Day 06 (Puzzle Painting)

Workshop: Puzzle Painting (first day)
Date: 17 December 2008
Time: 5-6.30pm
Participants: Chan Yun Sheng, Lai Ming Xuan, Lim Jun Hong, Wong Kai Wei
Details: Puzzle Painting hopes to spice up the participants' creativity by asking questions - simple questions. To paint a puzzle, is to paint fragmented stories, whereby those fragments or anecdotes, can be integrated into a bigger or a more hollistic story/scene. Unlike painting only a scene on a paper, this workshop manages to trigger the participants' creative thinking, to have them visualize what's beyond the paper, and what's next.

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The four participants entered the class, looking pretty excited with the big wooden puzzle. The hard fact is that they have to paint it within 4 days - a 1m x 1m puzzle:

Today wouldn't be the day to begin though, but rather warm-up exercises were conducted to educate them the whole idea of constructing and multiplying narrative in a scene.

The 'Interior series' paintings of Mastura Abdul Rahman which I have shown them are classic examples. I recalled when I was fixated by the flatten details of her paintings, while Mr. Sim Tan (art dealer) fervently explained to me his appreciation. Of one that I found relevant here, was where he talked about the cropped objects at the edge of the paintings like carpets, stairs, congkak etc. Those are actually indications of things, of life happening beyond the artworks.

Mastura Abdul Rahman, House of Flower, House of Harmony (1999)
See those cropped carpets and congkak?

The patterns are showy, but the value of this piece - at least to me - does not lie on the details, but the composition, the aerial perspective, the tradition and of most the symbolic indications (those magazines/newspapers/congkak indicate lives; those cropped objects indicate something beyond, those aerial pillars indicate the God from above). Perfect contemporary rendition of Islamic art.

Another visual reference was the image of 'A Closer Look At The Illusion of The Whole' by Yap Sau Bin:

Yap Sau Bin, A Closer Look at The Illusion of The Whole(2005)
photo courtesy of Yap Sau Bin

While Aristotle said 'The whole is more than the sum of its parts', emphasizing the idea of holism, this artwork seems visually reductionistic - it reversed the process of holistic thinking. With this minimalistic artwork, the artist questions 'Could contemplating on the less apparent structure bring us a perception of a much larger whole?' And that perception of the much larger whole emerge beyond the semi-framed painting, the 'whole' is imaginary and that process-of-imagining remains as the main excitement of the artwork.

The warm-up exercises manifested the above concepts, the participants were asked to link, create, imagine ideas beyond a given set. Those ideas were narrative-based and contained a plot where they have to visualize what's beyond and taking notes on the existing indications.

"Peace!"
left to right: Chan Yun Sheng, Lai Ming Xuan and Lim Jun Hong.

Something like this.

A & B given, C & D by Chan Yun Sheng.
C: Escaping from the monster; D: Get caught again. (Stretchable branch!)

B & C given, A by Lai Ming Xuan.
The beauty in most of his drawings is the straightforward depiction of raw expression. And most are gothic too.

A & C given, B by Lim Jun Hong.
B: The car can stretch? He thought about Transfumers (Transformers). Nice!

A & C given, B by Wong Kai Wei.
B: Glass broken due to strong wind. Being the only girl in the workshop, while others thought about breaking the glass physically, she thought about something else. It might not be the best solution, but it was an original one.

After that, we went straight to the puzzle and the participants started brain-storming on what to draw. They wanted kampung+garden+paddy field+farm etc. Just to keep them busy, I kept asking what's beyond this particular small little piece...

Puzzled with puzzle.

Sketch.

I thought they were amazing small kids, and they gave me rivers, roads, bridges, directional composition (like Giotto's Mourning of Christ/Kiss of Judas) etc.

Mourning of Christ by Giotto.

Just in case you have no idea what 'directional composition' is:

The composition has been specifically arranged so that the focus point is on the head of the Jesus.

There will be one more exercise tomorrow about linking arbitrary ideas together to form a story before getting serious with puzzle painting.

Good luck to them.