Workshop Art: Ken Kewley's Looking and Inventing “Separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.” — Werner Heisenberg, 1927 . . . . . . . . . . Participating in a Ken Kewley collage workshop has become a nearly annual event for me since 2015. It is hard to equal elsewhere the quantity and scope of work produced in one of Ken's workshops. The pace is … [Read more...]
Spring Teaching 2018
Registration is now open for my spring teaching schedule beginning April 2 at ccae.org and April 10 at www.danforth.org. This post contains examples of student art from three classes I teach in painting and drawing. Below are descriptions of each class and the schools where the classes are offered. From Copies to Life at the Cambridge Center Studio School. This class alternates between copying … [Read more...]
New from Vermont
Bennington, Vermont continues to inspire me as an artist. This year I returned to Art New England, a Mass College of Art workshop program that convenes on the Bennington College campus each summer. It is a remarkable gift to work every day for two weeks without other responsibilities, far from the madding crowd. The focus yields incremental but essential changes in my work, especially while guided … [Read more...]
Visual Poems
Some graduate school assignments are given to expand use of materials, to produce unexpected results, and to reveal untapped aspects of ourselves. In one assignment, we were asked to select two poems and make a drawing of each. One of the poems I chose was "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. I stitched together two pieces of fabric along the center line, and stretched it by wetting and stapling it to the … [Read more...]
October Light
My studio work day begins with drawing the city from third floor windows, using sumi ink and bamboo pen. Drawing led to doing a larger acrylic painting on paper. Simplifying and limiting color to black and white has helped organize space. This week the color yellow made its appearance. The critical response was, "You are doing what you already know how to do." The evening drawing class … [Read more...]
BU First Month
Events are moving too quickly to post everything from the graduate school program on the blog. Here are highlights. The photographs are snapshots, hand held, daylight. The city paintings are influenced in part by recently reading Don DeLillo's White Noise. The story concerned an "airborne toxic event" hovering over Somerville, Mass, circa 1985. The next series of paintings use only black and … [Read more...]