Random Musings

 

In one week I will be waking up in Australia. It will be the beginning of five week’s immersion into a land that, simply put, smiles back.

Since 1997 it has been a source of great joy to be asked back there to teach workshops. The students are so generous with each other and toward me. Very few of them over the years are in my classes to simply learn a technique. They seem more interested and receptive to another way of seeing, another way of doing.  We are all paused in mid flight of our own directions and converge to gather up new ideas. In that classroom for just a few days we are reorganizing our points of departure and starting again. I am so very grateful for all the new beginnings they have given me. Thank you, Australia.

I will return to working more on my printmaking as illustration for poetry and essays in the near future. This monotype of the essence of the Outback was an attempt to say “Australia” in very few strokes using a relief ink made from processed soils.

I am seventy years old.

I have too many books I will never read and more that I never should have bought in the first place.

There are too many things picked up along the way when they looked indispensable. And now there is a guilt connected with some that I took to draw later and have no way of putting them back. I can’t even remember where some of them came from, only that they found their way into pockets and suitcases and once home were placed in the studio with care and promises.

Now I am promising myself that on my next trip I will remember them still waiting at home for whatever I had in mind and keep my hands in empty pockets.