Young Printmakers at the Woodson Art Museum: Week Two

When we last left our printmaking heroine, she and her trusty sidekick, Woodson Art Museum Education Curator Catie Anderson, had just wrapped up a week that involved carving tools in the hands of 4th grade through adult learners. I'm delighted to report only one small bandaid required in a pool of 180 rookie carvers.

But for Week Two we put away the sharp implements and loaded up a travel crate with all the accoutrements required for an inky adventure. (Read: Many, many packages of hand wipes.) We were taking our print-and-pony show on the road!

The blocks the students carved the previous week were 4" x 4" in size. Their first step this week was to print their block four separate times on small sheets of paper. This gave them time to get a feel for the proper amount of ink and hand pressure to apply, and it provided four little prints that could be manipulated to determine a final design. Our goal was to print each individual block 4 times on a 10" x10" fabric square that would ultimately be assembled as a classroom wall hanging or quilt.

Once the students determined their 4-print pattern, they practiced printing on a larger sheet of paper.

5th graders with their larger repeated-pattern prints

Printmakers. All of them. And isn't this a spectacular art room?

Once they settled on their overall design, students printed their 4-up pattern one more time on to fabric squares. So satisfying.

Let's see... let's do some quick math. 150 students times at least 12 impressions of their blocks... that's a minimum of 1,800 print impressions in 5 days. Pretty. Darn. Awesome.

Plus I have to say that you haven't lived until you've prepped and cleaned up more than a dozen inking slabs and brayers over and over during a week. I owe so many thanks to Education Curator Catie Anderson for spending epic amounts of time at the sink, in addition to organizing our travel, coordinating with schools, gathering our supplies, providing amazing classroom input and backup, and lots of great conversation on the road. (Once she had enough coffee. ;-))

Finally, kudos once again to the entire Woodson Art Museum staff and all their members and volunteers. The museum is an amazing resource and it's clear how dedicated they are to supporting their community, its educators, and its students. It's always a privilege working with such an amazing organization, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to introduce printmaking to a wide audience. Let's do it again some time!

Young Printmakers at the Woodson Art Museum: Week One

Ready for students in the Woodson Art Museum classroom.

And there goes February. Did you see it? Me, neither.

At the beginning of the month I headed off to Wisconsin and a two-week Visiting Artist Residency at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum. During my visit I worked with 150 students in grades 4-12, and about 30 adults, creating relief prints. I'm back in Maine now (with a rotten cold, go figure), but wanted to share some images from this great experience. There are TONS more photos on the Woodson museum's Facebook page if you're itching to see some.

During the first week of my visit the students traveled to the museum and during the second I traveled to their schools. This is a risky proposition in Wisconsin in February, but we were fortunate to have two weeks of clear (but cold) weather, especially since most of the participating schools were about an hour away from the museum.

Week One sessions included a quick visit to the main galleries of the museum and two concurrent temporary exhibitions: Wild Fabrications, which featured studio art quilts with an animal theme, and Explorations in Wood, which included both functional and sculptural works.

Looking for graphic patterns in art quilts. R Wunsch/LYWAM photo

While in the galleries, students were asked to looked for strong graphic pattern elements as well as aspects of animals that might be incorporated into their own designs.

Downstairs in the classroom we first drew thumbnail designs for relief blocks, then transferred the drawings and carved. We accomplished a lot in less than two hours!

Designing for repeating print patterns. R Wunsch/LYWAM photo

5th graders hard at work.

Next week... Printing!

But before printing week I also got to work with a couple of adult groups, including area teachers who were invited to a free printmaking workshop at the museum. (Complete with coffee and snacks!)

Beginning experiments

Oops! A couple of people are missing, gone to pick up some art supplies,
also provided by the thoroughly awesome Woodson Art Museum.

We treated the afternoon as an experimental print lab, trying simple two color reduction prints, different color combinations, and overprinting two different images.

I really enjoyed this afternoon with teachers and was grateful for the opportunity to facilitate some personal creative time and casual interaction among art education professionals.

Lest you think it was two weeks of all work and no play... I did get out for a few hours to do a little birding. One of the museum curators and his wife shared their Sunday with me... we picked up what I think were my lifer snow buntings and three snowy owls. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Stay tuned for Week Two and some amazing student work....

Visiting Artist Residency: Woodson Art Museum

Despite not having space to make linocuts right now, I'm certainly thinking about them a lot. I see potential images everywhere, mentally mixing colors and imagining print order while I explore my new surroundings.

