For me the best part of teaching is finding ideas again, dusting them off, and passing them around to the class. But when one has been away from libraries and hiding out in the basements of museums, all the ideas are sometimes overwhelming. I started teaching the course with a real plan of a plan but it's now a much more improvisation. I spend the days before the class reading, thinking, absorbing, remembering, discovering huge slides in the middle of museums and generally finding myself getting pulling back in to the history and mystery of art.
Tonight is the last formal (certainly not formal) lecture and I've decided to scrap half of it and instead of talk talk talking too much, show my students Rivers and Tides becaues they need to know more about how an artist thinks, they need to smile their way through finals and they need to know that leaves and twigs are as important as paint.


It is after all, looking at art and that's what we'll do.
More soon, I suppose.
take care
Rachael

oh yes, and Pull my daisy is on the web...yea!

There were fireflies in my head and somehow they managed to come out in my sketchbook. This is a pleasing page for me, thus I share.
take good care,
Rachael

Random but true, that in my life as an artist it is not constant rewards but occasional perks.
The Bread and Puppet Theater is coming to my town.
The entire text of Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art is online.
A few days ago I got a chance to spend my day painting while still doing my job. I was a semi-student in an amazingly productive and fascinating one day workshop with Sydney Licht who is more than a simple still life painter. Funny how I was able to be in the same place I am every day but in a much much different place. I was able to paint all day (save for the moments I was listening to the other painters and soaking up the color).



Here's hoping it is percolating in your world, too,
Rachael

It's been a few days off work and I am still tremendously inspired. My friend and fellow painter, Karen, and I wandered and wondered and helped each other sort some things out simply by talking and listening and eating. She's hunting down a good MFA program that will keep her painting for a couple more years, build her skills more, and let her be her. I'm wondering how I do and will keep balancing making and learning, teaching and working, and anything else life sends.
Karen and I didn't take a camera with us as we left for our roadtrip last Thursday. We packed our sketchbooks, a slew of apples, a bunch of sweaters and with our eyes open and our watches back at home, we discovered the greens and oranges and reds and yellows and white streaked bluish light grey skies of miles of road between Rochester and Ithaca and New Haven, Connecticut.

The road itself was mad inspiring, although I'm a bit guilty still that I didn't drive.
I had a chance to hear The Avett Brothers
We started with a few hours in Ithaca where we randomly and wonderfully discovered The Plunger Press which seems the natural heir to a legacy of social protest printmaking and clever critical/commercial enterprises like Oldenburg's Store. Below is just one of the magic heads available for purchase and perusal at Plunger...

We had more experiences in Ithaca and New Haven but they're stories not to be told today. Except I will share the Martin Johnson Heade I looked at in the Yale art museum (though the dirty rats wouldn't let us in to see the rest of the museum because it's closed for renvovations though it just seemed closed for big-wigs until December 10.) It's OK, this smart Heade was the only thing I really needed to see.


OK, then, I'm back to being busy and Karen's back to the paint and the applications and Georgia...
take good care,
Rachael