School assignment: Playing with lines and letters

Last Saturday I worked together with my friend Fhant on a school assignment about lines and letters. Letters are actually all made of lines and when you think of it, writing is an incredible invention really :) I loved the fact that we shared some thoughts on what letters actually are and mean. Fhant actually writes and it is his way to express himself. He was curious about making something artsy and this assignment was a perfect subject for him. While in the beginning for me, I really had no clue what to do with this assignment when I first read it. But the fact that Fhant was really enthusiastic and had a lot of ideas before even knowing the details of the assignment, really helped me getting in the flow fast.

We started off by writing letters in black on different white papers and white on various black papers. We used pencils, pens, crayons, pastels and charcoal. Fhant experimented with different fonts and I did some Japanese hiragana and kanji, as well as some writing exercises from when I was child.

Then we had to cut everything lose and make a composition with it. I am used to the process of cutting something you just made into something else by now, since it is something they like to do at school. It is about letting go, and to go through the loss and fear that come with it. For me it felt a bit frightful the first time I had to do this, but making pictures from the piece before cutting it helps. Fhant shared his feelings about this part of the assignment with me, but because of privacy reasons, I won't share his thoughts here of course :)

After we cut everything the way we wanted it, we made a composition on a 24x30 canvas. We mixed some different grey tones with acrylic and painted the background. Then we pasted some parts on it we wanted to include. I had read that acrylic paint was a natural glue so I thought we didn't have to use any additional glue. But we had to, so I am not sure how this technique works yet. And this is the end result:

We have a composition of opposites. And yes, we wrote black and white wrong on purpose. The 2 Japanese kanji on there mean fire and rain, so that fitted the theme well. I made a list from the leftover parts afterwards, since we had so many leftover parts since I didn't have a larger canvas. I will probably keep the leftover parts in a map to go with it so I can spread it out like this at school again :) Well not exactly like this of course ;)
I really liked working on this together and I loved that Fhant was happy with the result. He gets to keep the painting after I have taken it to school.

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