BURRIDGE PART 1: OVERVIEW, April 28, 2008

Last week I took a workshop under the direction of Robert Burridge (http://www.robertburridge.com).

This was a great experience for me. First because I was always interested in Burridge’s powerful use of color in his paintings, and it was wonderful to see him do demos and hear him talk about his approach to art. Of course, I had his videos (1st was ok, 2nd was better, 3rd was great—each one seemed to get better and better), but there was no comparison to the enthusiasm and the energy of the man in person!

Second it was an experience because I had never worked in acrylics before….I had dabbled at one time or another in many other mediums—oil, pencil, charcoal and other drawing tools, chalk, oil pastel, clay, and even bronze sculpture—but never had taken a dive into the acrylic arena. So, it was time to “give it a go” and purchase a whole range of paints that I was not sure I would ever use again….

“So?,” everyone asked me at the end, “what did you think of acrylics? Are you going to be doing a lot more of them?” I was fascinated that everyone I talked to about the workshop, gravitated to that question.

Perhaps their fascination was because I had remained steadfast to watercolor for so long. Since I had picked up the first watercolor brush almost 10 years ago now, I shunned the use of other multi-media that other watercolorists seem to grab on to sooner or later. You won’t find hardly a piece of art in my art archive that has pastel, or chalk, or collage, or any other “things” pushed onto the surface!

Of course, I really believe that most watercolorists “move on” because they can’t see the creative possibilities of watercolor. It has probably become boring for people to hear me say… but, all of those rules and tricks and “how to’s” has relegated much of watercolor to a craft rather than an art. There is a reason why people talk about “painters” and then they put in a separate category for “watercolorists!”

But, for me, watercolor still holds its fascination. Burridge and acrylic paint did not change that. It's probably too early to say, but I still don’t think I can do in acrylic (or in any other medium that I know of) what I can do in watercolor. I have people tell me all the time that some of my work looks like pastel, some looks like oil, some looks like acrylic… oh, and some looks like watercolor! I would actually be a much richer artist if I just could get $100 for every time a patron/viewer said “THAT is watercolor?” They usually say it with as much an exclamation mark as with a  question mark.

So, an answer to the burning question about acrylics, “are you going to do a lot more of them?” The answer is, I don’t really know. I do know that I will probably do enough of them to use up the couple hundred dollars in paint that I purchased… I didn’t dislike the medium, so no reason to throw, or give, the paints away. Might as well play some more.

But the question they were really WANTING to ask, “is acrylic going to become your medium of choice?” I can pretty much say, at this point, that the answer is “no.”

I still have way too much to learn about watercolor to stop!