Critique on Location

Today is Monday, and as has become a regular Monday activity, my first task of the morning was to clear snow from my car and shovel out my parking space.  Last Monday's snow was a really big one, forcing us to postpone the scheduled critique to this week.  Today's shoveling (snow from last night) was relatively light, and by the afternoon what had fallen in the streets had melted and dried in the sun, so our critique could happen.  Tonight we were on location, meeting in the room used by scout troops at First United Methodist Church in Belmar.  Why?  I'll get to that in a little bit.  We had 8 people come out on what must by the 50th consecutive bitter cold night, 6 of the people with art to show.  Above is a drawing on linoleum from Molly, my proof of the train postcard, a paining from Sheilagh, and (on top of that electric outlet- click to enlarge) a ceramic head from Margery.

Mary brought two versions of her latest print (above), her intended contribution to her first group folio.  We generally favored the four color version.  Below, Tim had a bunch of very colorful lampshades he recently created.

So the reason we did this in Belmar was that Molly wanted to show her latest work, an entire altar created for the church.  This is a continuation of her table project- much of this particular Belmar street was under water in the aftermath of Sandy, and an altar is essentially a table.  For all those tables last year, she just made the tops and I built the structures.  She did the tops of this three piece altar (the pieces were on display during the table reception back in November), but also facing panels for three sides of each structure.  I was curious as to when and where she did these, as we emptied out our table shop months ago, and then we got the answer.  She led us to an upstairs room where she is working on a similar piece for another church connected with this one.  There was even a giant pile of sawdust from all her router work- no need to photograph that as there are plenty of photos full of sawdust if you go back through this blog.