Busy Week at School

We’ve had a busy week since I last wrote about my time at the Vienna Academy of Visionary Art.

Thursday evening last week, after class, we were treated to a special public lecture by our guest teacher Benedetto Fellin. The event was to celebrate his own teacher, the famous artist Rudolph Hausner, who would have been 100 this year. He presented along with Ulrich Gansert, one of Hausner’s assistant teachers at the time and Timea translated for those of us whose German isn’t quite there yet.

Poetic Landscape – Draperies, Transparent Figures, and Horizons

Left to Right: Lizzy, Benedetto, Kevin, Laurence, Edgar, Hadley, Martin // Timea, Dominique, Rachel

We’ve been fortunate to spend quite a bit of time this past week with both Benedetto and Timea, who have continued to teach us about light and shadow, this time using drapery as our main subject – one of Benedetto’s specialties!

Still Life Drawing:

We started by drawing a drapery still life with white and black chalk on coloured paper … not as easy as it seems. I am still struggling with making things look dimensional and unified. The more I practice, the better I get. Funny how that happens…

Abstract Acrylic Ground:
Then, we prepared a decalcamania acrylic ground on canvas boards for painting the same set-up from a photograph. We used sticky masking paper or cardboard in the shape of our drapery to keep that part protected before flinging paint around. This splatter and smush exercise was a lot of fun – the kind of work/play I’ve always enjoyed… I used a little Photoshop magic for the action shot backdrop above.

with Rachel

Lizzy

Masking paper

masking paper on acrylic ground

the fun begins

Underpainting in Black and White:

photo by Florence

I spent several hours staring at the photo of our set-up and a photocopy of Benedetto’s painting while working at my easel. On the first day, I didn’t think it would ever look real. I tend to go too fast and too bold at first, using more expressionist brushstrokes (as Benedetto calls them – I’ve also heard them referred to as sloppy – a term I may have originally volunteered). I really have a hard time seeing how things all link together with light and shadow – shades of white and watered down black. Truly, I think I may be visually impaired in this way. I didn’t give up though. In the end, with patience and lots of coaching, I’m quite thrilled with the results.

We then painted the horizon in colour before painting a figure in white in a way that would make it appear transparent – a ghostly figure. The way to do this is to only paint the highlights. I used a photo reference I found on the Internet and did mine free-hand. What I learned is that rubbing paint once it’s almost dry doesn’t make it look more subtle… it only scrubs some of it off, revealing the texture of the canvas and taking away all of the subtle strokes I had and leaving the bold highlights. Oh well … 🙂

Oil Glazes:

The next step was to apply thin local oil glazes on top of the underpainting using a transparent paste and a new medium made in part with sunflower seed oil. Et voilà! From far it looks even more realistic. I tell ya, that’s progress!

Learning by Observing:

I spent a lot of time this past week just standing behind Benedetto, watching him paint – a very good way to learn (at least I keep praying that I’ll learn by osmosis each time I observe our teachers or classmates at work).

Personal Projects:

Because of tight timing, I’m not sure I’ll get to create my original Poetic Landscape composition that I had planned. I may do something like it in Bali instead since I’m supposed to bring a design for the week I’ll be spending in Philip Rubinov’s “Eye of the Spirit” reatreat. I really want to get working on all the other projects we’ve got on the go right now, so I can finish those in the three weeks we’ve got left. Some students, however, took photos of various drapery set-ups for their poetic landscape project – rather entertaining…

Fantastic Creature Project:

One of these unfinished projects is my Fantastic Creature. I spent 6 hours on it today, but am not much ahead. I’ve created quite a puzzle and a lot of work for myself – an experiment that was suggested to me and that I’m happy to try out. Instead of simply painting freehand on my large canvas, I traced my design on transparent paper, then on sticky masking paper and mirrored that. I then spent hours cutting up and numbering all the bits. I’ll eventually stick them all on and paint the whole thing dark. When I remove the sticky bits, the colourful parts should show up with nice crisp edges.

Live Figure Painting:

This week, Laurence also gave us a presentation / demonstration on live figure painting (instead of live figure drawing). I had fun the whole 2 hours of trying it out – something I don’t usually experience when I work with pencils.

Out and About:

It’s been quite warm here this week, and I enjoyed the sunshine at lunchtime a couple of days. Even just sitting at the foot of the monument across the street for a few minutes is a nice treat after inhaling turpentine and other fumes all morning.

Wednesday morning, I walked around Vienna’s 5th district for a couple of hours before class because the art store wasn’t open at 8am as I had understood it would be from their website. No worries. Instead, I explored a new neighbourhood, found some of the natural supplements I needed to ward off dengue fever and Bali Belly during my trip in April, walked about the Nacht Markt, went into one of those tiny tobacco shops to get another 10 Euros put on my phone (yup, 10 Euros/ $15 a month for all the calls, Internet, and texting I need) and approached school from a different direction – always fun. I then returned to the art store in the evening to buy supplies and to try out an affordable Mexican restaurant my classmate had talked about. I enjoyed my in-city 3.5-hour hike that day. There’s always so much to see.