Catching Up

During the school year I have very little spare time, with art related activities taking a lot of it. Late this morning I set out with lots of plans, but only got to some of them. An unusual traffic situation cost me a bunch of time on my way to my first errand, and required me to to take a long scenic route to get to my second location, an art reception in Belmar. The second half of the annual Jersey Shore Arts Show at the BAC is a sort of Salon des Refuses, 25 works that didn't make the main show at the Boatworks, but the jurors still felt were worthy of exhibition. This show is at a bank about a block away, which has had a relationship with the BAC for a while now. By the time I got there, things were almost over- maybe half a dozen people looking at the pieces hung all around the lobby. As the bank was ready to lock up, I helped walk the leftover cupcakes back to the Boatworks. There I ran into more visitors than we usually get on a weekend and got into various conversations, and before I realized it, much of the afternoon was gone.

Still, I drove up to the Studio to at least get some of my planned work done. Not personal work, but school work. With about a month left in the semester, the work load builds for both students and professors. Today I printed a late arriving woodblock (after the first day of printing with a class, I generally just collect blocks and plates in following weeks and print them at home myself) and graded a color project from one of my 2D classes. The project (shown above) was taken directly from the 2D class that I took back in the 80's, and completion requires the student to mix hundreds of colors. Grading it requires me to verify that students have not repeated any colors in each set, an extremely tedious process. Despite that, I have stuck with the project through a decade of teaching because it does provide students with some necessary experience in color mixing, which helps them with future projects.

By the time I was done with school stuff, I had no time left to continue working on my own color project- the color studies for the shower print. Well, no particular deadline for that- it just means that I have a few more days to think about it.