I just finished teaching a weeklong printmaking workshop at Shakerag Workshops in Sewanee Tennessee.
Sewanee is the home of the University of the South and St. Andrews Sewanee high school, where the workshops take place. It is set on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau in rural Tennessee just north of Chattanooga.
Shakerag was started ten years ago by Claire Reishman who is a ceramic artist and English teacher at St. Andrews. I first met Claire many years ago while I was teaching at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle . She is a wonderful woman and has made a huge contribution to the arts by creating Shakerag.
The workshop I taught had twelve delightful and hardworking participants. We focused on collagraph prints which simply means that one creates a textured collaged surface on wood panels which is then inked with oils paints applied with brushes and rollers and then run through an etching press.
The class was so much fun and I feel inspired
by the interactions and all that I learned from students and other instructors
during the week.
There is such a feeling of camaraderie and deep bonding
through the common interest in making things by hand at these workshops. All of
the instructors give short presentations about their work and lives which I
always find inspiring and eye opening.
I learn so much about craft and
processes about which I was previously unfamiliar.
I began teaching these
workshops when I was in my early thirties at Arrowmont School of Crafts in
Gatlinburg Tennessee and have taught at Penland School of Crafts as well many
times. Being involved with these schools has enhanced my life and work greatly
in so many ways and I don’t think it all would have happened if I hadn’t moved
to Tennessee in the mid-eighties.
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