FINAL REPORT--sent to grant agency

Thought that I would blog this final report which was sent to the grant agency that underwrote my workshop this spring. It conveys some of my thoughts on making art & making clay prints.




As an emerging artist, I work alone. I make art for myself and for the process of making art, swimming in color. I often wonder if I am kidding myself about this clay printing that I do in my basement. Maybe it is just a flight of fancy. I don’t have many opportunities to compare my printmaking with others, and so after a year of this solitude, I felt that I had reached a wall. This workshop helped me find a way around that impediment. It helped validate my work, and it inspired me to continue working.

To watch Mitch Lyons work and demonstrate various techniques in clay printing was first of all a remedial class. I had forgotten a lot of what he shared with me last year. Maybe forgotten isn’t the right word, maybe I mean these techniques had lain dormant and he reminded me of them. In any case, seeing him work refreshed my own notions of clay printing. He gave me plenty of ideas to try. Mitch is a fine teacher who always praises and builds up a doubting student.

Working along side the other 12 people was also stimulating. Each one of us had separate, individual ways of approaching the clay. Some, like me, worked fast and the work poured out of them; others dawdled and worked the clay slab for an entire day before trying to print it. Seeing such variety and diverse styles broadened my thoughts and techniques as I borrowed from those around me. Thus, both the mentor-student relationship and the community of artists’ relationships were enriching and stretching to me as a solo, emerging artist.

My techniques changed too. Because we shared colors, my palette was forced to change. Sometimes I only had a few colors to work with and this limit made me think about how to use these colors effectively. New color juxtapositions were made and sometimes I also was forced to not think in color at all. Rather, I was forced to think about adding textures, inlaying surfaces, scratching, and scraping out lines in the clay that would be visible when printed. These textures added depth and interest to my work and helped make the pieces stronger.

Finally, I was able to return home with a new body of work—12 new prints! But even more importantly, I drove home with a sense of validation that my work was good and true--that it could stand along side others’ works—and that I could spend another year working on my own thanks to the inspiration as well as the techniques that I gained from this workshop.