This past weekend I taught a workshop in Clare, the French shore of Nova Scotia. It was a wonderful, enjoyable, exhausting experience. I took Dahlia with me, my talented fifteen year old friend and student (she’s been taking classes with me at NSCAD for four years).
Friday night I gave a talk on my work, using slides to show an almost fifty year painting career. (How did that happen!?!) It’s always interesting to see again what I have done, where I began, how I progressed. And how I've come full circle from where I started, only with more understanding of what I am doing. The group asked lots of questions and I talked a lot. Talked a lot. They talked; I talked.
Saturday morning I talked a lot about color and then gave some color exercises. The first was to rule a piece of paper with six one-inch squares across and six one-inch squares down, giving thirty-six in all. The challenge is to fill in all the squares with color in such a way that no color dominates, pops out. Then I had them do some free form color studies using solid color papers cut from magazines. The afternoon was talking about pigment sticks or oil bars (what I use) and some work with them.
By the time I left I was tired and feeling satisfied. Teaching a workshop is good: I go there, teach, and leave. No grades to mark. I like that. It is so hard to put a grade on creativity, art production. In the greater scheme of things, a grade is meaningless.
Then we went to Annapolis to visit Wayne Boucher and his family. Annapolis is a hopping place. There’s always something happening there. The weekend before it was a benefit for the Public Gardens. This time they were having an International Feast Night as a fund raiser for some charities. The food was Mexican, the art was local. I came home with a car full of animals: a wood-cut rabbit, a photo of a puppy in Thailand taken by a twenty-five year old who is part of a My Photo project, a dog from Wayne’s dog series and a “spiritual giraffe,” also by Wayne. Then I picked up my own dog (at her doggie resort), whom I missed very much.
Posted by leya at May 3, 2007 11:45 AM