Another class I took this year at Art Unraveled was Judy Wise' "A Handmade Life" journaling class. We prepared pages, painted, collaged and wrote. The purpose was to learn how to go deeper into finding your unique artistic voice and subject matter through visual journaling. I've taken several classes in art journaling, and have always found it challenging. At first, it seemed that all the sloppy painting, simple subject matter and visual elements were things one would do in grade school, and that journal writing was somehow more mature. Actually, you can uncover a lot of deeply hidden feelings through visual journaling, even more than with writing, at times.
Since I like to manipulate photos with photo editing software, I like to use them a lot in my journaling. The above is an example of visual journaling using an old manipulated photo.
I also took a couple of intuitive painting classes this year. They were quite similar; both were intuitive and experimental. One class used watercolor and the other, fluid acrylics. No drawing or painting ability was needed, which was good for me as I am not that kind of artist. The purpose of the Spontaneous Haiku Painting class was to find images in the blotches, dribblings, and spatterings of watered down fluid acrylics. Then, we had to put words to the visual vignette using haiku form. Once we had six to eight of these paintings, we mounted them on mat board pages and made them into a fabric-bound booklet of personal visual haiku. It was a stretch for me to find various forms among the blotches as I'm such a realist. Some people seemed to be able to immediately see many little animals, people and other things while I sat there and pondered. It reminded me of looking a clouds as a kid and seeing all the ever changing scenes, but apparently I've lost that spontaneous ability.
All in all, it was another great year at Art Unraveled, and, "God willing and the creek don't rise", I'll be there again next year to learn new and different art forms.
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