Artist Inspired: Ana Mendieta Inspired Figurative Artworks

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Elisabeth and welcome to my Artist inspirers Series class focused on the figurative artwork of Ana Mendieta. I am an artist and art educator, as well as a published author illustrator, and I've been teaching on Skillshare, creating classes that cover a wide range of art materials and practices and processes, as well as my passion for art history and sharing how we can get inspired by artists of the past and put our own spin on it and help further push and explore and drive our own creative practice. Miata is a really amazing artist to look at because she was really pushing the boundaries of what was possible for art making and all of her art explores the figure and the human body and different ways that both it can be manipulated in some of her more fun playful works and the photography that she created, as well as in the more land based artworks, the land art, the way she was manipulating natural resources and materials and going on site to create some really dynamic pieces. She has a wide range of work during her short life that we can take a lot of ideas from and get inspired by I'm hoping that you will really enjoy working on the class projects as much as I our class project, I'll show you several ways that I have been exploring Ana Mendieta's work as an inspiration for my own art making. I don't often do figurative art. This was a really fun way for me to push myself into a subject matter that isn't my natural go to, but weave in some of the art processes that I really love and just see what came out of it and hopefully get you inspired both by looking at Anna's work and ways that I'm interpreting it in my own art practice. I hope you'll join me in class as we look at the amazing work in life of Ana Mendieta and explore figurative art making in some unconventional ways. Let's send it over to our next lesson to talk a little bit more in detail about our class project. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: Before you dive into your class project, take advantage of the lesson that I've created about Ana Mendieta life and her artwork. I show you a ton of different imagery of the work that she created and talk you through some of her artistic processes, some of the themes and concepts that she was exploring and hopefully get you really excited and get the wheels turning about ways that you can incorporate figurative art making in a very meaningful way or a fun, playful way, however you want to go about that into your own artistic practice. For our class project, I'm going to demonstrate several ways that I've been exploring Anna's work in my own art making. I lean into a wide range of art media as an artist and I love getting excited about ways that I can take little bits and pieces from artists that I really love the work of and admire and play with how that can be woven into practice both with what I'm comfortable with as well as pushing me outside my comfort zone. Class project is one where you're going to be incorporating figurative artwork. I have a PDF that I've created that has four different takes on figurative artwork that you can absolutely print out and then just work right into or transfer that onto whatever based background material you want to work on, but you're more than welcome to sketch them freehand. I talk you through how I do that as well. Then we go from sketching the figure to planning out some ideas, what material we want to work with, what we're getting inspired by. Then I've got the project where I actually walk you through from start to finish the artwork. But then I also show you some sped up time laps ones that I created in anticipation of this class. I had a couple of different ideas that I really wanted to explore. I ended up exploring those before I actually sat down to make the class. You get to hang out with me outside the art studio because I'm actually making those pieces in my living room and playing around with some ideas for this concept ahead of starting the actual class production. I loved making those pieces so much that I really wanted to bring you into my home. And invite you a fly on the wall to see how those pieces were made as well. You have a lot of different options. There's no limitations here as far as how you explore your cast project. It's going to be really exciting to see how everyone interprets this figurative art making and gets inspired by Ana and puts their own spin on it. Let's turn it over to the next lesson where I talk through some of the material options that you might want to explore as you consider your own figurative artwork inspired by the work of Ana Mendieta. I'll see you there. 3. Materials : Amazing. There's a lot of different ways you can go with your on a Mendieta inspired figurative artwork. I have explored several different ones. The very first one that I did, I gathered up images of flowers and called them out of different magazines and created a giant pile of them, and then I built up the collage of them around the sketched figure. So this started as a piece of construction paper. And then I sketched out my figure, much like this the This is just grocery grocery bag that I'm repurposing for ours. And then around the sketched figurative image inspired by Anna's work, I filled in with flowers, kind of letting it overlap and kind of to make it so that the figure wasn't as obvious, just kind of as the flowers, made the most sense for creating my composition. Then I went in with colored pencil. So this one I've used construction paper, magazine, images of flowers, and I've used some colored pencils. This one I really