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Each day during American Craft Week Don Drumm Studios & Gallery offers an afternoon workshop for anyone who wants to try a new medium or learn new techniques. First up was the Monotype Workshop, held on a very chilly Monday. After a brief intro on relief printing by hand, the enthusiastic participants gave monotype printing a try. Despite the falling temperatures and the temperamental ink everyone enthusiastically embraced the unpredictable nature of the medium and went home with an impressive selection of prints.
photo courtesy of Don Drumm Studios & Gallery
The monotypes below are among new work printed before the workshop.
Windflowers
monotype (Createx ink)
Autumn
monotype (Createx ink)
Other workshops included Feather Earrings with Renee Armstrong, Felted Flowers with Paula Singleton and Creating with Found Objects with Shannon Casey. American Craft Week at Drumm’s ended with the 4th Annual Light-UP Lantern Festival on Saturday evening.
Joan Colbert Studios at Summit Artspace has been open for a couple months . . . so far, so good! The walls are filled with relief prints and monotypes and the arthounds wheedled their way onto the postcard and signage.
Regular gallery hours are Friday and Saturday, 12:30 – 4:30 p.m., with additional hours during special events – like next Saturday’s Downtown Artwalk when the studio will be open until 9 p.m.
Cari Miller, artist and owner of Sunthing Special at Summit Artspace, took the following photo:
photo by Cari Miller
Years ago, while working on the Pictures at an Exhibition print series, the background music in the studio was often . . . Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Moussorgsky. There were many different versions to choose from including orchestral, piano and brass. The piece varied as different conductors added their personal style and interpretation to the music. Leopold Stokowski actually eliminated two of the pictures, Tuileries and The Market Place at Limoges, feeling that they were more French than Russian. Quite a few CDs of Pictures found their way onto my shelves.
Since then several vinyl versions have also joined the collection, enjoyed mainly for the album art:
1961 album with cover art by Josef Albers
1967 album, side one – Vladimir Ashkenazy, side two – Zubin Mehta
1971 Emerson, Lake and Palmer
plenty of info on Wikipedia here
and, saving the best for last:
1972 Vladimir Horowitz, piano version and Toscanini conducting Ravel’s orchestration of “Moussorgsky’s masterpiece that inspired Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s hit!”
It’s hard to decide which is most amusing, the groovy cover art or the album notes headlined by:
Keith Emerson
Modest Moussorgsky
Carl Palmer
Maurice Ravel
Greg Lake
Victor Hartmann. . .
It’s just a guess, but this is probably the only time you’ll ever read that combination.
More information on the print series, Pictures at an Exhibition, is available on my website.
There are actually two arthounds and Thurber has been sulking since he found out Dylan made the first post of artHound. Again.
Okay, not really – Thurber only pouts if he’s missing out on something a bit more tangible, like food or a walk or a ride in the car. Most of the time he’s as exuberant as the hounds created by his namesake, James Thurber. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, James Thurber, a prolific writer and illustrator, created stories and line drawings that could be found in the pages of the New Yorker and within the many books he wrote and illustrated.
Thurber’s work was adapted for other media, too. A Thurber Carnival opened at the ANTA Theatre in New York in 1960. This original cast recording came from Square Records, a local record shop. (Square Records’ specialty is new music from independent artists and labels, but their vinyl inventory covers a wide range of genres.) The album opens to a foldout of Thurber’s quirky drawings, including The Last Flower, A Parable in Pictures, a cautionary tale from his 1939 book, Alarms and Diversions.
The error notices and undeliverable email were not my fault. And, no, the dogs did not commandeer the blog, nor did the cat decide to tweak the website programming.
In what should have been a theatrical moment the servers disappeared, the website, webmail and blog went down and poof! the webhosting company vanished into thin air! Following weeks of dealing with the good (fully backed up website files), the bad (corrupted, unusable blog database backup) and the ugly (a failing, scene-stealing laptop that attempted to add tension to the plot) the odds of an upbeat ending have improved:
– joancolbert.com is back online
– the arthound has embarked on a new beginning (oh, no, who wrote that?!) and
– the laptop has decided to cooperate now that there’s a new notebook vying for affection.
The artHound looks unchanged, but it’s really a new version of wordpress dressed the same as its predecessor. It’s also missing five years of posts, but sometimes you just have to tell yourself to get over it. C’est la vie!
Naming names: according to WebHostingTalk, Nexpoint Technologies was purchased by XibiGroup, after which all basic functions and communications ceased, effectively negating any memory of the preceding eight years of trouble free service. Techs at Hostgator, the new hosting company, actually answer their phones – really!
Thankfully this arthound is still around, but the same can’t be said for the blog that began in 2008 with his photo:
So . . . here we go again!
