The Imagination Fully Dilated Blog

I have been teaching acrylic painting for the last year at the Emerald Art Center. I taught two sessions of Controlled Accident painting. Controlled Accidents is my term for spontaneous image generating techniques that I use. They involve pushing the paint around on a painting surface with things other than brushes, such as rags, plastic, tin foil or balloons, in order to create impressions in the paint that suggest subject matter.

The most recent class I taught was Acrylic Painting—Illustration. I wanted to teach methods of creating atmosphere and a sense of space through the use of shadow color and light. Also I wanted to encourage the students to create illustrations that compelled audience participation by setting up relationships within the subject matter that were highly suggestive.

The painting included in this post was done by one of my students, Phyllis Null. She took my controlled accident class and the illustration class. The painting’s title is “warty bliggins and archy,” It is an illustration of “warty bliggins, the toad” by Don Marquis. In it she succeeded in using controlled accidents to help her “discover” textures and incidental landscape elements. She succeeded in creating a sense of atmosphere and of space by systematically reducing the value range of objects as they moved farther into the background. And she succeeded in setting up a relationship between the figures in the piece that invites the audience to wonder what is going on and perhaps imagine the conversation.

This is her success, but it makes me feel like I did my job!

Thanks for taking my classes Phyllis.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon