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Last Journal + Sketchbook Class of 2012

Yesterday was the last Journal and Sketchbook class of the semester, taught by me and Patty at Columbia College Chicago. Remember that this is primarily a writing class, and that most of the students have not taken any art classes since high school, if that. As part of the final presentations for this class, on the visual art side, we had:
  • A stuffed cat.
  • An acrylic painting with 3-d elements consisting of a play-doh goblet and a styrofoam heart.
  • A collage painting on a pizza box that the creator said she "roasted over a fire that I set in the bathtub of my house."



Then there were the:
  • Giant papier mache sculpture/painting.
  • The collage with 90 separately cut pieces of paper lego.
  • The acrylic painting by someone who said she hates acrylic painting (but which turned out pretty good).
  • The portraits consisting of maps.


And there were the discoveries that this led to in the writing: the moments of personal memoir involving bad decisions; the terrible murder that took place outside someone's window in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighbourhood; the creative non-fiction telling of a moment of cruelty from childhood; the hilarious children's story that sounded like something from Damon Runyon.

It was a great class, and a great bunch of students, and I'm going to miss going into this classroom every Thursday and finding out what they had to show and to tell.

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