wanted to play with text as pattern, and I really love embroidering in my artwork. And I really felt drawn to creating this. This was the piece that I was so driven to do after seeing Anna's work and this just really felt like something that was very true to me, but also honored her in her artwork in a very wonderful way. So I like to gut books and turn them into sketchbooks. So I have lots of different papers around that are the insides of the books that I then repurpose in my collages and other artworks. So this is just a page from a book. Paper and books is pretty thin, so I glued this down to a mixed media paper because I knew I wanted to embroider into it. Then again, I sketched out my figure very similarly to this one that I'm going to start working on in our class. And then I chose colors that spoke to me, the earthy natural colors for the base. So I chose a green thread. This is embroidery floss. And then I chose colors for the flowers that are kind of my symbolic significant colors. So blue, purple, and magenta. So if you want to do some embroidery work, like I demonstrate in one of the videos down the road in the class, you're going to need embroidery floss. You're going to need an embroidery needle or a needle that has a fairly large eye to it. To poke the holes for where I do the stitches because you pre poke them, you're going to want to have a push pen or an owl. Either one works great because you kind of you do your drawing of your figure, and then you poke the holes where you want the stitches to go, and then you can just start stitching as you go. I have a class where I embroider into my other paintings into watercolor paintings. So if you are curious more about this technique and it's new to you, definitely check that one out. I also taught this class as an in person one at our local community center. So for this one, I started with black hard stock, but you could also do construction paper. I wanted to use the pattern from inside an envelope. So the security envelopes, if you haven't noticed, all of them have these gorgeous patterns inside. So take a look the next time the mail comes and start to save your envelopes because there's really great patterns, and they come in different blue designs and black designs. They might be different colors in different countries. I'm not sure, but blue and black seem to be the ones that I get in the mail in the US. What I did was I sketched my shape out on the white side of this for my figure, cut that out, glued that down onto my card stock. So here I needed scissors and glue for this one. And then I wanted to work back into it with colored pencil. I really wanted to emphasize the shape because with the black and white pattern and the black card stock, it was a little too similar. Then I just started playing around with different shading ideas. I was just playing with small artwork while my students were working on theirs. So this is just kind of one that came about during teaching this class in person. So if you're looking for the basic art supplies you're going to want to have on hand, you're going to need some sort of paper to work with. I recommend picking a paper that's going to fit whatever art material you want to use. Going to be sketching out the figures, you're going to want a pencil with an eraser. If you want to go collage, you're going to want to have scissors and a gloosta and then you're going to want to have different kinds of papers, either magazine or decorative papers or papers that you collect and find along the way. Through this one, because the next one I'm going to make is going to be on grocery bag paper, I'm probably going to mount this on another sheet of paper just so it's a little stiffer because the grocery paper is a little flimsy. Drawing back into it with anything that you want to, if you want to draw back into it, you could also paint into it. So I've got a fine liner. I've got some colored pencils. I've got some paint pens. I might see what else I come up with. I'm not sure where I want this one to go yet. I want to explore something different from what I've already done in the other pieces. So I'm going to kind of see what inspiration strikes me when I get to the demonstration for the class, but these are the basics of materials that you might want to lean into for your project. So, now that I have an idea of what we could do for our project, let's head it over to our next lesson and learn a little bit more about the life and art of Ana Mendieta. See you there. 4. About Ana Mendieta: Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, in the beginning of her artistic career, explored a lot of expressionism. So color representing emotion and feeling and just really dynamic ways of playing with color and the emotion behind that that we can look to. She explored many challenging topics, including displacement, violence, and the female body. She was exploring performance and body art as well as land art and art and nature and definitely was very much influenced by the feminist movements of the 1970s. So all of these elements influenced Anna's development, both as a woman and as an artist. She explored a wide range of media, and I love that because there is a commonality of addressing related topics that were really important to her and things that she was processing and working through. And there's a lot of darker art that she made also kind of as part of her need to express and kind of put out the things that she experienced and kind of work through them. Flooring. A lot of her pieces involve photography because what she is doing with the art making process, the only way for it to live on is through a photograph. Between the performance element and unconventional materials, she is in that genre of artists, where there's the work of art, and then there's the documenting of it that becomes the art that we get to see after the fact, because the art can exist beyond time. Her main subject matter was her body, the Earth, and then she was working with organic material. So blood, fire, feathers, wood. She just has such beautiful ways of incorporating the figure into her pieces. So for Ana, she is quoted as saying, My art is the way I re establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. So let's head it over to the next lesson to start learning some options that we have for how we draw out our figure for our Ana Mendieta inspired artworks. I'll see you there. 