But there have been a few opportunities to get a little "hands on" lately, since I'm preparing for a two-week artist residency at the Woodson Art Museum in February. (Yes, I know. Wisconsin in February. A winter residency in, say, Hawai'i or Arizona might have been a good idea, but the Woodson museum and staff are great to work with in any season.)

During my February 4-17 tenure I'll be making relief prints with students in grades 5-12, as well as teachers and other museum VIPs. The Woodson currently has two great temporary exhibitions installed, Wild Fabrications and Explorations in Wood. Our student project will draw inspiration from both of these collections, as we will be designing repeating patterns and printing quilt squares on fabric.

Fun, eh?

This past week I put my friend Sue to work as the project guinea pig. Classroom projects are, of course, constrained by time, so logistics can sometimes be a challenge. It was great to talk through the process with Sue as she worked to get a sense of materials, timing and the best way to success for students. And, look! Sue made something beautiful, too.

I saved a little block for myself that I'm hoping to work with this weekend, but wow! I'm still spending a lot of time meeting people, galleries, teaching venues. It's all great stuff, and when I finally have a work space I'll have more than enough to do to keep me busy.

In the meantime, if you find yourself in central Wisconsin... well, ever, really, do stop in and see what they are up to. The exhibitions are always stellar and admission is always... free!

Artist Residency Opportunity!

Every summer I am so fortunate to spend time at a place I love: Hog Island Audubon Camp, off the coast of Maine. The island itself is a 330-acre wildlife sanctuary, and the energy of the camp community can't be beat.

Long-time readers may recall that I spent all of the summer of 2015 on the island, wearing multiple hats during the course of the season. During that adventure I spent several weeks living in a rustic cabin, partly as Artist-in-Residence, and partly as the person who was going to help formalize the Residency program. Which we did.

The application period for the summer 2017 Residency season has almost reached its deadline: February 1. If you are an artist or writer... or know an artist or writer... whose work could benefit from two weeks of unstructured time in a great environment, I encourage you to take a minute to check out the Audubon Residency at Hog Island. I'd love to meet you there this summer!

(The Residency also has a Facebook page here.)

Hog Island view

The Writer's Cabin / Residency site

The Main Lodge / Residency site

Main Lodge interior

Evening light

Island sunsets are fantastic

The Maine Event, 2016 version, Part II

Dang. My time on the east coast is all over already... almost.

Plenty of things have happened in the two weeks since I last checked in. A couple of days after Ed Week ended at Hog Island Audubon Camp I traveled to Canton, Massachusetts (Boston-ish) to facilitate workshops and present a lecture at the Museum of American Bird Art at Mass Audubon (MABA).

As soon as I arrived we mapped out the locations in the estate house for a temporary exhibit of 2-dozen of my linos. This is a fancy way of saying I taped little pictures of the pictures onto the walls and then let Owen the facilities manager install the show.

I had a nice turnout for the Friday evening lecture, including friends from Worcester, MA I hadn't seen in a few years! (Thanks for making the trip!)

The next day I facilitated a one-day linocut workshop. The participants got through a single color "test print" so fast that we tried a 2-color reduction in the afternoon. It was a crush to get it done, but we did! I didn't have a plan for it, so didn't have a good registration system ready for them, but we still managed a few good prints.

The very next day I headed back to the island, where preparations were underway for Hog Island Audubon Camp's 80th anniversary celebration.
There were lots of little projects to wrap up before the event, and a few BIG projects to finish. Eric and Adrian finished a gorgeous new sign for the mainland sanctuary entry, which had to be hauled across the narrows from the island and up to the top of the mainland hill.



Here it is, all installed and gorgeous.

Meanwhile, I was trimming and taping and gluing 72 pieces of paper to 12 pieces of poster board to present first drafts of an island history display for the Fish House (community meeting building).

Of course there had to be some drama in the midst of all the preparations.

There's an insanely popular webcam mounted at an osprey nest right in the midst of the main camp buildings. (Cam link here.) This year the osprey pair had three chicks, which by the end of July were energetically exercising their wings and standing at the edge of the nest preparing to fledge.

August 1 Cleo and I were here having supper when we heard a big kerfuffle outside and I saw something large and dark fly past the kitchen window. (The osprey nest is very near to the dining hall.) At first I thought perhaps a chick had finally decided to take its first flight, but something struck us as not-quite right, especially in the calls of the adults. We discovered that a bald eagle had swooped in and taken one of the chicks! A second had escaped by deciding it was time to fledge (nothing like bailing out for the first time with an eagle bearing down on you) and the third had "pancaked" itself... getting as flat as possible and avoiding detection in the pandemonium.

