“Three Guys Smoking Cigarettes on the Sidewalk”
20″ x 16″ 12/2023
Here’s another painting I did during my studio painting class at Woodmere Art Museum in December 2023. You may remember it from an earlier post. I worked on it at the same time as this one, below. You can see the two influenced each other. That is just how it works for me!
I’ve been friends for quite a few years now with a wonderful artist I’ve never met in person. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Here is the story: Nancy Bell Scott and I met through mail art, and we have exchanged artworks through the US Mail for some time. Next thing you know, we corresponded through email, and then…we are friends.
Before I go any further, take a look at her work. If you are like me, the glowing colors, the delicate papers, and the punctuation of the inked black lines will draw you in, again and again. I think you will also be interested in her use of asemic writing (it was through her work that I first heard of asemic writing, in fact). And I’d also like to say she gives her works the best titles ever – they are stories in themselves.
I made her a Tiny House not too long ago and sent it to her. Here are some photos. Here are views of the front, interior, and sides.
Here are some more shots of the interior:
And here are some angled shots of interior rooms. I know I am showing a lot, but I hope this way you can get a sense of how the decor appears in each room. With each wall that I construct, that is two surfaces to embellish (which suits me fine!)
A few more detail shots. I especially like the front door on this house. (You see it below as the orange rectangle. I used a hole puncher to make the array of holes (you might recognize the interior of the door in this way, in the earlier photos).
I think it would be fantastic to have a real door with small round windows scattered all over it like this.
I also like the roof – I used coffee holders for the roofing material.
How about a couple of views of the Tiny House 14 in an environment? Here it is on my desk:
And here it is out in the wilds of my back yard.
Well, that’s it for Tiny House 14, now settled in a new location. I hope it gives enjoyment for a long time.
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
In this session of class, our assignment was to sketch animals and people in motion, the hardest thing for our last class! During class, we peeked in through several webcams and observed cows in a field, sheep in a barn, and people walking on a beach. Take a look.
This picture shows you a couple of cows. I did some sheep pictures too, but to be honest, the sheep looked like anything but sheep. It’s not that easy to draw animals in motion!
This picture is a lady walking on the beach. I did a lot of people pictures. I found it hard, once again, to work fast enough to get anything good. I will need to practice this skill.
I will end with a stationary subject – my cat, who slept through each one of these classes in a chair by my side. Yes, he did. Here he is, semi-sitting up and asleep.
Well, that’s the end of my tour through my sketching class work. I hope to be able to do another class along these lines. It is a lot of fun to sketch with other people and to try subjects I might have otherwise ignored or felt hesitant about attempting.
Happy Sketching!
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
In this session of class, our assignment was to sketch nature. Nature! What a big subject. I decided to choose a couple of images of things close to home.
This picture shows a group of imaginary trees drawn in class. We practiced capturing the forms and shapes of trees as our instructor gave us tips on how to do so.
This picture depicts a real tree – I liked the tangled branches it has. It’s located near a walking path in Plymouth Meeting, PA.
This picture is a stylized tree. I was just enjoying making shapes and forms inside a tree structure.
This picture is of some of my favorite flowers – dandelions.
I was using some gouache on a drawing a while back and using this notebook page to catch the overruns. I liked the look of it and kept it.
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
I continue with the images I made for this session of class, in which our assignment was to sketch personal memories. In doing so, we record feelings in tangible form.
This picture depicts the manual typewriter used by my mother in college in the 1950’s and then by me in the 1970’s (though I eventually got an electric machine). I learned to type on this typewriter. When my mother died, I asked to have it and now it’s here in my own house, a treasured old friend.
This picture depicts a display of books I chose for our local library. I won a raffle to choose the theme and volumes for a month-long presentation on this kiosk. If you want to know more, I wrote a post about the experience and show photos of the display here.
I love to read and I love the library. This image symbolizes for me the infinite pleasure there is to be found in reading and learning. And a thank you to the people who help me do that at every library I go to.