5. Drawing the Figure: T. Ana Mendieta worked with a couple of different versions of the silhouetted figure. You can look at the different symbolism behind the different ways that she chose to do it. I'm kind of leaning into my own art aesthetic with her figurative imagery. So kind of trying to make it personal while using her figurative approach and then kind of playing with that. So I'm just going to quick sketch out some options. The one that I've been going for has kind of a round head and then kind of an angled torso. And then a roundness at the hips and then going down as if the legs were together, very simplified. Something like that. That's what I've been enjoying doing. Another option we could play with would be the rounded head. We can still have our torso sometimes on a head, the arms up raised above the head. And we don't have to worry too much about realistic proportions. You can just let it be exaggerated. And then the legs are always together. But you could absolutely play with whatever kind of figurative representations you wanted to. That's very angular. That's how I just like to do the figure. So that's my own artist that it kind of layered on top of us. Another option would be to do something more rounded. So the hands are still going above the head. There's more of a roundness and less of an angularness to the body. Then this could just be a little bit more simplified. Maybe we don't define the hips. This doesn't feel as true to my own aesthetic as these two do. I'm going to lean into somewhere along here and I like when the arms are not visible, I like them just down. Now, I could make this more a little less defined. I like that approach too, so the arms are more represented there. You can also play with some other ways to represent the figure. Maybe layer in some of your own symbolism. Maybe we start with the same straight boxiness here. But maybe one arm goes up. Like, something like that. And then maybe another arm kind of comes out down there. Almost like a dancer. Like this kind of feels more like we're representing a figure in motion. You create your own symbolism for what that might represent for you. I think I'm going to lean into this one and kind of go from there. 6. Planning the Design: So I'm going to set my sketches off to the side, and I'm going to go to this paper. I just feel really drawn to working on grocery paper. I'm not sure why. No idea why. It's calling to me. So I'm going to sketch my figure out following the shapes that feel make the most sense where I am. She always, even though she was doing this work a lot of this work out in nature, I feel like when she photographed it, everything was still very centered. You can absolutely also play with composition and explore different ways that you want to represent that. I still kind of want to have the hips, just so it becomes a more feminine figure. The other thing we could play with is she's representing the figure straight out. You could absolutely turn the figure different ways if you wanted to have it more sideways. I wonder now that I'm doing a longer body, I wonder if I want to do almost a little bit into an almost a little bit into fashion sketching and have the arms that maybe maybe even change the bottom, it goes out more. I don't want to stray too much from it, and my original idea was going to be to do something more like this. This is more along the lines of what I've been doing. I wonder if this becomes too much. Feels like too much. I do like the idea of changing the shape of the bottom though for style reasons, aesthetic reasons and having it more belled I could still do a curve. I like the strong shoulders. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll do a little bit more hourglass. I'm going to do that. Gonna change it up. Now that I've done a couple, I want to push the boundaries a little bit, kind of see what else I can do with this. All put this one off to the side. I have to figure out what I want to do here. This one I put it down so that I could have a little bit more room at the top, like I have in the embroidered example. I'm not sure what I want to do up there. So I think I'm going to start sketching some lines and kind of see. I liked this tie into nature. I felt like this was a way that I could tie nature in to the piece. And I think I kind of want to play with some paint pens. So let's grab a couple of colors and just start putting together a color scheme here. I like the worms, and that's going to look really nice on here. Maybe not a peach. Maybe a white, and then I might grab my color pencils, too. So just kind of a nice way to pop in some color. 