In the Studio – New Paintings

As much as I like working on my computer designing patterns, I very much need the actual process of real painting in real life. Real paint on my real hands and brushes, all the exploration and surprises and all the “mistakes” that can’t be fixed with a go-back keyboard command. Painting always touches me on a deep level. And as I like being inspired, challenged and learn something new, I signed up for Mati Rose McDonough’s new online course Daring Adventures in Abstract Paint. I have taken her courses before, and liked the way they are structured. There are online courses out there that can overwhelm you with their sheer amount of informationen, videos, assignments. Mati’s courses deliver bite-sized content, that makes you start doing the actual painting and not only reading about it and that is a very good thing.

With this course I also wanted to give myself permission to be “an abstract painter”. It is okay to paint abstractly, paintings don’t have to look like photographs (even though people admire this a lot) and good abstract painting is actually more difficult then it might sometimes look. Mati’s course had some great information on colour, composition and mark making and gave me a lot of ideas for trying out new things, like being inspired by a colour palette:

Cathrin Gressieker_60s color inspiration
sixties circles, acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

Or a photo in a magazine:

Cathrin Gressieker_Santorini Morning -l
Santorini Morning, acrylic on canvas, 100x100cm

And then take abstraction even further:

Cathrin Gressieker_at the pier
at the pier, acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm
Cathrin Gressieker_jungle feeling
at the pier, acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

My last big canvas took me a couple of weeks to arrive at a place where I could stop and the whole process involved also painting with my 4-year-old daughter Carolina on it.

Cathrin Gressieker_My Happy Jungle-k
my happy jungle, acrylic on canvas, 100x100cm

So my winter months of January and February where filled with a lot of colour and I am already excited to see what spring brings. What I can tell you, I see a lot of green and yellow arriving in my studio.