Light it Up: Lynn Whipple on Finding What You Love
You might HEAR a Lynn Whipple (Ep.23) class before you see it. Music. Laughter.
You’d enter to find big canvases rotating, lots of color being thrown about, drawings going down and then getting wiped off. Everyone is working fast. And Whipple in the middle of it all dancing.
“We stand up. We've got music playing,” Whipple says of her live classes. “Sometimes we'll break into dance, you know, they'll be just silliness. So it takes all that seriousness out of it though I'm teaching some serious principles ...But I do like for people to feel free to make mistakes.”
Talking with Whipple, a Florida-based artist, you’d probably find many of these same elements in her own studio practice as well. Laughter. Music. Joyfulness.
“I just don't care,” says Whipple about being labeled as super serious. “If you're having fun and you're alive, and you're making stuff, then that's so much more important.”
THE EARLY MIXED MEDIA LIFE
Whipple has always been a collager. As a child, a large bulletin board was the center of her universe. She’d collect everything and lay it out, move it around. She would paint leaves and rocks and paper scraps.
As a member of the art department for Nickelodeon, she’d find gems in the studio trash. Hauling out flats (large narrow wooden boxes that served as walls on sets) and bringing them home to use as giant substrates.
“If you're having fun and you're alive, and you're making stuff, then that's so much more important.”
-Lynn Whipple
Today, what goes in a painting may be as simple as whether or not it happened to be on the work table when she got started.
THE POWER OF ABUNDANCE
Whether that’s been backyard rocks or large sheets of lumber, Whipple’s process has always had a piece of abundance. She surrounds herself with multiple boards and dozens of tubes of paint. A huge part of the delight is playing with all of those options...without the fear of running out.
Her first paint was house paint for this very reason. She was familiar with it from her set painting work.
“The other thing...that I enjoyed as a learner is that it was very abundant, not precious, there's a lot of freedom to it.”
Whipple loved that house paint was matte and that she could draw on top of it. It also helped her learn color.
“When I was learning, the freedom of choosing all my colors...like. I like that red, but it already exists in this wide mouth, little jar,” says Whipple. “For me that was liberating. And it wasn't precious. I wasn't squishing a little bit out of it [thinking] ‘But that's expensive’...that sort of beginning helped me understand color, play with color, [and] not worry about wasting it.”
Because of archivalness, today Whipple reaches for artist quality paints but she still wants that sense of abundance that working with house paints gave her. For that reason, when she starts a new project, she makes sure to have a lot of the new materials around her.
“So it takes all that seriousness out of it though I'm teaching some serious principles ...But I do like for people to feel free to make mistakes,” Lynn Whipple
For example, when she started playing in non objective work, she went out and bought a ton of gouache, which was her paint of choice.
“I buy like a million of the art supplies,” she says. “It's so bad, but it's so good because I have it all to experiment all the time.”
AVOIDING PRECIOUSNESS
A sense of abundance is important. Whipple knows it helps stave off preciousness which in her experience is the enemy of experimentation, loose painting and learning.
Abundance is the tool she uses to keep preciousness out of both her own studio and also her workshops.
“There's so much paint,” Whipple says of her classes. “There's so many gorgeous flowers to choose from. We like it to be like this candy store of fun and joy. And let's just try. Let's experiment.”
She keeps preciousness out of her students’ paintings by another method as well: speed.
“I constantly say, ‘This is going to change. Don't fall in love with it. We're going to spin the canvas’….I guess I leave them off balance enough that they're willing to be in the moment and that helps them paint big.”
This is how Whipple herself works. She sets up a process that is at its core abundant and fun. And the same unpredictability she uses to keep her students off balance, she uses on herself.
She starts a painting by throwing down loose underlayers. She builds up drawings with charcoal, which she then wipes out. She rotates the canvas between drawings so that wonderful and unpredictable shapes begin to emerge. She paints with complementary colors. She builds the energy into her work before pulling it all together with a final background and final line work (of pastel and pencil line) on top.
Whipple sets up a process that is at its core abundant and fun. And the same unpredictability she uses to keep her students off balance, she uses on herself.
This is what works for her. This is the process she’s found for herself that she truly loves. More than anything else, Whipple knows that’s the most important piece for artists to discover, what they themselves love to do.
“You have to make it fun for yourself,” she says. And that’s about finding what feels good to each individual artist. Does an artist like to move and dance? Does she want to use her whole body to paint?
If that's the case then it’s time to go big and messy with lots of paint.
But maybe the opposite is true.
“Or are you super happy with just you and your tiny little beautiful dip pen?” Whipple asks. “Then do that. Do the thing that makes you light up.”
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