The drama caught the attention of media everywhere, including NPR and the Washington Post, so it was quite the deal. The video IS pretty darn amazing, but I find the vocabulary used to describe it really annoying. "Vicious" "Attack" "Cruel." (Sigh.) Animals eat each other, no malice involved. It was sad, of course, that it was one of "our" chicks, but the world is not an easy place. The clip is here. 

Despite all the hoopla over the osprey chicks, the 80th Anniversary party was great fun, with good weather, good food, and good friends. Dinner was, of course, our traditional (every week) lobster boil followed by cream puffins. (Probably the most-photographed dessert in history.) But Cleo and her team went above and beyond, creating a sheet cake in the shape of the island, with a big Gojira-esque puffin roaming the ocean of blue frosting. Cuteness overload.

Where there are celebrating Puffineers there are ukuleles, and in the morning a hootenanny broke out on the porch of the Bridge.

The very next day camp started up again, and we're filled with Family campers, ages 8 to 79. Our fourth and final Artist-in-Residence for this season, Sean Murtha, arrived on Sunday and is already at applying paint to canvas and exploring his home for the next two weeks.

But the Hog Island experience is over for me this year, and I'm slowing trying to fit all my stuff back in my suitcase for the trip home on Thursday. It's always hard to leave this community and this place, but I'm looking forward to getting back in the studio and getting some work done. (And maybe even getting back to a regular blog schedule, eh?)

See you all from another horizon soon...
 

The Maine Event, 2016 version

There's been some serious neglect going on here at Brush and Baren and apologies are definitely in order. The pace of the last few weeks has allowed for the occasional Instagram or Facebook post (mostly because one auto-posts to the other), but a format requiring thought and articulation? Not so much.

I'm in the east! The eastern US, anyway. I've been on the coast of Maine for just over two weeks, running amok with back-to-back sessions at Hog Island Audubon Camp.

Warming up in my own journal on an overcast arrival day.

First up was Arts & Birding, a week of sketching and painting skill-building, bird anatomy drawing, and trying to put it all together in the field. Another group was also learning and practicing photography skills, and each evening before dinner we came together for an informal salon. It was great fun to see and share in everyone's work.

Evening salon in the Fish House

Arriving with our Arts & Birding campers was our third Bingham Cottages Artist-in-Residence, writer Alex Dunn. Alex spent two weeks off the grid out at the cottages, coming back to camp in the evenings to share our evening meal and even to conduct some interviews as part of his book project. (And okay, to have a shower and use the wifi, too.)

Unfortunately I was so busy during Arts & Birding that I didn't have time to take many photos... a situation that improved only slightly during the following week's Educators camp.

Field sketching in the island's hummingbird garden.

Makers on the beach at Sand Cove, Hog Island Audubon Camp

One night during Ed Week we explored night activities... astronomy, insects, games... and bioluminescence! There are luminescent critters in Muscongus Bay, and it's SO fun to lie on your stomach on the dock, gently swirl the water with your hand, and watch the sparkles! I wish I could get a photo of it to share with you... but I'm afraid you'll have to settle for the full moon over Crow Island.

Full moon rises over nearby Crow Island.

While camp sessions are now over for me this season, my time on the east coast is not! This week I'll travel down to Massachusetts for a few days to teach a workshop and present a lecture at a reception for my work at the Museum of American Bird Art at Mass Audubon. Then it's back to Maine for Hog Island Audubon Camp's 80th Anniversary celebration and to welcome the island's next Artist-in-Residence, Sean Murtha. Whew! Another wild summer vanishes like a guillemot carrying a red rock eel.  (You don't think that's too esoteric a reference, do you?)

Of course it's friends and colleagues who make the time here extra-special, and despite our chock-a-block schedules we always try to sneak in a moment or two to just be together. Sometimes the moment for stopping all work and just hanging out is completely obvious. Like this one:

Or this one.

And of course, this one.

Because what's a trip to Maine without sunsets and puffins and friends? Find your moment, wherever you are!

Hog Island Artist Residency Deadline!

Bingham Cove at high tide

Longtime readers of Brush and Baren know that I spend a portion of each summer at Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine, teaching workshops and reveling in the coastal environment that is so different from here in Colorado.

Earlier this spring I announced a new Artist-in-Residence program on the island... visual artists, writers, musicians are invited to apply for a two-week residency at the Bingham Cottages on Hog Island, but the deadline is fast approaching! Next week!

Program description and application can be found on the Hog Island / Bingham Cottages Artist-in-Residence web page.

Just in case you need a little more inspiration to apply:

Sunset from the Writer's Cabin

Hog Island woods

Bingham Cottages Main Lodge

Main Lodge interior

Writer's Cabin

Looking west, Writer's Cabin