St Georgia

Tonight something newish happened in Belmar- a critique group.  We used to have one years ago, an off-shoot of the our ongoing group at the Studio, but it was always a struggle get people to come, perhaps afraid of having their art criticized, and when the organizer moved away, the Belmar group died.  The group that meets in our Studio was very regular, not even missing a meeting around Hurricane Sandy, but we've missed a few months in the last year, and Molly is just refusing to come lately.  The last two meetings that I scheduled I was the only one who showed up with art, so I didn't bother this month.  So that there's one in Belmar came at a good time.  It was organized by some of our photo people, but it was made sure that it would not be a photo group.  It made sense to me to bring the latest saint block, a piece in progress, if for no other reason to show the group the advantage of bringing work in progress to a critique group.  However I did want to add the date at the top first, so this afternoon  I pulled some old saint prints so that I could copy the traditional type faces used, and spent part of today's Studio session adding those letters and numbers.

The first part of the evening was spent establishing the principles of design, I guess so there would be something to talk about.  Old hat for someone like me, who handles critiques in my college classes, but maybe not for the other artists.  Besides the organizers, we had 4 artists show work, only one of whom was a photographer.  A policy was established that nothing would be said about the works until after everyone had a few minutes to look at them, though in my case there were many questions since many of those present had no knowledge of printmaking and were confused about the idea of things being backwards.  Once people realized what they were looking at they liked what they saw.  Some people brought up the idea of balance, which was seen in the birds, and in the text.  I pointed out that more will come with color and promised to bring the finished one to a future meeting, as this is being planned as an ongoing group.