Painting Teacher Question:

A manner worked on by Alexander Cozens, which is elaborated on in A New Method for assisting the invention in drawing original compositions of Landscape (1786). The idea is that an accidental blot or brush mark on the paper can act as a trigger for an imaginative composition. Leonardo makes mention of a similar approach to marks on walls that could be worked in with a painting. Twentieth-century Surrealists have experimented with the child ploy of folding paper over a blot of colour to produce a fantastic shape from which some idea could grow.