6. Week Three: The Studio as a Place of Cross Pollination

The students were talking excitedly about their paintings as they arrived for our third meeting. A student who had witnessed the effects of paint applied via the spray bottle the week before now asked if she could be the first to use it. Wanting to begin anew, she turned her painting around revealing a pristine white surface. As she squeezed the trigger, streams of burgundy spattered and dripped causing others who were watching to exclaim, “It looks like blood!” and “That is awesome”. She then covered the surface in wide swaths of blue and used a roller to work into the wet surface with yellow that created wide strokes edged in apple green. Once that layer began to set up she scumbled over the surface with a pale pink. Recalling how another student used strips of sandpaper to scrape away at the surface of the paint she took out a few pieces of sand paper from our tool cabinet and instead of using them to smooth down the surface of her painting she smeared the paint and created broad waves of parallel lines.

The students alternately painted and watched others paint while offering comments and appropriating techniques. When one student donned vinyl gloves to splatter paint others tried it out as well. At the supply table they shared ways to pour, mix, and add paint to their palettes. One girl wanted to make a “paint bomb” after hearing stories from older students who had created them a few years earlier (Rufo, 2012). She began by making pod type satchels out of copy paper, filling them with paint and tossing them at her painting. The technique did not work as well as she expected because the thickness of the copy paper prevented the pods from bursting on impact. Meanwhile, another student found she was able to create a superb splat effect by soaking a tissue in paint, rolling it into a ball, and then hurling it at the painting.

As the session wound down the student who developed the spray bottle technique got a small smear of alizarin crimson on her hand. Thinking the color resembled the zombie skin from the drama television series The Walking Dead, she decided to cover her whole hand and arm with the paint. She then grabbed her right arm with her “zombie” left hand and said with obvious relish, “It’s like a walker grabbing my arm!”