Abstract Painting Class at Woodmere Museum, Spring 2022 – Part Five

In May/June 2022 I attended an abstract painting studio class at Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Our group met in the museum’s teaching studio and spent 3 hours each Tuesday morning just painting with critiques from our instructor, Val Rossman. You may remember I took an earlier session of this class with her at the same location in fall, 2021.

This time was just as much fun. Thanks to her and my fellow students for a nice experience.

This week was the last full painting session we did in the class. For the sixth and last class, we did a little bit of work but spent most of the time in Critique Day – we brought in our painting(s) and chose one for the class to talk about. It’s a nice experience when it is done as we did in our class – we learn and we get to talk about our work and what it means and what and how we worked to accomplish our aims.

But I digress. In this the fifth class, I did two works. One was a reworking of a painting I did in the landscape class I had taken the previous summer. I just do not like doing landscapes and this painting always felt very forced to me:

So in this class I turned it into this:

It’s called “Fugitive” and is 18″ x 24″. I still don’t much like it but I am not going to do anything else to it.

I also did this painting:

It’s called “Interrupted Journey” and is 24″ x 18″. I keep wanting to add to it and then not doing it. I think that means it is finished, even if I feel an unfinished something about it. So that is why I named it as I did. Maybe this painting’s journey was meant to end before I thought.

*********

Well, that’s it for this session of abstract painting. I’ll be taking studio sessions again this fall of 2022 – let’s see what I come up with! I’ll show you when it happens.

7 thoughts on “Abstract Painting Class at Woodmere Museum, Spring 2022 – Part Five”

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. I found in this series of sessions that I ended up in places I have not gone before (accepting more “unfinishedness” or as you say, mystery). I feel it was an advance for me to do this and that I was able to stop repeating myself and move into something new. That is a good feeling.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. In the first painting, no one liked the figure and they wanted me to get rid of her, but I think it makes the painting have a story. The second one, I have come to think it is really finished, it’s just that my inclination is always to keep working on an image, and this one came together so fast I guess I felt I hadn’t gotten my desired amount of time with it.

    1. Claudia McGill Post author

      Thank you. Re-doing an existing piece is always a risk but if the itch is there I know from experience it won’t just go away! Experimenting always teaches me something, I feel. These two paintings definitely are different steps for me.

Comments are closed.