Chicago

I had a wonderful, awful day this week, 23+ hours long and filled with art, new friends and a healthy dose of odd luck. I went to see my new friends in Chicago who I met at Ox-Bow last summer. Maureen and I were in the same litho class taught by Mark P. at the AIC. Mark is a curator of prints and drawings there, but he is also an accomplished printmaker and teacher. Like me, Maureen has been an artist all her life and unlike me, has an amazing background in art history. She attended the AIC for her undergrad degree, and through her I got a peek into the art history associated with the school. It all made me want to go to Ox-Bow again this summer. We'll see.

One of the wonderful developments of the day was viewing a large work that was made up of several small woodcuts, assembled to make the image. Just like my quilts, except they were just laid out together on a big sheet of paper and framed. I'm thinking about not continuing the quilts and maybe collaging the prints end to end like this. I'm feeling the need to speed up the process.

Another cool thing was that Mark graciously pulled out some June Wayne prints for us to see, since I had just missed her show at the Institute. I couldn't have asked for a nicer day.

The bad luck came on the way home. My train broke down and we were stuck on the tracks for 4 hours. I'm no stranger to travel and I know that things like this happen and it is best to just buck up and get through it. But. On this particular train there were people who did not know this. One man also didn't know that it is very rude to have many loud conversations on his cellphone when others cannot escape hearing the conversation. I now know way too much about this stranger, and unfortunately, it isn't a nice picture.

Still, I loved the day, and discovered an excellent new novel to boot. But this post is too long already, so maybe I'll tell about it later!