Student artists investigated the relationship between movement, music, and mark making as a method to make meaning. Itʼs difficult to really understand the work of artists associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement (and mark making artists who preceded and followed them) without directly engaging in the power of making through moving.

 

To begin, the student artists engaged in a series of gestural exercises, experiencing the process of mark making through varying degrees of physical energy, forms, and directionalities. Through these exercises, the student artists experienced an “internal compass” that is specific and unique to each individual. The same exercises produced strikingly different results when artists were free to bring inherent bodily rhythms into the process of making.

 

These warm-up exercises also worked to alleviate the anxiety often experienced in approaching abstract mark making. The artist didnʼt need to know what the artist was going to mark; the body knows. Working with sticks of chalk pastel and charcoal, the student artists produced energetic marks in response to a song of their choice. Responding to the challenge of physically keeping up with an auditory stimuli, students artists forgot to be self-conscious, becoming conscious only of the relationships of sound, body, and mark.