getting schooled.

this morning, i accompanied shannah to her school to do a guest artist visit with her sixth grade class. shannah is the art specialist at a school in st. louis that focuses on multiple intelligence education. it's pretty interesting stuff. for my part, i came in, talked about myself/my art, and took some questions. the first question was, "do we get to make buttons?"

so we got down to it.

i have a great appreciation for what shannah does. trying to shove a lesson and project into 50 minutes is no small feat. we got into themes of found materials, beauty in the mundane, pattern, thinking small and the reframing of imagery. in the end, the kids ended up making a first wave of mostly garfield buttons (a theme which i a no stranger to), but then automatically got into their own drawings, slogans, and even abstracts of found materials.









in the afternoon, i had the bruce and shannah's whole house to myself. it was great. i made a big mess on the dining room table, making a new rubber stamp, stamping paper bags, folding up target bags, and sorting through the huge score of security envelopes that i got from bruce last night. i had to prepare the envelopes for future button making by cutting out the plastic windows and cutting them down to be more easily packable. this process reminded me of cleaning fish, something i used to be quite proficient at. cutting up these envelopes really does have similar rhythms.







it's hard for me to express the depths of joy that i got from picking through security envelopes. we decided that i had acquired at least 30 new patterns from bruce's collection. my first purple! waves! knots! we even took to naming some of the designs - the drunkard's weave, harlequin, riverbed. i have a larger personal application planned for all of these designs. but more on that when it materializes. until then, i have some project runway to yell at...