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
I continue with the images I made for this session of class, in which our assignment was to sketch personal memories. In doing so, we record feelings in tangible form.
This picture depicts our family’s stopwatch. Between the ages of 7 and 17, I was a competitive swimmer, starting out in a summer league and by the time I finished competing, I swam for a team participating in national-level events. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, before there was electronic timing, every family had a stopwatch to record their swimmer(s)’s splits and times as they watched in the stands. And, since all meets were hand-timed, that also meant the official timers (three to each lane and volunteers from the host club or spectators, usually parents) used their own watches.
The watch was run by my mother (my father was unreliable at starting or stopping it; you could not trust his results). I can picture her sitting in the stands with the other parents, holding a heat sheet and timing every heat. All the parents ran their watches all the time. In every event somebody’s kid was swimming, and if you wanted to keep up with the rankings as the event unfolded, you had to time the heats yourself. You timed their kids and they timed yours. This was especially helpful when you got excited at a close race and forgot to stop or start the watch.
When my mother died, I asked to have this watch, and it is here at home with me. It still runs perfectly.
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
In this session of class, our assignment was to sketch personal memories. In doing so, we record feelings in tangible form
Here are the results.
This picture is of the bank branch in Conshohocken, PA, where I spent six months working in 1980-81. Just out of college, I was a trainee in the commercial lending program at Philadelphia National Bank (after many mergers and acquisitions, now part of Wells-Fargo). I did a rotation here with the small business lenders based in this office.
I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, I loved working in a branch and with small businesses, and I received wonderful training and friendship from my bosses and the staff in this division of the bank. In fact, I went on to become a small business lender, something I did for the next 13 years, because of this assignment. So, this place is very important to me.
This picture is a view of the post office in Conshohocken, PA, across the street from the branch. Back when I worked here, I wrote a lot of letters to my family and friends living at a distance from me – the phone was too expensive for a lot of long-distance calling back then. I mailed a lot of those letters from this place, and it symbolizes to me the importance of the US Postal Service in my life.
This picture includes various items related to my old sewing machine. I bought it at a local shop in 1997 and used it for 24 years, until it finally could go no longer. The tag is from a repair, and I kept it because it was filled out by one of the owners of the fabric shop I patronized most often. The two owners, mother and daughter, became friends to me, and this tag is a souvenir from that time.
As for the item on the lower right, it is the throat plate from my old machine. We took it apart (I thought I might use the parts for other projects!) and I kept this piece for sentimental reasons.
(You can read about this sewing machine, what it meant to me, some of the projects it did for me, and see the photo I used for this drawing if you click here. )
In March/April 2022, I took an online sketching class at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. I was looking for an opportunity to get myself back into drawing. My eye problems of summer and fall 2021 into early 2022 had shaken my confidence in my ability to see well enough to do pen and ink drawing, and I thought a regular schedule of sketching would be good to start me moving again.
The class was a lot of fun, the instructor was great, and my goal was met – I did a lot of drawing and I enjoyed myself. I’ll show you what I worked on in a series of posts.
Thanks to my instructor, Zoungy Kligge, and my classmates for a good experience.
In this session of class, our assignment was to sketch interior scenes. In doing so, we make a record of a particular time and place.
Here are the results.
This picture was done during class time. We sketched our immediate surroundings. I was working in my basement studio. You see the freezer, weight bench, and World-of-Tools-in Boxes-on-Shelves. Since this time, I have completed converting this whole area into Environment Claudia, so the tools are in the garage now (the freezer is my friend and has stayed. The weight bench is here on temporary assignment, maybe it stays, maybe it goes). So this is a picture of history, already.
This picture shows a section of our spare bedroom. I added color as I saw fit and what made the picture look nice to me, not what is actually there.
This picture shows one of our upstairs bathrooms. Just the left back section of the room. I added a muted bit of coloring to the picture.
