Exploring Balance at the Spring Equinox

Join Richard Heys for this creative painting workshop working with the theme of exploring balance; the Equinox is the moment when night and day become of equal duration. The Equinox heralds the awakening and re-birth of creative energy when the sun enters Aries, the time for a new tart. If we carry the question ‘Can truth be found in painting?’ We can explore the medium and come to an experience of ‘presence’ in our work. Can we find: the right balance of colours, the right amount of light and darkness, the right qualities of line, tone, mark, mass, depth, colour, surface and image, to create an artistic balance?

The anthropologist Michael Taussig watching a sunset describes the fading colour as “Polymorphous magical substance”. All colour arises almost as shadow, as a song of the fall of light into matter. Sonia Delaunay described colour as “the skin of the world”, it is no real leap of imagination to realise colour is feeling. Each of us has a vast inner wealth of knowledge and experience of living, as the alchemists thought, we are each a ‘little world’. We have in our lives developed a sense of life, an ennobled sense of the ‘right’ way to live. Painting may become a sensitive record of such right action. Can we develop this as a playful sense of ‘rightness’? Looking into our memories, exploring our feelings, calling up imaginations and possible futures?

Paul Klee in his teaching notebooks describes a need for wonder, further to this he wrote:-

“Creative power is ineffable. It remains ultimately mysterious. And every mystery affects us deeply. We are ourselves charged with this power down to our subtlest parts. We may not be able to express its essence, but we can move towards its source, insofar as at all possible. In any event it is up to us to manifest this power and its functions, just as it becomes manifest within ourselves.”

I’d like us to come together with the aim to approach our painting as a new beginning. This creation of an image and discovery of beauty can become a conversation. When we approach painting as a question we find answers in the resolution of imperfect elements into a balanced whole. We shall take our lead from a number of artists, looking closely at how the answer to the question of painting has been resolved by these masters. We may even walk in their shoes for a time, always seeking, what is being said here?