Praeterita

Last week, my writer-wife Patty and I taught some classes at Shake Rag Alley Art Center in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. As you can see in the above photo, the grounds of Shake Rag Alley, with their lush gardens and nineteenth century historic buildings, are perfect for sitting outside to do some drawing and writing. One of the activities we give students to work on is to write a series of instances, beginning with the phrases I remember/I don't remember/I'd rather not remember/I've been told. It's a great activity for stimulating memories of moments that come to be braided together in almost poetic ways. One of the best examples of that came from participant Wendy Moylan, who kindly agreed to allow me to post it here: Yellow I remember the old wedding shot, my grandpa lighting a cigarette in the flower girl’s mouth. I don’t remember if he’s smiling or gravely playing the joke. I’d rather not remember that he erased all stories in his barn. I’ve been told he ch...

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 th...

I'm spending a few days in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, while Patty runs a writing workshop at the arts center here. This was the center of a thriving lead and zinc mining industry in the nineteenth century, and yesterday I walked along a trail over the high bluff that overlooks the town to see the old mine workings: The grates are placed over the mineshafts, which were only wide enough to lower and raise one man at a time, and one wheeled iron container at a time. But these are the original winches and bins: As I've said many times on this blog, my work in the past few years has dealt with my own childhood, including the time that my mother, brother and I all lived in the house of my grandfather, who was a miner. So I always feel an affinity with this sort of thing, even though the course of my life has been conducted as far away from manual labour as one can possibly get. Even the abstract looking pictures I've been making recently derive from memories of coal ...

Hammered jewelry made by a student in Judy's class In part 1 of this interview with Judith Sutcliffe , we talked about how she got involved with Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. The interview continues below with a discussion of Judith's own artistic biography. Philip: We’ve spoken a lot about Mineral Point. Now I’d like to find out about your own artistic history. Judith: Before I absconded to Santa Barbara in 1978, I had a pottery in my small Iowa home town, Audubon, and I experimented with a lot of things. I'm kinda entrepreneurial. Someone gave me a necklace made of beads and hammered copper wire, and I just started doing wire jewelry on the side. I also sculpted dolls, culminating in doing all the Iowa First Lady Dolls still in their big glass case in the Des Moines capitol building. But once I was in California , I concentrated on tile murals for homes, business, and signage. It was a full time business for 17 years. On the side I designed computer f...

Entrance to Shake Rag Alley Judith Sutcliffe is an artist and writer, and a co-founder of the Shake Rag Alley Center for Arts and Crafts in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. I recently had the opportunity to visit Shake Rag Alley, and see how Judith and her partner Sandra  have transformed it into a thriving arts center. The interview is divided into two parts. In part 1, below, we discuss the history of Shake Rag Alley and the artistic community in Mineral Point. In part 2, published tomorrow, we will talk about Judith's own art, past and present. Philip: Could you tell us a little about the history of Shake Rag Alley? Judith: It's in Mineral Point , an artists’ community in southwest Wisconsin known for its 1840s limestone buildings made by Cornish lead miners. Early miners clustered their cabins around Federal Spring in a small valley known as Shake Rag Under the Hill or Shake Rag Alley. Some of the cabins are still there, and the spring is still flowing, winter and summer. ...