Speaking of Art Blog

I’ve taken many art workshops over the years. Obviously when you take lots of lessons and receive instruction from a wide variety of teachers you’re going to get some overlap in the content of their instruction. I don’t see that as a drawback. In fact I see that as a very good thing because with many of the workshops I take, there’s so much valuable information packed into the 2, 3, or 5 days that there’s no way I can retain it all. So repetition is good.

There’s also something that we teachers refer to as the teachable moment. It’s that moment when something the teacher says suddenly clicks, it makes sense. It could have been said many times before that moment, but previously it just whizzed right past the student’s head because they didn't understand, or they needed more prior knowledge and experience to better understand, or perhaps they simply weren’t listening at the time. 

For instance, I took a color theory workshop from Larry Blovits, www.larryblovits.com, many years ago that laid an important foundation for my knowledge of color usage. Now I’m quite sure in all the instruction I received at that workshop, at some point Larry talked about the importance of choosing a dominant color temperature, warm or cool, before starting a painting, but I wasn’t ready to hear that, I guess.

Then a handful of years later Sally Strand, www.sallystrand.com, taught about color influence and, again, choosing a dominant color temperature. I even did a painting of a model sitting under a red filtered light, and then a green filtered light. But alas, I still wasn’t fully comprehending what I was hearing.

Finally I took a workshop last month from Mark VanderVinne, www.vandervinnestudio.com, called Understanding Color. And for the third time I was told of the importance of choosing a dominant color temperature. Suddenly it all made sense to me. The first day of the workshop I produced this cool temperature painting, Leaving Juneau – Blue.

Then at home afterwards I produced the third and final piece of this threesome, another cool temperature one, Leaving Juneau – Waves.

And I got it. I finally got it. So who do I thank? Well, all three instructors, of course. It’s just that until Mark’s workshop I wasn’t ready to understand at a practical level what it all meant. Call me dense, call me typical of most people, but it looks like, for me, the third time’s a charm with learning valuable things about the vast world of color.