Improvision

This painting was completed a couple years ago during a workshop I conducted at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art. The painting contains aluminum foil and collaged photos and is painted with Golden Fluid Acrylic paints. It is now in the collection of Joe and D'Ann Huth.

One of my art mentors, Doug Walton, said "You always have what you need to create art". In one of his workshops we painted on roofing tar paper with acrylic paints! I am not sure how archival tar paper or aluminum foil may be but I am sure the paintings will survive my lifetime or more.

This is the challenge that turns me on- to to look around in my studio and surroundings use what I find and enjoy the process of making art happen. Improvisation is creativity.

This week I prepared many handouts and excercises to conduct a workshop on values and contrast in watercolor in Mercedes, Texas. After spending hours getting prepared, I packed up my portfolio and painting supplies and drove the 50 miles to the workshop. When I unpacked my supplies to begin the workshop to my dismay, I found that I had left all of my handouts at home in my studio! Talk about improvising! There to my right on a bookshelf was Nita Leland's book, Exploring Color to use as examples of making value charts of all their pigments .

I had left my drawings at home that I planned to have them trace to do a quick monochromatic value painting but a student had a partially finished painting almost identical to my drawing, we used a lightbox and her painting to quickly draw and paint the study. Then I drew another quick sketch to use for a landscape painting using light, middle and dark values in different perspectives as they were working on their assignment. We continued throughout the day doing value paintings that were probably better than my best laid plans.

Improvision is the key to being creative!