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Pictures from Shake Rag Alley Classes


After a busy week preparing for the opening of my show DIA DEL PADRE in Chicago (see previous posts for me), I finally have the time to blog about the classes that Patty and I taught at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts last weekend.

The slideshow of photos above starts with the linocut class, a one-day workshop in which I led three talented and enthusiastic people through the basics of transferring/drawing an image on the block, cutting, inking, and printing. By the end of the morning, everyone had made at least two prints, and by the end of the afternoon the drying table was covered with many more.

The next day, we taught another one-day workshop -- the Journal and Sketchbook class, with ten people. We did four combined drawing/writing activities: quick-fire drawing; writing a scene; "take a place", which is a Story Workshop activity; blind contour drawing; and blind writing, where we ask students to write and cover up each preceding line with a piece of paper that they pull down the page as they progress. Again, some people can be a little puzzled by the way we approach the writing, but I think that everyone there made noticeable strides in their writing by the end of the day.

It's such a great place to teach, too, as I've said numerous times before. And this time, we were staying in the beautiful stone house of Cathy (with a C), a fellow tennis enthusiast who was just the perfect hostess:


There were people in our class who came from as far away as central Illinois, so I would strongly recommend that if you live anywhere within a 200 mile radius of Mineral Point, you seriously consider having a combined weekend away/one-day workshop at this unique place.

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