Anyone following this thread will note that I’ve changed the title from ‘Working with nature’ (which were parts 1 & 2) to the overall course title.  I feel happier not being so constrained by the narrow reference to nature.

It’s been an interesting fortnight with much studying, a lot of personal reflection and some interesting (and some crap) art experimentation.

Personal interpretation:

Having totally misunderstood the course instructions I took one of my nature photos, selected the colour palette and splashed some acrylic paints around.  The tutor explained that we were to disregard any form of representation and simply apply colour to paper.

That was fun – using an old credit card to push paint around – and apparently wrong (yep, it was one of the crap experiments).  Great colour scheme though.

I regrouped.  Further instructions revealed I was not to paint the image but, rather, capture the ‘essence’ of it.  Oh-oh, not my strong point.  (Note to self: What does that even mean?).  I thought I’d change image to something with more colour; it might offer more scope.

This got a moderately better (??) response in “Good place to jump off and move to the next part of the course”.  I read that to mean ‘You really don’t have a clue what you’re doing, do you?’.  And she’d be right.

What the heck, let’s have one more go …  I went back to my original image.

This elicited a ‘like’ from the tutor on the group fb page but no comment.  I’m laughing because I’m having fun and not seeing a whole lot of difference between my ‘art’ (used in the loosest possible sense, of course!) and some of the other posts on the group which are fawned over.

Do I care?  Honestly, no.  The more I look at them the more I love my personal interpretation of the exercise – and that’s what it’s all about for me.