Just back from teaching “Drawing in Color” at the Wildacres Retreat in NC blueridge mountains. The workshop is sponsored by the Ringling College of Art and it’s a real deal especially for me since I  get paid to go there. I usually teach only the fall session in Oct but this year they had me for the July session. I hope that I’ll get invited back each summer from now on and more hopefully for 2 weeks instead of 1. The workshop went smooth. My Aunt Leota accompanied me and my mother Vera was there too because she works for the Blumenthal family that own the Wildacres Retreat. They are also the family who’s name adorns the Blumenthal Theatre in Charlotte NC. But back to the point, I was fantastic this year! Usually I have 85% return students so we all know what to do and just get onto the chore of making great art. This year I had 85% new students and I had to really rise to the occasion. I worked them hard on basic drawing exercises and then let them free to do as they wanted for the rest of the day. My class used to be a pastel class now it’s anything but soft pastels and so the variety of materials and techniques makes for more diverse creativity. I mostly just try to get the students to draw well and I tried to get them to just spend some time with a regular graphite pencil doing some drawings worth framing. Most were seduced  into using color and missed all the joy of just drawing. When it was a soft pastel class it was more of a painting class, using big fat sticks of color to cover big areas of board and paper. Now I’m trying to make using sharp pointy materials just as enticing. I think the mountain is so beautiful that it just makes you want to do big energetic colorful things and trying to make everyone concentrate inside an 11″x14″ sheet of paper is practically impossible. I’m sure that there’s a happy compromise out there. Now don’t get me wrong. We all did some beautiful work this year. I always threaten my students with having to get at least 2 finished pieces done per day but of coarse that never really happens for every student. It’s not like we don’t have all day to make art up there. We do a class in the morning and hike or nap in the afternoon then hit it again all night. Some don’t even hike of nap. So I’m not being mean I’m just challenging them and myself too.

Now the funnest part of Wildacres is lecture night. All the instructors have to do it. For the most part they are interesting and informative but after dinner and a few glasses of wine, when you put a bunch of people in a dark theatre… you kind of know what’s likely to happen….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! So 13 or so years ago when I started teaching at Wildacres I decided that my lecture was going to a ‘SHOW’! I always dress up and give an informative yet entertaining lecture. I’ve been a Chicken, a Jail Bird, a Pig, a Hippie, A Country Bumpkin, a Devil, an Incan Indian and so forth. I get the whole audience involved with clapping and singing and volunteering. I make my friends and family participate and it’s a big hoot. I wouldn’t say my shows are Broadway quality or even Dinner Theatre quality but they are fun and the theatre is always filled. It’s easy than you might imagine, I mean these people have spent a week without television so anything is funny to them at that point. My theory is “make them laugh and they will learn and if they don’t learn anything at least they laughed”. Not to go on and on forever here but in case you are wondering what I did this year…..? My lecture was about Perspective. I used rope and sting and boxes and beach balls, parking cones and an oat mill canister to show how the horizon line works in photos and drawing. I strung the string throughout the theatre and crossed the strings across the audience demonstrating 2 point perspective and then when all my string got knotted up ( which I knew would happen) I told the crowd to hang on this would only take about 10 minutes then said “screw it” and simply went around cutting the knots off. It was really fun because no matter where you were you had string and rope all over you and the point of the lecture was to demonstrate how simple and  complicated perspective is. From that madness I said enough and suggested we just look at some of my fine art and proceeded to display a set of my pastel landscape paintings.

More about my trip to NC, SC and Georgia later…… I’m completely blogged out!

For now, I’m resting up from drawing caricatures at  the Brentwood Elementary School “Spring Fling fundraiser” last night in Sarasota. Then today  from drawing kids as comic book characters for ‘Free Comic Book Day‘ at the North Sarasota Library. Then this afternoon from teaching my teen students at Art and Frame of Sarasota, how to draw perspective! Yikes! I wish somebody taught me how to draw perspective at age 15! Every now and again, “I Rock”! So now….right now…..just catching up on some computing that’s gone ignored too long, like ‘My Blog’.

When I figure out how to add images to my blog, I’ll post some pages.

In the mean time, I’m working on a set of house paintings for a private client. Will probably do a total of 3 or 4 final pieces in pencil and water color and maybe ink. Other than that, I’m doing some fun character design for Baskerville Advertising here in Sarasota. All that plus doing caricature jobs every weekend which is after all what keeps me financially afloat. 2 weeks ago I worked at the Super Bowl VIP tailgate party. Daughtry was playing on a stage behind me. Not a bad life eh?

So in a nut shell, that’s what’s up in my art life. How’s yours?