Surprise!

It's week 3 of the latest 4 week session of my current Belmar woodcut class.  Considering the ever evolving state of our parking area I decided to approach from Main Street and 7th Avenue and get the big picture.  So the first thing I saw was all those yellow construction vehicles in our side lot, as well as a bunch of newly constructed curbs.  This continued around the front, no way to pull a vehicle into our lot.  And thanks to all this construction, no room in the adjacent municipal lot, so after circling around I settled for a street spot on 7th Ave.  I walked through the rain around the corner to the front, and then across the mud.  As I got close I saw that the only route to the Boatworks would require walking on a wide plank over a ditch, seen just below the window on the left in the photo below.  The idea of carrying all the equipment and supplies that way, and my not so young students having to make that journey on the wet, muddy plank, while a big juried show was being hung all around us, led me to make a quick decision to move the class up to the Studio.  I sent my students on ahead, let the people in the building know what we were doing, and then drove up to Ocean Grove.

The room was still relatively clean from our critique this past Thursday, so it just took a few minutes to clean a few things off the middle table, and the things I keep piled on my table.  My two students both had projects in progress and jumped right in.  Above, Mary continued work on her multiple block scene, trimming bits from both the black ink key block and the blue background block.  She plans to print the new version at home before next week.

Since last week Jill had made some adjustments to her goats block and pulled a good proof (above) of the new version.  Then she pulled a first proof of a new block, the image of a girl feeding birds.  She wasn't crazy about the cut block, but after printing it decided it wasn't as bad as she thought.  This may become a color piece.

The students cleaned up and left, but I still had some work to do.  Back in January, Doug Ferrari at SICA had mentioned a possible exhibition opportunity up in Rahway and had me send him some sample images.  I chose 4 that represented different styles and subjects of relatively recent work.  Last week I learned that these images had been added to an online arts registry, and he sent a request for digital photo of a piece for possibly printing in a catalog of this proposed show.  I reached him by phone yesterday with some follow up questions, and today I shot a new photo.  I have plenty of photos of the above image, but to be suitable for printing, he wants a much larger file than what I typically use for the internet.  So I shot it using my camera's largest setting, just barely reaching the 2700 pixel minimum he requested. I took a few, and chose the best one to edit.  I'll send it out tomorrow.