Painting abstracts in Florida

After settling in Palm Springs for moments, I flew to Boca Raton for a painting workshop with the inimitable Eydi Lampasona. She teaches through the Boca Raton Museum School of Arts and she is a fabulous teacher. She is relentless, she is funny, she is loud and outrageous and the 3 days were filled with laughs, great instructions, experiments, diving in Golden products which she represents, and all in all, a very worthwhile trip.

It would be a bit hard and boring to get into why I went there, let us just say that I followed my intuition, and it turned out that it was a great move.

 

I learned to focus on design and construction in my paintings, rather than my usual ‘stream of consciousness’ of painting all over the place with wild abandon. The operative word here is ‘wild’!!!

  She introduced us to the pleasures of tar gel, which makes these lovely thick and gooey lines when handled properly. I love it and will use it, discriminately, again.

  

Being in Florida, it was a thrill to be able to paint outside, although it did get TOO WARM rather rapidly!!!! Love that… Golden products were available galore for us to play with. What a treat!

This last one really needs to be stretched. I was painting on canvas just taped to a piece of board, the easy solution for taking my work home on the plane. This one shows the ‘traditional’ composition, which I accentuated with dressmaker tissue paper. I HAVE to make it obvious for me to follow the instructions, I’m not so good at following formats and structures.

I did learn to blend my colors better, and to mix them directly on the canvas, which is great fun.

As always, it was truly inspiring to paint with others, and although the styles were immensely varied, seeing or witnessing the direction of their work helped direct my own.

The pieces below are from Jane, a view of our studio, a piece I love from beautiful lady and generous chauffeur Dee. I could have taken each of her pieces home, I love her style. The last one is from my easel partner Susan, who was going way out of her comfort zone for the duration.