alphabets

My sister-in-law, Meg, has been visiting from her home on the northern California coast.  Coming from redwood forests and restless ocean, the open horizon and sandstone stasis of our southern Utah country provide a stimulating contrast in environment.  Meg is in a transitional period artwise, after a career of working primarily in glass (see some of her work at Gualala Arts).  The two of us have wanted to try working together for a long time, and this seemed a perfect moment to do so, in the pause between the retreat of winter and the constant activity of summer.

This is our third and final day together in the studio, and we both feel as though we been in an intensive workshop, with the accompanying exhilaration and exhaustion.  In addition to just sharing each other’s artistic energy, we each had some purposes: I wanted to benefit from Meg’s work in drawing, and Meg wanted to open up her boundaries by exploring some cold wax and color work with me.  We spent the afternoons on the latter, of which more later.

In the mornings we have focused on producing mini-sketches and designs based on the English alphabet.  My first alphabet, shown at right, was simply an exercise in remembering mark-making with pencil and paper, using the lower-case alphabet as a source (interestingly, Meg chose to work with upper-case letters...hmm).  My second alphabet, shown above, carried with it the assignment to have each "letter" touch all four sides of its space.  I love the way that each set of five letters became a row.  I also am interested to see how instinctively art-deco-ish this second series turned out to be.  I wonder what the next alphabet will look like?  I have done this type of exercise before, in classes and workshops, but it has always fallen off the radar here at home, where I focus too much on the production of finished paintings and not enough on nurturing my own artistic growth.  It has been rewarding to spend this time with pencil on paper. 

So, in addition to three days of wonderful company and companionship, creativity and exploration outside our comfort zones, I am also left with a resolve to take some time, if not each day, then at least once a week, to do something in the studio other cold wax work.  Meg and I have accepted a homework assignment -- to take one of the other’s letters and work up a larger next iteration, due back to each other in a week -- in an attempt to enhance the transition for each of us once we are back home.