Praeterita

Occasionally I teach classes to artists and writers about creating and maintaining a blog. I just checked in on a few blogs created by people who took one of these classes, to see how they are progressing. The answer is: very well! Here is an entry from Jessica Baldanzi's Commons Comics , dedicated to reviewing graphic novels. In the post I link to, Jessica talks about Fatherland, which seems to be a serious exploration in graphic form of a person's family roots in the former Yugoslavia. Jessica's writing is extremely clear and engaging. On Common Pages , the writer talks about something close to my heart -- music -- in a blog post reviewing a book about the history of the Cleveland Orchestra. And on The Barefoot Norwegian, Connie Geissel has a blog post with the title Almost Eaten by a Bear . Which gets full marks for grabbing your attention and forcing you to read it. Nice work, everyone!

One of the classes I am teaching at the moment is collagraph printmaking. As the name implies, you make a collage of materials on a flat substrate such as matboard, seal the back and the front, then ink and wipe it like an intaglio plate before printing. Here is one of the collagraphs I have made this year: The texture along the top is created by ripping away the first layers of the matboard and exposing some of the rougher fibres below the smooth surface. The crane shape comes from cutting precise lines with an x-acto knife and then digging away inside the lines. The brown shape below the crane=a piece of thin textured fabric glued onto the matboard. The factory=pieces of the torn mat board cut into regular shapes and glued back down. Finally, the very darkest areas were created by brushing on carborundum mixed with PVA. When all of that was dry, I sealed the front and the back with acrylic gloss medium. Inking=prussian blue and sepia, wiped with tarlatan to create a middle tone ...

Neocolor water soluble wax crayons A waiter at La Closerie de Lilas, at the eastern end of the Boulevard de Montparnasse. The bistro is famous for its association with several generations of writers and artists, from Paul Fort in the 1890s, Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s, and Gide and Beckett in the post-WWII era. The waiter could have worked at any place in Paris, however, and that's what caught my eye and made me draw him. The crisp white shirt and apron, the black tie and waistcoat, and the high domed forehead made him seem like the distilled essence of Parisian waiter. If you cold walk into the Closerie in any of the eras I mentioned, there would be a fair chance of seeing a waiter who looked just like this. He looks like he might be sleeping on the job in this drawing, but I think he was looking down as he was ringing up a bill at the register. And that reminds me of something: I don't recall many French waiters gazing at their smartphones, even if there was a lull i...