Back to School

The fall semester is still almost 3 months away, but it's time to start teaching again.  My latest round of woodcut classes at the Belmar Arts Council began tonight.  Last fall I had three people sign up, but only two showed up on the first night, and the third was never heard from again.  Coming into tonight's meeting I was expecting to have three students again, but it turned out that I had four, the extra telling me she signed up online Saturday.  I'll verify that with the office tomorrow, but meanwhile we got the process started.

The first hour was a little rough, with the sudden return of some of my cold symptoms, but I things improved considerably after that.  Like last time, we started by looking at art-  historical work, representative examples of some of my work, and some good group folios that I have been a part of-  so the participants could see some of the many possibilities of woodcut.  I also showed them the kind of ink we'll be using, and the tools.  We discussed ideas for everybody's first prints and I gave advice as to what would work and what might not.  The last part of tonight was to cut everyone a block of wood, and I demonstrated how to surface them with the wood filler.  As it turned out, I was so busy I didn't have time to take out my camera and get any photos,  but it have likely been my unruly piles of prints and books, so nothing missed there.  Next time people will be cutting and maybe we'll have something worth showing.