7. Embellishments: I'm going to start creating just kind of some big shapes that are kind of sort of blobby that lean a little bit into the floral. So kind of a variation on the embroidered one, but I want to keep it pretty loose. Play with scale. So I'm trying to get the nature in, I guess, without pushing it too hard. I also want to play with value. So that's the other great thing about the colors I chose is they're a family of worms, but they're also varying values. They're going to give me a nice range. Do I want the figure to be light or do I want the figure to be dark? I guess I want the figure to be dark. Let's stick in the neutrals. I did. Recently, I learn I've been using my pastas the wrong way. I was kind of battling the paint pen. Instead of coloring, I want to kind of fill in. And it's important to not go over a wet area. So make sure that you're gonna add more that you have to wait til it dries. I have some other ones, a different brand. These betams acrylic margars, they're not they don't do that. But pastas need to dry before you go back over them. So this has been a game changer, just to kind of better understand the tool and how I need to work with it. That's very neutral. I want that to go darker, so I'm actually going to grab this one. That is pulling up the paint. All right. You got to let it dry. I'm going to come back to the figure. I'm going to play with the three colors that I use. I'm going to have them create some texture inside of the other colors. Sometimes it's important if you're using paint pen to turn your paper so you don't smear through it. Then what I can do is I can go back even while it's wet. Sometimes it's nice to work back into the wet paint. This is a great trick if you don't have fine liner paint pens. I'm probably going to go back into these with some swirls of colored pencil too just to add a little bit more color variation and value. I may go back into some of my pinks. The orange and the red are pretty close as far as hue value, pretty close in the same fightness and just the darkness of the hue. So it's going to be less noticeable, but still it's going to be great. I might not need. I'm going to do even less orange and back into it because I don't want to just paint back over when they're so similar. Love those. All right. Now my figures dry. I'm going to go in with a darker brown. Actually, that's funny. On the paper, it's lighter. That's right. We'll make it textured. My paper gets too wet, it's going to start to also tear. We're leading into the wood. Going to play with some geometry and some straight lines here and just connect these through that. This is going to be super subtle. I'm going to just to let that dry a little bit, and then I'm going to go in with some darker colors. I've got some warm gray colored pencil, so I'm going over the marks that I already put in, but I'm also sloppily going off to the side on purpose. It's going to add a little bit of a drop shadow, which I love to do. I love to just add that little bit off line. You can do the same thing with a highlight too. If you've got a light line and you want it to stand out, or a dark line that you want to minimize, it's a great way to do it. Because now I can absolutely see all those lines that I put in. I like that a lot. Painted figure is still kind of wet. I want to be careful not to rip the grocery bag because it's very thin. But I do want to add a teeny bit. I'm shading around my figure. I can use that shadowing to emphasize the roundness without outlining it. It's too too much. Normally, as figures are down and they're either built up from the surface or they're in the surface. I like the idea that this is becoming more landscape and I want to raise it up a bit. I'm going to play with alluding to a ground. She also did a lot of performance art where she had armatures where the figures were vertical, perpendicular to the ground, and then something happened to the armature. So I'm going to kind of lean into that idea, letting this one stand up. And prior to doing this, I was feeling that I kind of needed to add something to that ground, but I don't think I do. I think I'm just loving the simplicity of this. I do want to pull some of that brown down, though. I'm going to do it though with colored pencil. I want the focus to be on the figure and the floral tree feeling, and I just want the ground to kind of be a support for it. And if I put the paint down here, I feel like I would lose some of that So I'm just going to do little dusting of some brown, a light one, just to kind of pull some of that lightness from the paint pen down. I'm going to go back in with my warm prey and just pop those darks a little darker. And then now that my paint's dry, I can pull some of those darks up a little bit better to create some unity but also some separation. I love that. Oh, my gosh. Okay. I think it's done. Like, that was the fastest one I've done. Everything else took so much longer. This is fast, and this is gorgeous. I love it so much. You can explore this project anyway you want to. As you can see, I have explored it four different ways. I've learned so much and grown from each of them. So this is the order that I created them in. This was, like, the original idea. I started with this one, though, because I knew the embroidery would take a long time. So I started with the collage flowers, kind of leaning into that. Then I finally found the time to work on the one that had been haunting me for quite some time. Then I taught the class in person. So I wanted to create alongside my students when they didn't need me. And so I did a really quick little one like this. And then today for our class project demonstration, I've created this one, and this is my favorite. This is my absolute favorite, and I feel like with each one, I was exploring different ideas, but I was also growing. So I would highly encourage you whenever possible in any of your art practices and journeys, to return to things and kind of revisit some