Thinking outside the box.

When I was teaching I would get the students to draw a chair as perfectly as you could and then draw it again and begin to abstract it a little.

Then once they had done that, use their drawing now not the chair and draw it again and abstract it some more and we would repeat this about six times until the chair did not look anything like any normal chair, but it taught students to do more, go further, change, and change, and think outside the box until they were not drawing the original chair but their own creation.

You see often it is the drawing of the normal over and over again until the subject is so abstracted and far away from the normal and becomes your original creation, why a lot of people stop doing this is because at first it does not look or feel right, but you must persist and you will be amazed at what you will create.

My girl in the landscape series that I have been showing is a good example of this, I really did start with a normal woman seated in the landscape and I just keep abstracting her until I got to the shapes you see in the paintings, it’s not a woman at all but your eye says its a woman.

Change the normal into what your imagination sees, it is just repeating the abstract process again and again until you get what you are wanting or until the subject becomes yours, you own it, your original art work.