Five Days a Week

Last week I remembered what it felt like to commute to work. Gerrie and I took turns driving out to OCAC, four days in a row, for yet another art workshop. We left home at 8:30 and got home between 4:30 and 5:00. On day five we had to drive separately, but the routine was the same. Everything else in our lives -- cooking, email, catching up with family -- had to be accomplished between our arrival back home and bedtime. How do working people manage? For me the pressure was greater than it would otherwise have been, because Jer was in New Hampshire for his high school reunion. I even had to prepare meals for myself; the horror.

The bright side is that the hours between 9 and 4 felt more like play than work. For five days we explored screen printing -- apparently the preferred term now, since silkscreens are no longer made out of silk -- from simple stencils made from freezer paper or masking tape to tricky photo emulsions. Here's my wall o' stuff -- some of the better stuff, at least -- at the end of the workshop:


When you're immersed in art, you see everything through art goggles. Both this bubble pattern in a soaking bucket and the remains of my midmorning snack struck me as potential silkscreen designs:




Got dye? The studio refrigerator (below) is full of dye solution, print paste and assorted other chemicals. No food allowed, needless to say. The retro aqua interior adds to the skeery effect, casting a sickly aura on its contents:


I love the point in a dye workshop when your fabrics come out of the washer, colors fixed, and you hang them on a clothesline in the full light of day. It's sort of like a gallery show. Here's some finished work -- mine and others -- drying on the line: