The Past Revisited…

I was a lucky kid, my parents recognized my need to be artistic and often found various ways to satiate my desire to create things. Wh threefaces_12web en I was 12 in the 70s, we lived in Atlanta, down the street from Chastain Park. Chastain Park offered art classes, and I took a few of them. One was a collage class. We would use india ink and transparent tape to make a little cottage and cut up old magazines to make the gardens that surrounded it. That was such a fun class. I think I made quite a few of those, unfortunately I saved only one, and it wasn’t my best. I think that class is why I save magazines. I see potential subjet matter in them all. Another class used a faux encaustic technique. We used melted crayons to achieve a painterly effect. I took a leather class and made an overly embellished bracelet and wallet. My favorite class employed a specific transfer technique. We used tracing paper, graphite, fixative and a coated Xerox paper. The image above is the work that I created when I was 12, Three Faces. One of the most incredible things about those clases is that they were not geared towards children. I took most of those classes with adults. I think that there were only one or two other kids in any of these classes. It was an amazing experience for me to take these as a kid, it’s part of the layers of who I am as an artist.