Making Art a Practice Online Class with Cat Bennett via

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1 Making Art a Practice Online Class with Bennett via Week 5 Greetings at the Facebook Class Group TUESDAY, the 3rd! Good morning! Today we begin a new adventure and move on from portrait drawing and painting back to nature. Drawing people can be quite challenging and takes practice. I hope everyone has found good ways to practice and explore. I've been astonished at the great ways you've all explored and grown your drawing. I'm sure you've been equally inspired by all we've seen here! Thanks again for sharing your work and for working so hard. The new video explains how we'll begin this week by making quick, loose sketches outside. We're thinking here of the big picture the bare essentials. We're drawing quickly and without undo concern for accuracy just making quick impressions. These spare drawings are often quite beautiful and will give us some structure as we begin to play with imagination! To simply invent and make things up! We'll be doing a lot of playful painting! It will be fun and a chance to just "wing it" and "forget our perfect offering". To play like children do. And to move away perhaps from habitual ways of working to simply explore. It's a beautiful day here in Boston, unseasonably warm, and I'll be heading out to the Charles River a short walk from my studio to sketch. I'll share what I do later! Hope the weather is good where you are too. If not, please feel free to draw landscape from photographs on the internet! Happy drawing!

2 TUESDAY, late afternoon! Hello! I went out to sketch today as the video suggested. It was a gorgeous warm summery day here in Boston so I got lucky! It's the most beautiful time of year here with all the leaves changing color. I walked from my studio down to the Charles River that runs through the city. It's only 5 minutes away and I always feel like I am in the country when I go there. There was so much to draw! Quite overwhelming as this kind of drawing is not part of my usual practice. But I really enjoyed it. It's always great to be outside and I saw so much more by taking the time to draw it. It was very peaceful. Most of my drawings were a bit scribbly but I don't mind. I tried to simply some of them when I got back into the studio. Then I tried to paint but it was really too much. I was in drawing mode and not quite ready to switch gears. The exercise is to bring in IMAGINATION so I told myself to do just that. I would try to simply draw the experience of being in the woods with my Neocolors. To just IMAGINE and record my feeling of being there. So, please make some loose sketches then feel free to take your time before painting if you need to. Maybe, like me, you need to draw in color first. Or maybe you just want to dive into a painted version straight away. There is no need to replicate your sketch in paint just use it as inspiration then make an image using your imagination. Check out David Hockney for landscape inspiration: I will be working along with you on this one. Lots to try out this week! Thanks for being on this journey with me! See you in the morning!

3 WEDNESDAY : Landscape Drawing with IMAGINATION! Good morning, everyone! I was so excited about getting back to our landscape drawing that i woke up early this morning and did two more sketches. Often doing things that are out of our usual artmaking gives us new energy. It becomes a kind of inquiry how can I do this in a way that is using the best of me? I did enjoy simply drawing in color yesterday but wanted to get to the watercolor approach of the video today. I used my Neocolors rather than my Pelikan watercolors because I had them handy. I'll try the Pelikans later. I looked briefly at my sketches from my walk yesterday then put them aside to simply work from memory and imagination. I think this is helpful when we are doing new things as we don't get bogged down with detail and can simplify quite naturally. It helps us be less literal and to think a bit about our approach. I hope you enjoy exploring in this way too! I'll be checking in throughout the day and will post again this evening! THURSDAY the 5th! Good morning! It was amazing to see everyone's work yesterday and to see how many ways we can approach landscape, especially with a dollop of imagination and with our own style! Our sketchbook is our place to really explore and see what happens! What happened here was a bit of a mess to start, I confess! I was looking at my sketches and got confused. I think my sketches had way too much detail. I forgot to take my own advice and keep things simple at that stage of things! I finally simplified the watercolor and worked just from memory and imagination. That was much better. But something else kept wanting to appear a big sky with clouds! Another view. And so I began to play with that. Today, we'll see where it goes! Hope you'll all have fun with it too!

4 THURSDAY evening! Hello, everyone!! Wow! What amazing work got posted today! It never fails to amaze me just how individual we all are and how many things can be said in this kind of art about place, about our response to it, about who we are as human beings with brush in hand. Thank you for all your great work! I know this exercise hasn't been all that easy for some of us. It hasn't been for me. Not that it has been hard exactly but it is not my usual hang out spot. But I wanted to stick with it. What could I do with such the vast sensory experience of nature? It became a pressing question! I know I don't have the eye or skills to render very much but I still wanted to convey some sense of my pleasure and awe. I realized as I was working (and tossing pages into the bin photo coming!) that there are a million ways to respond. Just do it, I said to myself. It can tell us a lot about ourselves and that's good to know. Thanks too for speaking out about your feelings. Curiously, this question of preferences leads us into the work of our final week. But we won't leap ahead! Let's carry on and see what happens as we explore over the next few days. Often, when we persevere, a door opens! Friday the 6th! Good morning! My playing around yesterday had a bit of strain to it like I felt I had to get somewhere, like there was a perfect destination! And, of course, we're simply exploring. That's what the sketchbook is for. Still we can get caught up in this desire to do something that sets us on fire. But without it we probably wouldn't do much! I did quite a lot but didn't fall in love. Quite. But in everything, something. And my Rothko like piece yesterday is still speaking to me. I hope some of what you are doing with this exercise is speaking to you too. We're just looking for what we love and for that feeling of excitement!

5 It is again just amazing and uplifting to see all the great work posted here and to see how many interesting ways there are to approach this kind of free painting. I love how you are all trying things out! It's so great to wake up to all this imagination and good energy! Have a wonderful day! And I'll see you later! Friday evening Hello, everyone! No art at all for me today too many other things cooking but the weekend is coming! Tomorrow morning I teach my regular Saturday morning class here in Boston and I'm taking in some inspiration from all we've seen here. Thanks again for all your hard work and fantastic posts! The weekend has started! Make it a good one! I'll see you again at the top of the page here on Monday! But I'll be sneaking some peaks before then, for sure! MONDAY, the 9th! Hello!! Usually I say good morning but today I am a little late because...i was working in my sketchbook on the landscape challenge! Seeing all you have done has been such an inspiration! I hope we are all getting great ideas from seeing each other's work! This morning when I was working, I tried to forget details to concentrate on shape and color. The colors got pretty muddy but I began to see possibilities! It was really fun and I learned how great it is to get out of my comfort zone! This is the last day of our landscape exercise. Tonight Carla will post the last video in this series. This next week, we have one exercise that may help us think more about our own art-making as we move forward.

6 The second part of the video is basically a tip for how to keep the flow of energy and inspiration going in our sketchbooks as we move forward. I will talk more about this tonight. HOWEVER, we have this last week to continue drawing, experimenting and sharing our work with each other. Hooray! Have a wonderful day and see you tonight! MONDAY evening! Hello, everyone! Tonight, at midnight Pacific coast time, Carla posts the last video for this series! It has been a incredible experience to see everyone's amazing drawing and painting in these last few weeks! Thank you all for sharing so much of yourselves! So many wonderful connection have been made. The new video offers one simple exercise and a tip for our continuing practice as we bring our work in our sketchbooks into the art we choose to make. But here, on this page, I'd like us now to return to whatever kind of drawing and exploration we each most love or feel like in this moment and to continue to share our work here. Sleep tight and see you in the morning!