painting with jesse reno

After heading straight from beautiful St Maarten to rainy Virginia Beach for Art & Soul this past weekend, I'm now finally home and unpacking. Before buckling down to a few doodling assignments, I wanted to share some iPhone photos snapped during my 2-day painting class with Jesse Reno.

The first day was all about hand-applying layered grounds of color, adding various finger markings to increase the scale and complexity of the color backgrounds. All colors were mixed in our hands from red, yellow, blue and white, and no brushes allowed! These couple photos were taken early during the first day's process.  They're just the initial finger-painted backgrounds -- and they changed a lot during the two days. In the first background above, I think I was still being influenced by the island sun. Then I turned it over and painted this second background, apparently influenced by the darker coloring of Jesse's painting and many others in the class. Almost everyone was using darks, especially blues! In another background down below, I've reversed myself and lightened up my palette again.


Late in the afternoon, we engaged in a spontaneous exercise, directed by Jesse, of randomly drawing element after element on a white piece of paper, then randomly transferring some of the elements to one of our backgrounds. We were finally allowed to use our pencils and brushes. :) First came the quick faces, then the eyes, then the animal bodies, then symbols, and so on.



During the second day, we developed our backgrounds with more layers of color and markings, blocking out areas to emphasize other areas, adding personal symbols and animal shapes. It was challenging, exhausting and enlightening, and of course I forgot to take photos. Plus my hands were continually covered with paint. By the end of the second afternoon, I needed a break and just sat looking at paint with Donna and Heather and Mindy. Somehow Mindy still had steam to keep painting, rotating her pieces to stay fresh. In April, she'll be teaching an online painting course using her beautiful mixed media techniques.


Meanwhile, I can hardly wait till I can get my hands covered in paint again.