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Ali Cockrean demonstration Acrylics, 17 August 2010 Visit her at www.alicockrean.co.uk
This was a demo about techniques with acrylics but Ali started with a bit about her background, as inspiration. As an infant, she loved drawing. She did well in art at school, too. So she went up to London and enrolled at the Slade to study portraiture. Very traditional. Very regimented. Rules had to be followed. She came away loving the feel and colour of paints but wanting more freedom of expression. and so kept her art going in parallel with a career in Marketing and Business. When she first started more abstract work, a lot of it was a complete mess. "Don't expect instant success". After a few months things started getting better and she decided she wanted to give more time to painting. This meant plucking up courage to mount a solo exhibition to which she invited all the friends she could think of and got them each to bring someone else!	It didn't take her long to realise that if you want to make a living by painting you have to establish your personal profile, so people know your name. This takes time. In her case, getting on TV and radio and contributing to the SAA and other magazines has proved valuable. She takes time explaining how she sees abstract painting: that all art should aim for expression, not mimicry that it can be very therapeutic that you hope that what you paint will strike a chord with someone that the owner of an abstract work should keep finding new shapes or points of interest that many people (including the artist herself) like the mystery of never quite understanding a picture. She was working today on acrylic paper but feels you need double-primed canvas or board for permanent work.
	Daler Rowney System 3 and Windsor & Newton's equivalent, Galleria, are excellent acrylics, despite being student quality, and she also likes Chroma's Atelier (even better quality and slower drying), but you should avoid cheaper ones. She buys many of her materials from www.artdiscount.co.uk - 500ml tubs for under £8. Ali poured out perhaps 40 ml from each of three primaries and a white, onto a plate. That's a frightening amount for anyone who buys it in little tubes but she says she doesn't waste much because you can put leftovers into airtight containers (even a margerine pot) and they will keep for months. StayWet palettes are good for casual students.
She started by picking up some yellow, reminding us to get it on the bottom of the painting knife (it will spread to the top as you work it, but you just have to scrape it off again). A knife gently held almost flat to the support puts down a thicker, more reliable layer of paint than you get if you treat the knife as a scraper. Next, she showed the effects you can get if you pick up all three colours at once. The danger here is over-working, which leads to browns you may not want. Then she put big blobs of the three colours together and started sculpting them (see right). The skill here, of course, is deciding when to stop. Remember that such thick paint takes two or three days to dry through.
	An extension of this is to put the thick paint onto a smooth surface (plate or glass) and peel it off when it is dry. The resulting brightly coloured skin, torn or cut up, is excellent for use as a sort of collage, held down by more acrylic or by PVA glue. The sample picture on the left gives an idea of what can be done with this technique (detail below). Note that silver and gold paints are very effective, too. Ali says it is important to keep working outside your comfort zone and to realise that you will have many failures. "The best work is often done when you are in an a highly emotional state: angry; happy; sad; worried; exhilarated."
Here are examples of the use of other useful gadgets: A cake-icing nozzle A colour-shaper, which helps to distribute paint without giving too-predictable results. A broad kitchen spatula or barbecue tool, used in the "New York" image below to put down bold vertical stripes, and a narrower square-ended blade to apply and convert a contrasting colour into window frames. A square of lint-free cloth, rolled round the index finger, folded over at the top and held by the thumb. Such "messing about with paint" techniques are excellent ways of motivating children, even otherwise disruptive ones.
	Ali started a new sheet of paper and produced most of the above cloud scene using the "cloth-on-a-finger" method. The concept here is to dampen the end of the cloth (on the finger, dip in water and squeeze out) and then use it to pick up paint from the palette and apply it with a light round-and-round motion. She covered almost the whole sheet with thin, layers of pure blue, picking up more paint or re-dampening the cloth only when necessary. Ali occasionally departs from her "only buy primary colour paints" advice by adding burnt umber (as a source of many browns), pthalo turquoise and a magenta or purple. These were used in several places here, for the dark areas of the sky and for the ground (same bit of cloth). She re-introduced the original blue in places and finally scribbled in the town and cloud-edges with white, using a shaping tool.
The cloudy seascape, above left, is a somewhat more finished example that used these techniques. It was a most interesting, but too short, evening dotted with fascinating comments on her life; on materials; on painting and art-marketing; and on the psychology of artists and their potential customers.

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