Make your art – your way! With Anne McMahon (SOLD OUT)

The focus of this course is on your art making process, your practice; understanding it better, and developing it further.

Although you can make paintings and finished artworks in response to class activities, the focus is all about your process, not about producing a finished work. 

We will explore all forms of journaling from handmade to junk to visual and the process, benefits and preference of each. You will choose one format to use for the term. There is no restriction on the mediums you can use and explore, layer and experiment with.

As an artist your journal, well used, can be your best friend at your easel. 

A journal holds:

• Your ideas, inspirations, joys, questions, uncertainties and answers.
• Your artistic ‘dear diary’ of fears, frustrations and lessons in failures
• Your experimental highs and lows, and insightful moments 

We will use a range of techniques, mediums and mark makers, alone or in layers to formulate ideas, create and record visual thoughts and ideas in text – line - images – ‘what if’ experiments – photos - fragments – colour palette.

Together these become not only a valuable resource for methods and materials but a collection of meaning and future inspiration that is exclusively yours as an artist. 

We will use your chosen journalling format to explore your art making process.

Key themes include:

• Influences /inspirations for your art making / and process 
• Why you do what you do – what drives your need to make art
• Questions, blocks or frustrations in your process for discussion/resolution
• Questions of artistic ‘style’ – what it means and how to recognise and develop yours.

Before the classes begin you will be sent a list of resources to collect and bring along to class. These will include things like your favourite artist / art genre / images/ influence / papers from an existing ‘stash’ / questions and deep curiosity.

Using your journal to record your responses, the resources can/will be called on to trigger your personal responses, investigations, questions, explorations, play, experiments, into aspects of your art making process.

I will provide answers, options, visual stimuli, material demonstrations, and thematic frameworks, as well as individual ‘take away’ challenges as part of weekly ‘home play’ exercises and responses.

For art makers of all mediums and levels of experience.