Sera Knight Demonstrations

Visit her at www.seraknight.co.uk. Contact info@seraknight.co.uk or 01276 856517

Mixed Media Demonstration, 6 May 2011

Tonight was billed as "Come and be pleasantly surprised". Those of us who knew Sera were not disappointed to see a table with scissors, magazines, a stay-wet palette, some acrylic inks, tissue paper and PVA glue. That meant mixed media collage. Another table had examples of her paintings, including prints and cards for sale (I think she did quite well, actually). The nature of your support or ground is of secondary interest if you are going to cover it with PVA glue and cut-out bits from magazines. Tonight it was a piece of Bockingford.
	At this point Janice Hills kindly lent me her camera; my spare batteries were flat! As Sera was hunting through her magazines for the right bits of paper she said she would normally spend much longer choosing and placing the collage. She likes to do a little and then look at it for a while, over a coffee or what have you, but you can't do much of that in a demo. She worked from a small square photo of Hampton Court Palace but had chosen a portrait format for the painting. So, when she started sticking on her first rectangular bits of purple paper near the top I suggested that they were sky (their bottoms defining the tops of the buildings). Laughter all round - everyone else could see that they were the buildings themselves - she was making the picture rectangular by having more foreground. That's the trouble with collage demos - if there's no drawing underneath you're never sure how the bits of collage correlate with the image.
But I was reassured that even Sera needed help to visualize exactly what collage she needed for the figures. With blue Neocolor II she sketched outlines and used them to position smaller cut-out pieces for heads, bodies, arms, upper and lower limbs and their reflections - all quite carefully positioned. Apart from the figures, the choice of what to apply (and where) was, apparently, mostly intuitive: rectangular shapes for the buildings and chimneys; a dark rounded one for the central doorway; triangles pointing in towards the vanishing point to give a feel of perspective; foreground colours reflecting the background; conventional darker patches in the bottom corners. This technique lends itself very well to wet street scenes.
	As the triangular pieces almost completely filled the foreground I began to get a sense of deja vu (you will understand when you look at Sera's 2009 demo, below). This time she stressed much more that if you do the collage properly the rest need not take very long. Incidentally, each piece of collage is stuck down by brushing PVA onto the existing work, applying the collage and then smothing it down with the same PVA brush, so everything is soaked with glue. You might collage (if there's such a verb) with thicker glossier paper, even cloth, gauze or netting, but Sera's style lends itself best to pieces cut just from the inside pages of magazines. Even this thin paper leaves some unsightly edges, so she covered these with a dozen or two larger pieces (several inches across) torn roughly from lightly-crumpled tissue paper. This physically strengthens the whole work as well as softening the image. That got us to the coffee break without using a drop of paint. The hair dryer set everything.
Shock horror! Sera brought the break to an end by squirting a bright blue FW Acrylic ink, straight from the bottle. She carried this transparent colour down to the tops of the buildings and beyond, adding orange and magenta to grey it down without too much green appearing. Cerulean, too, was added for the foreground surface and then everything was dried again. This work was all done with a flat brush: the sky and building with vertical and horizontal strokes and the foreground with more diagonal ones. FW Payne's Grey was mixed (wet into wet, like almost all her mixing) to give lively darks but she said she'd also mixed a "black" with blue and red. When she started "simplifying" shapes, darkening the sky and adding detail like figures and windows (only 3 out of each 4 initially) she moved from acrylic ink to the less transparent conventional acrylics, but still mostly with the flat brush.
	In the last 15 minutes I lost the plot a bit. Yes, we hold pictures together by repeating colours all over it, so I understand the way that every time she had finished adding some new detail or glaze she used the almost dry brush to hint at the same colour in many other places. But then she would pick up some new less-transparent acrylic and glaze it over quite large areas "to adjust the colour and tone". This killed some of the existing lights and so she went back in with a smaller brush to reintroduce them. It didn't need many of these "glaze and re-introduce detail" cycles for the work to become so wet that the details merged unreliably with the glazes. It would have to dry thoroughly before the final touches could be added. The moral, I think, is that with a combination of opaque and glazed acrylic, and patience, you need never give up up on a work - even if you are driven to covering a catastrophe with new collage. Perhaps there's hope for me yet!
Sera had certainly given us another inspiring evening and this end-of-demo image (right) looked pretty marvellous to me. But, even better, said she'd be giving it more time over the next few days and would try to remember to send me a photo of the final result, for you to compare. We didn't have to wait long. Here it is, below. In the early hours of Monday Sera wrote: "This is the finished painting. I have been painting it since Saturday morning. I paint a bit, leave it, it dries completely and I come and see what is or is not working, work on it a bit more.. and this goes on 'till I am relatively happy. "As you can see, I had to apply more texture/collage to it and bring out more detail on the building because the wetness of the painting was not allowing me to work on it before starting to go muddy. I had also started to lose what I was meaning to keep. "Please apologise to anyone who wanted to ask more questions. I will be happy to answer any if anybody wants to e-mail me."

Mixed Media Demonstration, 26 June 2009

Sara is now strongly into collage - perhaps you could see the beginnings of this in her prizewinning entry to the 2006 Exhibition. She has come a long way from there. We were greeted with a fine array of samples of Sera's recent collage work. These are just some of them. I crave your indulgence while I get used to a new "cheapy" camera. Sam

Inspired by a black-and-white photo, Sara created more than the general composition with scraps of paper cut from a magazine and brushed down with PVA glue. This helps her thinking to develop: she was occasionally peeling pieces off; frequently covering bits that she did not like, sliding them to get alignments that pleased her and applying others of contrasting tone to re-define an edge. She distinguished clearly between the rectangular background blocks and the triangular ones that created the feeling of perspective. There was no wish to keep precisely to the perspective of the photo.
The choices of colours and tones of paper are not random: blue-greys give distance, reds imply foreground, stripes railings.	I was surprised at the amount of detail that went into the man and his reflection. Bits of paper no bigger than a few inches, in different shades of grey, were roughly snipped out and applied. Initially he was badly distorted but more bits refined the outline. Larger pieces of roughly-torn tissue paper and lots of PVA mellowed everything and got rid of any dry edges. Then the first paint was applied : acrylic ink, squirted directly onto the still-wet glue, thicker and darker at the edges, worked over, wet-into-wet (water spray to stop it from drying too quickly). The lovely purple/green greys had come from magenta and viridian, darkened with burnt sienna and finally dried with the hair-dryer.
Then came the ordinary acrylics. She's not fussy about who makes them - whatever comes to hand is OK. She knows she ought to use a limited palette, too, but finds she uses a dozen or so. The last 45 minutes of the demo were devoted to brightening, touching up, painting negative spaces, particularly around the man, glazing to improve tonal composition, adding highlights and countless tiny flecks of colour - virtually all, I think, with an inch-and-a-half flat brush. Nothing was mixed on the palette. Whites were modified with Naples yellow - pick up a touch of yellow, dip the brush into the white, apply and repeat. Subtle greens were made using Paynes Grey as the blue. She printed in the fencing with a 2-inch piece of mountboard.

	Almost at the last minute she chopped another small bit of paper from her magazine to make the notice board on the right. It needed only a light glaze to tone it in with the rest of the painting. Sera said she might do more but had reached the stage where care was needed to avoid "mud".
A great evening. What inspiration one can get from an old black-and-white photo!

Workalong, 21 October 2005

Before going around the room giving individual advice and comment, Sera gave a short lesson on perspective. At the end of the demo she distributed prints of some of her very early ink drawings, in which perspective was an important element, as possible source material. An interesting evening was enjoyed by all.

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