Painting botanicals with Anya Brock
I’ve been following Anya Brock’s work for something like 20 years, so it was surreal to get to do a painting workshop with her!
The subject for the workshop was wax flowers, but before getting to any paint we got warmed up to draw. After a meditation to get into the right headspace, we did some blind contour drawings using different native Australian plants as a reference. We did some contour drawing with a reference image held upside down, and finally just drawing from a reference. It was interesting to see how much the self-judgement increased the more I was able to look at what I was drawing versus looking at the reference. Although I didn’t think much of my blind contour drawing when I did get to look down at it (I didn’t take a photo), the feeling of drawing without judgement or self-editing whilst in the process was something I want to keep coming back to. Apparently some people have emotional breakthroughs (or breakdowns) during this process - I can see how powerful and confronting feeling that kind of freedom is.
This was my drawing I did after going through the blind contour exercises. It’s tighter and more readable than my blind contours, but I can also see the looseness and shapes that doing that exercise first helped warm up.
When we got to painting, having the reference photo and colour palette chosen for us and Anya’s completed painting to look at made things feel almost deceptively easy, but necessary to fit into the timeframe. I don’t think I’d have arrived at this combination without a bunch of experimentation, if ever, because I usually tend towards directly representing the reference which just wouldn’t look as fun. We laid down the sketch on the canvas in charcoal, and it was only after I started painting that I realised I’d done mind upside down. Not such a problem with this kind of subject though, with flowers going in all directions. Mine just looked a little more different to everyone else’s, but they were all really unique in the end. This isn’t the type of prescriptive class where it’s this stroke here, then that one there - there were demonstrations and examples, but more intuitive and left to interpretation.
Starting the painting process - you can see my charcoal sketch, and the paint palette in muffin trays
Since my medium is usually watercolour and very small, I had to mentally switch gears to work with squishy acrylic paint on a large canvas. I love having something large, bold and lightfast enough to hang up in my house though.
It’s not the same as having an original Anya Brock painting in my house, but considering how many random art projects I have littered around this feels more me. It was such a lovely, challenging and affirming class and Anya is a wonderful teacher.