This picture shows an area in our dining room. I had a great time doing this image mostly because of depicting the various pieces of artwork we have in this room – both mine and that of some friends. I believe that if you know our house in real life, you will readily recognize this scene, and I felt great at accomplishing that. Plus, I love making all the little marks used to create shadows or details.
Last night I attended an online workshop at the National Gallery of Art called Virtual Studio: Zine-making with Sarah Matthews, Printmaker & Book Artist.
I was interested in this topic because I’ve enjoyed the zine form for some years. I have done one myself that you may remember: Mom Takes the Train to Pittsburgh, Has a Great Time, and Then Goes Home, from 2013. At the time my son lived in that city and the zine tells the story of a visit I made to see him.
During this trip I visited the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which has a special collection of zines to be read in the library. I spent a whole day there, read zines, and talked to librarians (a couple of them gave me a really nice tour of the library, which I thoroughly enjoyed). From this visit I was inspired to write my own zine about the train trip (which I also loved). And…guess what, my zine is now in the library’s collection. To read about how that came about, check out this post from 2013.
I have also done a lot of artist books, generally using a discarded library book as the base and adding paint and collage for the images, and then writing poetry to fit the pictures. You may remember some of these, too:
Carefree Light-hearted Travel Outing
Today and Tomorrow and Today Again
and one that is very precious to me, a joint project with a friend, Sharon Mann, who is no longer living here on earth, but always in my memory, Nothing But Sunshine.
These days, I express my book making motivations with my various artist sketchbooks. Some have poetry to accompany the pictures and others, well, they just have lots of pictures! I usually post these books bit by bit. The current version, Large Artist Sketchbook 2021 , is now in progress with a page spread posted each week.
Here’s a random selection from a past sketchbook as an example.
So – back to the topic of this post, the zine workshop! I was eager to see what we’d be doing. Sarah Matthews, our instructor, a printmaker and book artist (and an excellent teacher, I can say, after attending this workshop) gave us a simple list of materials we would need:
I assembled these items on my work table, plus a few others.
After some introductory remarks and a chance to look at some examples of artist books in the National Gallery’s collections, we got right to work. Sarah had a well-defined process for us to follow in this workshop and guided us with clear instructions and demonstrations so that we could end up with a finished tiny zine.
And, before I forget, this session was popular! There were 90 attendees from all over the US and some other countries too – I noticed Sweden and Argentina as we entered our home locations in the Chat on Zoom.
I won’t go through the steps of the workshop in detail – but basically, we took the large piece of paper and first covered it with a pattern – swirly loops, circles, whatever. I took out my India ink and a dip pen and did some asemic writing. I’m very fond of the rhythm of writing meaningless words!
Then we chose words (actual words) and wrote them over the patterns. I decided upon writing random words that popped into mind and went in alphabetical order.
By now a theme for my book was emerging – BOOKS! WORDS! and best of all, READING! If you know me, you know that I read a lot, and it’s my favorite thing to do. So it’s not surprising that I would make a book about…books.
All right. Next we did some folding of this paper and by making one cut with the scissors, we created a tiny booklet.
The last step was to collage or further enhance the interior. I did some tiny drawings with my pen and India ink and put them into the book along with some other papers.
Here’s what I came up with. The book is a little thing, maybe 3 1/2 inches tall or so. This is the front cover.
Here are the page spreads.
Here’s the back cover. I’m not sure why this guy is so cross, maybe someone interrupted him in the middle of a good novel?
Well, that’s the story! Thanks for coming along with me. I enjoyed making this little book and I’d like to do more of them. And of course, I will continue with the book projects I already have going. Books!
Look here for a previous workshop I did with the National Gallery involving poetry and art.
And if you want to try a workshop with the National Gallery of Art, Virtual Studio programs occur every couple of weeks and are free, but you need to register. Why don’t you check it out?
The website of the workshop’s instructor, Sarah Matthews, has a lot to show you. Take a look.
Claudia McGill and Her Art World 
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