Drawing”. She invited each participant to set up a still-life scene in their own home to use as stimulus, and prepared an intriguing ingredients list to bring to the session:
And then came the exercises: mixing techniques and materials, subverting the dominant hand by encouraging hand-swapping throughout, and even employing both hands simultaneously at times. Lyndie introduced a phase system (five different phases of different strokes: straight lines, curved lines, marks of different lengths etc) that were then intermingled at speed, preventing over-analysis of the work as it appeared on the paper and keeping the outcome fluid and not overly-contrived. It was a treat to be able to see Lyndie’s page as she led the session, where her visuals acted as a guide rather than as a brushstroke-by-brushstroke instruction.
The session developed away from the page, and became three-dimensional as we modelled basic puppet hands using wire and masking tape.
Here is some of the work that came out of the session:
Thanks to alumni Amber Donovan Kahn, Freddie Crossley and Holly Black for generously sharing their results with us.
Next week, Toby Olié will be leading a session around “Simplifying Movement”, looking at how you can work with a simple idea to make an animal puppet using basic materials for just one operator.
Our weekly sessions are made possible thanks to Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund.