Abstract Mixed Media Painting: Play with Paint - Work in Progress

Charlotte Wensley
Jun 2, 2022
3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

This Blog post is about my working through Louise Fletcher's 'Find Your Joy Course' - Assignment 1, which was essentially an abstract mixed media painting challenge.

| Mixed Media Painting with Expressive Marks

There were a few materials limitations (3 colours and black and white, with paper taped off into smaller squares) but after that the instruction was just to play with paint for 30 minutes, making lots of expressive marks with tools and drawing mediums that were experimental and mixing as many colours as possible (which you'll see from the video was a lot of fun!).

A critical part of this exercise was to then share the results in the Facebook group, not so that people could critique our outcomes, but so that we could all see that even though every participant had been given the same parameters, the results were so unbelievably different. This was what Louise wanted us to notice.

| Unique Abstract Responses

It wasn't about making pretty mixed media paintings or artworks that looked nice, it was about raising our awareness that we all, as artists have something unique and highly individual inside us, that can come only from us and who we are. It's so fundamentally important to a sustainable arts practice, that we're making art that comes from within us - not art that looks like someone else's or that follows current trends.

When we realise this, and see literally hundreds of examples of this from within the group, a freedom to pursue our own very personal line of inquiry with our art making becomes real and evidenced. We know that our art cannot and will not be like anyone else's (even when given identical instructions) and that as artists we all have something individual and original to say through our art. This was a great evidence based exercise in showing us that we can, and will, all make unique and highly personal art.

| Finding Personal Narratives

The challenge is for us to practice our art making often enough, for long enough, that our personal narratives start to become clear to us and we begin to understand what is it that we want and need to pursue through our art making.

As Louise says, "These might not yet be good paintings … but they are something only you could have made."