For the last four weeks, I've been teaching a six week concentration at Penland School of Craft in Penland, North Carolina. Six weeks is a long time for me to teach--I usually do one to two week workshops in different locations around the country. It is intense. We meet every weekday from 9-5 and students are expected to apply what they've learned in the first few weeks to their images, going wherever that takes them. As the students do more and more of their own work, I'm able to work as well, both for demos and to try new processes. My rule in making work in a workshop is that everything I use has to come from somewhere else--the trash, materials the students don't want, magazines, or anything I find along the way. I do have access to my photos, but only what's on my phone, nothing that I brought from home, although I did bring paint and brushes. "Rough Ride" is about teaching this long workshop while still not having quite recovered from Covid(June 6 of 2022), being older, and dealing with the various complex problems that present themselves in working with 12 very different, very emotional, and very sensitive people. In other words, artists.
