My one print

At the Quartz Mountain workshop with Luther Smith, I focused on trying to make one good print. This was a pretty good idea because my allergies made it inadvisable to do much walking around outside and taking pictures. I learned a lot, and this is the best print I got, from our field trip to the town of Mangum, OK. My scan of it loses all the details in the shadows that I tried to hard to maintain, but you get the general idea. I called it checks because of the repeating pattern of squares in the bench, the tiles on the ground and the wall, and also in the shadow.

Back from the mountain

I’m back after a four day workshop at the Fall Art Institutes at Quartz Mountain. While I was there I realized it was my eleventh year to go to the mountain for one reason or another, starting as a writing student in 1979 – the summer of my senior year in high school. I was a camp counselor 3 years after college, and have since been to seven of the fall adult workshops. So, from the days of sitting on bales of straw, to before the fire, to after the fire when the dining hall was a tent, and now a few years in the beautiful new facilities shown here. This year I took a very good course in intermediate darkroom with Luther Smith, (assisted by Konrad Eek) where I mostly concentrated on print quality. I really enjoyed learning to use filters. Maybe I’ll post my best photo later in the week.

This second picture shows one of the two entrances to the darkroom – just to the right you can see the large deck overlooking the lake. Working in all this natural beauty is one of the main things that make these workshops so important to my life as an artist. The third snapshot was taken between the studio pavilion and lodge.

One of my student’s families has begun a large vineyard not far from Quartz, and since his mom is our high school art teacher, and also at the workshop, we stopped there on the way back and took pictures for him to work from in class. One of his classmates liked the picture of the deer skull hung from the fence, and is working with it.

some6th grade weavings

Finished

A few days ago I posted the unfinished version of this painting, and over the long weekend we had, I finally have it just where I like it. It has been a very agreeable painting to work with. Some pictures seem to work against me until they finally let me get them where I want them to be, and others seem happy to go along with whatever I want to try. It is 30″ x 30″ on a cradled panel that is 2″ deep, and painted in acrylic.

I’m not supposed to have favorites…

…but I stop and look at this new piece of student art every time I go past the display case. I photographed it in front of a painting of mine so it could have a sky for a background.

I think it is wonderful, a winged golden man captured just at the moment he touches back to earth. It is about 8″ tall, and made from wire, newspaper & masking tape, plaster gauze, and paint. And a piece of wood.
It is by Zach, an 8th grader in my Art II class.

back to this one

Putting an unfinished painting on the wall is risky business, because I can get attached to it the way it is, but it sure is easier than storing them! This one is going to get some work today.

This painting is an image I have worked with four times now, from my sketchbook to a small painting to this larger unfinished piece, to a woodcut.

Allergy season is upon us, and I spent part of yesterday at our local Festival in the Park in the Oklahoma wind, and the rest of it trying to get ready for a garage sale and taking things to storage, so the dust and pollen did double duty. Staying indoors and painting is probably a good idea. I already had one day of school with no voice, and thankfully my students treated me kindly. We accomplished a lot with hand gestures and notes.

New Painting

Here is my latest painting, it is 30″ x 30″ on a cradled panel. It was photographed before being hung, and I will have a better photo of it later. It was commissioned by a family for their mother’s birthday gift to go in her newly redecorated living room. I developed the design after talking with her about some of her own ideas, then surprised her with it this weekend.

Working in my small studio space, these 30″ x 30″ panels have seemed large, but seeing this painting on her enormous walls made them look really small!

Back to Work

Summer went fast, but fall commitments are suddenly picking up.

The “Suite Oklahoma II” printmaking portfolio is complete and has been displayed at ArtsSpace Ponca City, and opens today at Milagros print studio in OKC. It is also available for viewing by appointment at the Lachenmeyer Art Center in Cushing. It is a portfolio of work by…I think*… 18 printmakers across Oklahoma, including me. Hopefully it will be available for online viewing at some point. *we are still waiting on one print to be finished — not mine!

Last summer 3 friends and I visited Italy thanks to a fellowship from Fund for Teachers. In two weeks we open an exhibit of art that was made in reference to that experience. It will be a mix of photographs, including a couple of my pinhole photos, some jewelry made with Murano beads, a couple of serigraphs, a large woodcut, and maybe a painting or two (if I get them finished!)

I am still working on emptying my childhood home in preparation for a major remodel. Yesterday I finally worked up the courage to “process” my mother’s dresser drawer, which was pretty painful but ok in the end. I’m going to make that room my studio.

Slipping away

Summer is really slipping away, between art camp and traveling. Art camp was a great success. The first group of kids was perhaps my most engaged and enthusiastic ever. The second week, well, I really wondered about them at first. Seated in front of paper and piles of crayons, all twelve of them just sat there. My helpers and I told them they could draw while we waited for everybody to arrive, and nobody bothered. I thought “oh dear, a week of this?” Who could imagine a dozen third graders with no interest in coloring? I suggested they do something with their names…..so a few wrote their names, and that was it.

As it turned out, these kids had great imaginations and remarkably long attention spans, they just weren’t into drawing. I asked them to choose an animal, and I made them a wire armature of it and had it waiting for them the next morning – the wire is too stiff for little hands – then they built up the bodies with newsprint and tape, and we covered them with plaster gauze and painted them. I was amazed with their ideas and the fact that they happily spent an entire morning on this one project.

It never fails to interest me that classes of kids have a kind of groupthink.

printing on clay

I am a printmaker, not a potter, but have occasionally considered the possibilities of using my carved woodblocks to press into clay (after they have been editioned of course).

Just in the past week I have been thinking about it more, probably thanks to potter Cynthia Guajardo writing about the subject on her blog . No doubt she will come up with some lovely things for her etsy shop, so I’ll be keeping track of her experiments and progress.

Then, on the always fun design blog Decor8, I read about the potter Nathan William and his collection that is impressed with vintage Indian woodblocks, then layers of glazes. The effect is very mysterious and textile-like. This Terracotta Sugar Jar is an example of his work from his Esty shop hijackedceramics.

I’m thinking more along the lines of using my old woodblocks to make my own mosaic tiles, something simple like that. I start week 2 of Art Camp tomorrow, and we’ll start off with clay and paper mache (because it is raining daily, and that way things will have all week to dry!), so maybe I’ll try something out. If so, I’ll put up a picture.