ideas and give yourself permission to play in new ways. See what else comes out of it, because oftentimes, even when we're exploring the same ideas, it's virtually impossible to create the same thing twice and to have the same art experience twice. Have the same artwork come out of the same or similar experiences just because every minute, you're a different person. You're in a different place, you're inspired by different things, you're feeling different things. This is an especially great one to revisit in a couple of different ways. I would encourage you to do that in any chance that you get to in your art practice with whatever kind of art brings you joy. Now that we have explored on Mendieta artwork, before we head over to our last lesson to wrap up the class, I've added a couple sneak peeks. I've got just kind of a very quick time lapse video of creating this. I was doing this upstairs in my living room, but one of my kiddos was homesick. So I wasn't able to get down and record at my art table, but I still wanted to be able to share some of that process with you. Within that same couple days that he was homesick, I had some time to work on this piece. So, unfortunately, this also wasn't captured on film, except I was able to sneak down for one evening and do a little bit of the embroidery to show adding the French knots. So if you have any embroidery background at all, the flowers were done using French knots. You can kind of see the build of all of that on the back. But I do have another class where I explore sewing back into paintings embroidering back into your artwork. This is something that is enticing to you. Definitely check out that class and get a little bit more information about that process. Check out some of those mini videos of Nick working on these two projects, and after you do that, I'll see you in the last lesson to wrap up the class. See you there. 8. Flower Collage Demo: You you the and and and and 9. Adding Embroidery: You know you 10. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in another artist inspired series Glass. I hope you really enjoyed learning about the amazing life and artwork of Ana Mendieta and that the class got you excited, got you exploring, so maybe some things that aren't your regular go tos that you've really stretched a little bit and your art journey, and that you have some takeaways that maybe you'll want to return to as you continue to explore art in your life and your creative practice. I loved creating this class for you, and I feel so inspired by Ana and I think that maybe figurative art making and some of the approaches that I explored through the creation of this class are going to be ones that are going to live with me for a long time, which I really love when there's these things bubble up again in our art making practice and it's not just a one and done and move on. They're pieces to a puzzle as we figure out all the different ways that we can get expressive and explore art making in our journey through life. I hope that you are interested in sharing your artwork over in the Student Gallery on the Projects and Resources section. You can upload images of your artwork, you can add some text, writing about your process. You can share what you really enjoyed about learning about honest life and her art and different elements that you try to explore in your own process and maybe even some ideas for some future art making. I love that in the projects and resources section in the Student Gallery, that we can keep coming back. I have several classes that I have created and the practices that I have shared in those have become standards in my art making. I love circling back and sharing with my students and fellow artists what else I've done and how that's continued to impact me in my artmking practice. Has work is definitely one that has done that. I'm very excited to share several pieces that I've created and I hope you are excited to share your work too. After you shared your project to the Student Gallery, please take some time to pop on over to the review section and share your thoughts about the class. Class reviews are a fantastic way to share the student perspective of what the class was like, what you got out of it, maybe ways that it's impacted your art making, and anything else that you want to share with students that might be considering taking the class. I know that perhaps you like me are someone that before you click By online or before you dive into a class if you're unsure if it's the right fit for you, I love going to review section and getting some student feedback as I make some decisions about how to spend my time and where to put my creative energy. Greatly appreciate any thoughts you want to share in the review section of class. I would love to stay connected. If you aren't following me already, be sure to click the follow button below. That way, you'll get notified as new classes come out. I also love to share what classes I'm taking because I'm not just a teacher. I'm a Skillshare student and I love hearing from you what classes you are taking and following your art journey, and I love sharing my own with anyone who follows along. You can also follow me over on Instagram where I share regular updates on my art making journey, what's coming up in both my in person and online teaching, Art Adventures I go on, I just want to thank you so much for taking this class and coming along on this art journey with me. I have loved creating classes here on Skillshare, both art focused ones and then art history inspired ones and I have a ton more ideas of future classes to come. I hope that I will get to see you in class again real soon till next time.