For a while I’ve been following, with admiration and esteem, the work of Harold Hollingsworth a contemporary artist from Seattle, Washington. In his most recent works he embellished his paintings with floral patterns, a new consistency of the brushstroke and layers of oil and acrylic paint.
He describes his work with these words: “On a simple level, I describe my work as abstraction, with cultural reference markers (items like fonts, and old graphics I run into wherever I travel) falling into the work”.
In my opinion Hollingsworth’s paintings have an evocative power because the visual fragment bring back memories of our past. For this reason I suggested an activity inspired by this artist to my students.
In a previous post about Harold Hollingsworth we used just letters, but in this new work we added floral patterns. First we drew a square 18x18cm on both sides of a sheet of copy paper. On the front we drew a grid of 4 squares 9x9cm. On the back we drew a grid of 16 little square 4,5×4,5cm.
Students drew their names on the front with felt tip pens and then they decorated the writing with free hand drawn flowers. The drawing then has been colored with at least 2 colors.
Then the drawing was cut out in squares, following the grid on the back. The squares have been randomly arranged and glued on to a new sheet of paper to create an abstract composition.
Below is a video tutorial created by Chad Brown, an art teacher who shows the whole process from beginning to end. You can watch other amazing video tutorials check out at his Youtube channel theartproject
