Horizon Project

For the past month or so, I’ve been exploring ways to show horizon lines in paintings and drawings using collage elements on the horizon line. I started playing with this in Jane Davies’ online workshop Keys to Dynamic Composition. I started by making sketches from the view out my window, then sketches inspired by Van Gogh paintings, looking at the way the sky meets the horizon in his compositions. I continued by making some simple collage studies with magazine papers for the horizon and one color above and another below the horizon line. After making a few of those, I continued making collages along the same line, but adding more collage elements above and below the horizon line and using acrylic paint or soft pastels to integrate the collage into the composition. Most are 8″ x 10 ” or less in size.

I continued looking at horizons in The Abstract in Nature with Eva Bovenzi, at UC Berkeley Extension. We’ve spent time in class looking at ways contemporary artists have used nature as inspirations for abstract art works. For the horizon project, we started with a field trip to Rodeo Park in the Marin Headlands. Each of us trekked out to a quiet spot where we could observe the environment with all of our senses, then make written notes and/or drawings in our notebooks. We followed up with some in class discussions and a slide presentation where we looked at work by artists, including Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe, Michael Moore, Patsy Krebs, Arthur Dove, and Paul Klee, who all used the horizon as a source of inspiration.

For my project, I continued with the idea I explored in my collage studies but on a larger scale with acrylic paint on stretched canvas.