Recently I read a newsletter from Jill Jeffers Goodell (Glastonbury Studios), a wonderful teacher I have taken a few classes from, where she talked about taking up neurographic art (aka Neurographica). This art form was developed by Russian psychologist Pavel Pskarev and the basic idea is to let yourself go and draw a series of random flowing lines. Wherever they intersect each other, you smooth out any sharp corners which creates pleasing neuron-like lines and shapes. You can then color in the resulting shapes if you like. She warned her readers that it could be addictive, and she was right! It is a very enjoyable process.
The first one I did I liked all by itself and didn’t add any color. I later tried playing with adding additional lines paralleling the originals in spots and leaving some holes in some of the intersections. I was not as happy with that one, but turned a certain way it looked like a squirrel holding a nut — maybe I will try coloring it in at some point. The thing that I’ve found most interesting with this technique has been combining its randomness with a purposeful drawing to create something unique and special.
This is where the shower stall part comes in. A couple of years ago my mom had the idea to do something creative with these interesting marble-like patterns on the wall of her shower. We took some pictures, printed them out, and let our artistic processes take us where they wanted to go. For me, I immediately saw various animals and figures in these patterns and began drawing over the printouts to flesh out what I was seeing. I then took pictures of my draw overs, ran them through various filters on my phone, and came up with a series of fun pictures.
I have for a long time wanted to take some of these further and turn them into actual paintings, particularly this “bird lady” one but wasn’t sure what to do for a background. Maybe using this new technique would be the answer. I did a sketch of my reference photo on a piece of watercolor paper and then added a whole series of random lines in black ink, joining up with the lines of my sketch in some places. I then smoothed out all the intersections and added some initial color using watercolor paints. From there I used a combination of acrylic gouache and acrylic to add additional detail to the bird and the woman, covering over and/or moving some of the black lines as needed. As a final step I went back to watercolor and made the background colors even more dramatic. Working on this was a lot of fun and it is now one of my favorite pieces. Besides liking the painting, I also really like the crazy story of how it came to be, something that is in itself full of the same combination of randomness and precision found in the end result.
