Lecture and Demo in Freehold

Tonight's printmaking demonstration for the Freehold Art Society was scheduled for 7:00 pm, but they requested I be there half an hour before to set up.  I figured I should give myself an hour to get there, just in case.  The meetings are held in an all purpose room at the county library headquarters in Manalapan.  The simplest way of getting there is I-195 west to US 9, north past Freehold to Manalapan, and then jughandle left to the library.  However, I was running a few minutes behind schedule and feared delays with rush hour traffic and the many traffic lights on route 9, so after consulting a map, took route 18 north (always moving at 65mph, no traffic lights) then a few blocks on route 79 south to the street that the library is on.  Took only 30 minutes, but I took advantage of the extra time to find the correct parking lot and the complex path to the meeting room.  Two trips to bring in all the art and supplies and I was ready to go.

The business part of the meeting only took a few minutes and then it was my turn.  Everyone was gathered around two folding tables, maybe about 15 in attendance.  Usually when I do these things I open with a slide show, but they had allotted me less than an hour, so I left the slides at home and just brought a variety of prints that I talked about and let them pass around.  The usual items- Fourth of July, saints, Ecclesiastes, supermarkets, and boardwalks.  (those last ones were too large to pass around, so I held them up to talk about them and then put them around the room for people to look at)  After that, I took out the new St Genevieve block and showed using my most common tools (small and medium round gouges, knife, chisel) to finish cutting out the date at the top and a little sky in the top part of the image.  I would have done more, but we had a deadline to finish the meeting and I also wanted to show printing.  For that I had brought my old reliable "Two Gallants" block from the Dubliners series, and pulled a quick print using water based ink, shown below.

Unfortunately, I was so busy with the talk and demo that I forgot to take photos until I had already started cleaning up, thus just these two.  It went as expected.  The crowd asked a lot of questions about the processes, seemed interested in my unusual subject and style, and were generally impressed with the work.  I did talk about the upcoming Belmar class and the BAC (the crowd includes one former student and one signed up for the June class) but time will tell if anyone there tonight decides to sign up.

With great efficiency I cleaned up and packed up, and since we could hear the announcements that the library would be closing, I got some help carrying it all to the car.  With the traffic now gone, I went with Highway 9 for the return trip home, once again only 30 minutes.   In the next couple of days I'll take the check to the bank, and all the printmaking stuff back to the Studio.