Thursday, September 4, 2014

ARTIST BARBARA SMUCKER AT THE GCWS MEETING

Our GCWS meeting/program guest artist/speaker yesterday was Barbara Smucker, a Cincinnati artist who began her journey in transparent watercolors, moved to more opaque work and acrylics, and now considers herself a mixed media abstract artist.  She love color and love to play with pure colors on paper or canvas, just for the joy of seeing the colors together.  She starts abstracts as watercolor on paper just drizzled, dripped sprayed, floated over and around - with spritzes of acrylic ink in a spray bottles and lots of wet media.  Then she sees what is working - or not - and adds line or forms shapes more clearly.  

She told us to play with color in three ways:

Value (lights and darks in a Notan design)
Hues (using pure hues against other pure hues to see what happens)
Saturation (pure, saturated, bold, bright color vs desaturated, greyed down, dulled color.  

It was a good program and I enjoyed her Picasso-esq female figure using blocks of color inside lines that were then reiterated with black lines after.  Fun and entertaining, she didn't just show us techniques, but talked about playing with our art supplies and perhaps taking a journey without end (for we all know water media can take a lifetime to master - if ever!).

Barb's work can be seen in her Pendleton Studio - Studio 712. On the Pendleton site, she doesn't show her work, but you can contact her if you want to stop by, or if you are interested in her classes in Cincinnati.

I'm afraid I don't have any decent photos from the day (didn't take my camera), but you can see some of her work on the GCWS blog here when Barb visited in 2009 (just search Barb Smucker to pull up the May 9, 2009 post where it explains her work and talk that day (this was back when I was the Recording Secretary and I liked getting photos and lots of info in the blog post).










3 comments:

Sadami said...

Thanks, Rhonda! I read through it!! Please pass my best wishes to Barb, too. Cheers, Sadami

Debbie Nolan said...

Sounds like this was a great time. Always like it when you share your guest artists and workshops. Hope you are having a delightful day.

RH Carpenter said...

I like how her work looks like pastel work when done - even though she works with watercolor (pretty dry) on heavy paper and smooshes the paint into the paper - she's rough with her paints and uses little water.

It was a good program, Debbie :)