Studio Blog

Crushed Pigment, Lucha Libre, and Intravenous Painting at CCA

Outside the Studio

CE artists (and staff) had a multi-faceted and enlightening day while visiting the San Francisco Campus of California College of the Arts. Zarouhie Abdalian demonstrated to CE artists how to mix a water color “from scratch” using a glass muller to blend powdered pigment and gum Arabic into an intense blue watercolor. Everyone proceeded to do a little painting using the freshly minted water color.

Next up was Natalia Nakazawa, whose practice has roots in the work of papier mache artist Pedro Linares who, in the 1930s, started creating elaborate pieces that represented imaginary creatures he called alebrijes. Natalia showed us one of her sculptures in the vein of Linares work. Looking alternately like an elephant or a flower (according to CE artists) her sculpture is called RED PAM. “Alebrije” is also the name of a Lucha Libre wrestler. Natalia creates different sets in her studio and then video tapes her performances in these environments. For our amusement she and CE1 artist Hector Lopez put on store-bought Alebrije masks that Natalia had modified. Little did she know that Hector is a huge wrestling fan and is now thinking of going pro!

Finally we went outside and Doron Fishman demonstrated his IV Cart painting device and then let several of the CE artists give it a whirl.

CE2 Studio Artist Thanh Diep had this to say about the experience:

“The field trip to CCA was fun. We checked out some other student artist studios. They showed us what they have been doing and encouraged us to participate. Zarouhie, one of the student artists showed us how to make blue watercolor from scratch by using (I forgot the name of it).
Another student artist showed us some of the wrestling masks and she discussed how she’s going to act like the characters with some costumes in a video. I thought it was pretty cool to act like another person and I would like to do that someday.
Both of the student artists had really small studios to fit all of us and it was crowded a little bit. However, I thought it was pretty nice to have an own little and quiet work place, where they could have some privacy, they could really spread out the work and concentrate on it. It would be really awesome to try out working in that environment sometime. I would probably get a lot of work done quicker and could actually focus on it with much lesser distraction.
The last student artist we saw invented a big adapter on wheels, which drips black ink on a piece of paper as someone moved it around. I thought it was wild and very creative.”

Thanks especially to California College of the Arts (CCA) Community Student Fellow (CSF) Zarouhie(currently serving at CE2), she enabled us to visit three grad student’s studios at the SF campus of CCA.

# Posted by CE on March 6, 2010