Sigh! Another week, another workshop. Yep, that’s right, I am well on my way to becoming the dreaded “workshop junkie”, but I really didn’t mean for it to happen this way. Of the last 30 days, only 17 of them have been spent at home. See it happened like this… earlier this year way back when it was still Spring I registered for IWC, then a little later on I discovered Art Unraveled, & then a little later still I discovered Silvia Heyden was teaching. It’s not really my fault that they were all happening within the same 30 days, it was just the result of how the stars & planets which govern these workshop things were all aligned. There must be a reason for this madness, I know there is because there is a reason for everything. Sometimes we just don’t know what it is until later.
On Monday this week, I drove up to Phoenix for a day of workshops at Art Unraveled 2009, an annual art retreat that I now can’t quite remember how I discovered, but it seemed that it would be so fantastic that I had to attend something there! It goes on for 8 days of day & evening classes that cover everything & beyond from soldering to collage to art journaling to jewelry making to doing all kinds of crazy things with wax without a single weft of weaving in sight. It was a different environment & atmosphere there… no looms, no skeins & balls of yarn. Instead, many very artsy looking people were walking around wearing aprons that were splotched with various art media, paint stained hands & arms, & the small kiosk was selling supplies for jewelry making, collage, painting-- anything & everything except fiber. It was all strangely refreshing, & when I packed my paints & brushes… disconcertingly easy & simple!
My “day class” was A Handmade Life, an art journal class taught by artist Judy Wise, & it was quite wonderful. With her guidance we rapidly prepped a series of pages in our journals with paint to ready them for entries by swirling, scraping, finger painting, glueing in ripped up old phone book pages, ink stamping, haphazardly scrawling in a single word or covering the page with freeform automatic writing using Sumi ink that smelled of fresh earth. As soon as one set of pages was prepped, we slapped wax paper between them & flipped open new pages to embellish. It was quick, free, messy, & quite glorious! No deep thinking, planning, or pondering, just lay it down, baby, & move on. Just before lunch we were able to do our first entry, with Judy providing a “prompt” to get us going. After lunch we continued working in some other pages that had dried, & at day’s end were still left with several pages to work on later. I had chosen this workshop because I thought it would be a good way to allow myself to learn to “loosen up” my perfectionistic tendencies, & I loved every minute of it. Right now my studio is a jumbled disarray that reflects my recent nomadic experiences (Dennis has taken to telling the dogs I am just a transient passing through & have no jurisdiction within this domicile until I have been a resident for 30 days), but I will be tidying it up this weekend & want to set up a space so I can work in my journal regularly. I am fervently hoping that one day Judy will write a book… she created such a spiritual environment during the workshop & it is echoed in our class handouts. It would be so valuable to capture a little of that essence in a book to cherish.
My “night class” was short, only 3 hours, & it was Then is Now, taught by Sylvia Luna, a class for learning to physically alter photographs. And, I do mean alter. We sanded, painted over, melted plastic, embedded things, stuck on things, rubbed on things, until the photos actually became assemblage art. Ours were quite tame compared to Sylvia’s, she can really take it to another level. I found it so very interesting that through destruction of one art form a completely new one emerged. I am hoping to experiment with using some of the “tamer” things I learned in her class to alter photos I use to design tapestry cartoons.
So, now I am here trying to get back into the home groove, tired, my mind stuffed with all of the possibilities I was exposed to during this month of workshop mania, enduring the summer doldrums of endless heat & hot, dry winds, & as probably everyone else living here in the Baked Apple is, hoping for rain. I see a glimmer fall in the changing angle of light in the mornings & evenings, feel the barest hint of it in the morning air that is now occasionally, on lucky days, cooler than 75 degrees. I am waiting & watching.
And today, which quite mind blowingly happens to be the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I wish you peace, music, & happy weaving!
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
