Week Seven October 15-19, 2007

Week Seven at the Art Centre.

Another week has gone by and if you have been following this blog, you are familiar with the routine by now. Monday is printmaking class and we missed a week due to Thanksgiving and as most of us really like the class and the teacher, we were ready to get back to our current project of a lino square 6 inches by 6 inches with a small border piece as well. We had a review of how to sign prints - we’ll be doing 15 various prints with these two lino blocks. I've chosen to mine based on a Mexican tin angel I bought in Mexico (the Mexican town across from Laredo?) back in the early 70's. I believe it was meant to be a Christmas decoration. The baby angel is holding a star and I have put the angel in a field of stars. It is a bit primitive and hopefully will work well enough not only for the assignment but also to have some items to sell at the Christmas craft show in late November. Four of us sitting at the same table have agreed to go in on a table together.

Tuesday, the painting class actually had us painting for the first time. Using black tempera paint and a #6 flat bristle brush, the idea was to lightly sketch in the arrangement then dry brush the composition. The instructor set up a truly ugly and uninspiring scene involving a large Mexican sombrero (the type tourists bring home), that old boot that's been around the studio lately, a French horn and a plastic branch of what looked like large dogwood blossoms. All of this on old fabric and toweling to give us lots of drapery to mess with. The first time he looked at my drawing he used a conte crayon to make my sombrero larger. He didn't look at my work again until near the end of the class after I had been painting and at this time he told me my drawing was not large enough. Now why didn't he say that back when he was enlarging my sombrero? By now class was almost over and it was far too late to do a damned thing about it. Cruelty to learners....it's bad enough to suffer the angst of the tortured artist having to teach cretins but really! I was too tired and bummed out to go back to the centre for studio time - being practical, I did laundry instead.

Wednesday is our "day off" and I spent some time on homework but primarily with doing prep for my classes - the ones I teach. Thursday beloved art history and we continued where we left off with the Greeks finally getting through all of the power point slides. The Time Life Series DVD on the Golden Age of Greece was quite well done and I watched it with interest. Afterwards I finally saw the rest of the Annie Leibovitz DVD. I have tried to view it numerous times but it doesn't play through on any of my machines. I have now seen it to the end and have written my movie review and submitted it.

In sculpting class as usual, the time for the presentation and various demonstrations took us much of the class time. I did get some work done on my medal - I've postponed the carving as the timing to be ready to cast the medal in bronze is more critical and I'm falling behind schedule.

Friday in figure drawing class we had our heroic javelin man posing nude again. We used ink washes and drew lines with sticks or reed pens (I used a brush pen) for this the last of the series of drawing focusing on line. Next week we'll be looking at all of the drawings we have done in this class so far, deciding on which ones will go into the portfolio we want to submit for marking. I had some success with some aspects of the drawings today - in the hour long drawing I got the head fairly well but I still have some problems with proportions and somehow the legs didn't seem quite right. Sigh.