Symbols Shaping Space

Katie Kendrick

Space, that mysterious dimension in and around us, where all form takes shape. Just like the stars that twinkle in the spacious deep sky, our hopes, dreams, and longings take various forms when a brush loaded with paint follows an invisible path, around and over the space on a paper, sweeping across portions of a collaged image, embedding color, texture, and sometimes even emotion in its wake.

While continually acknowledging and encouraging you to follow the voice of your intuition - your truest source of creativity and wisdom - I will guide you through hands-on exercises designed to help loosen up the tight and critic-bound places, allowing more space to play and create with greater abandon. We will spend the day exploring our own personal symbols, using paint, collage and other media in various ways to create numerous pages and papers that we will later cut apart, layer, and collage onto disks to form our wallhanging. The interconnected disks are reversible and each can individually swivel, so when complete, you can reverse all the images at once to reveal a complete and once hidden second wallhanging, or flip only select images, resulting in a multitude of possible variations.

Supply List:

• A piece of flat wood for the base, at least 14" long, 2-3" high, and 1" thick. In the sample, I used a piece of flat driftwood. It needs to have some thickness to it if you plan to nail on an additional stick like I did.
• A few items for embellishing wood base such as a stick or two, shells, dried flowers, small wooden disks to collage, etc. It helps to have small holes drilled in items but it will also work if items can be wrapped and hung.
• 24-30 size 10 interlocking brass barrel swivels (fishing tackle)
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Watercolor paper or any type of heavy paper to paint/collage on (wallpaper, printmaking paper, recycled heavy paper, etc. You will need 4 pieces measuring 11" x 14" or that approximate surface area using smaller/larger pieces
• Some images for collage. These can be prints from original artwork or photographs, or from magazines, books, ephemera, etc. The emphasis is on images that have symbolic meaning to you, images you are repeatedly drawn to (for example some of images I gravitate to in my work are doors, ladders, hearts)
• 8 ounces white gesso
• Small container acrylic regular gel matte medium (Golden, Liquitex, and Dick Blick brands all sell this product)
• Acrylic craft paints in colors of your choice including black and one metallic.
• 3 bristle paint brushes; a small detail brush, medium round, and 1" flat
• Paint pallet of any kind
• Water container
• 3-4 oil pastels and 3-4 crayons plus black ones
• Wide tip black permanent marker (like Marks-A-Lot)
• Stabilo Aquarellable black marking pencil (Dick Blick item #20408-2001)
  
  
• Optional: A couple quick-drying inkpads, text stamps, permanent markers, baby wipes, paint apron