I must apologize for not blogging for the past 3 months!  There has been so much going on in my life that I can only say the days flew by!  Where to begin?  Complex Collage with Julie Prichard  has been up and running for the past few weeks!  This class has been a wonderful collaboration between Julie and I and our students.  The network really works as a virtual classroom with give and take "conversations"  about art in process.  The student work has been really fantastic and I have high praise for all the efforts that have been devoted to collage during the class.  Remember, all of our classes on Julie's network are ALWAYS OPEN for students.
Once you join you can stay as long as you want! 
                                                     
Which brings me to what else has been going on these last few weeks.  I had the pleasure of participating in an exhibition of my work in France during May!  Wow, it was wonderful to say the least.  We flew into Milan, Italy and spent a few days visiting the Northern part of Italy near the lakes.  It was a mixture of Italian/Swiss architecture and a totally different climate to Southern Italy.  After meeting up with some friends we spent another few days in Reggio Emilia and surrounds.  Visiting a lot of small cities and villages, discovering a few castles with intact motes and others used as playgrounds for the community.  One of the best things about travel in Europe is the use of old spaces.  Lots of structures are hundreds of years old and in everyday use!  I have lots of pictures to prove it!  We drove across Italy along the Autostrada overlooking the Mediterranean Sea!  So beautiful and the color of the water is not to be believed!  AZURE blue.  Absolutely unbelievable.  Clear blue skies meet gloriously blue sea everywhere your eyes could look.  We drove through Nice into the the Village area known for a cluster of cities perched on hills.  It is not far from Antibes, Cannes, and Aix-en-Provence.  We made "base camp" in Callian, France where the exhibition was planned and enjoyed two weeks of getting to know the surroundings.  The exhibition went remarkably well and over 800 people stopped in over our stay.  I happily sold a couple of pieces and generally enjoyed my time.  Once the exhibit was down we packed up and headed back to Italy but this time went up into the base of the Alps and across wonderful miles of open fields and trees.  NO billboards in site for miles and miles and miles!  Such a pleasure. 

One of the things that was happening just before the trip and while I was gone was that Julie and I had mapped out the structure for
our next class in our Project deConstruction Series.  Julie was working on things while I was away and holding down the fort in Complex Collage during the days when internet access was minimal.  Well, I'm pleased to say that after a lot of processing and efforts on both our parts we got it done!  CHAOS & CALM:  Over the Edge Painting Techniques is on its way to you in the next few days! 

How do we come up with these classes?  Well, that is a good question and I must say it is a true collaboration.  Julie and I met in a class I was teaching a few years ago.  As a Working Artist for Golden Artist Colors I teach a lot of classes about using Acrylics.  I meet a lot of students and enjoy most of them immensely.  Julie and I really hit it off and one thing led to the next.  She started teaching online classes and then another thing led to the next and here we are today.  When Julie needs to grow as an artist she usually fires me off a suggestion or two and that gets my brain going and then the ideas start flying through cyberspace until we work things out.  Then the curriculum gets fine-tuned, we each get our assignments, we get together to finish up filming, Julie works her magic on editing and all the tech stuff and Voila...you have another class.  Most of the time Julie wants to learn something a bit out of the box so that ends up really pushing me to refine some techniques and develop ways of communicating them to students via the online network. I get to bring my years of teaching experience, curriculum development and materials knowledge into the mix and with Julie's tech skills, good humor, and work ethic and unending desire to learn more about art techniques we are a good team.  And we aren't neighbors.  Julie lives 2.5 hours away!  The joys of internet!

Just so you don't worry, there is another class already in the works!