Well, it has been much too long since I wrote anything here. I am sitting in my office at school on a Friday afternoon while my daughter is outside playing pick-up soccer with the boys' soccer team. Ten days from today we (the girls' team) begin practice in earnest and in about three weeks we have our first game. This will probably be my last foray into soccer as a participant. I don't know how many years I will coach-maybe just this one. I have just recently taken down my show at a restaurant in Lynchburg and for the past few weeks I have done nothing art-wise except teach. The image here is one of my newest paintings. The experience has caused me to begin reading some books on egg-tempera painting and I think I may try to do some egg-tempera painting this summer. In school lately, I've been teaching my students how to draw a hand. I have noted over the past five years that a number of students have brought in drawings to show me and invariably they will have the hands tucked into an armpit, or tucked away in pockets or held behind the back. So I decided to have the kids learn to draw the hand. This is one of the hardest things to learn, but my logic is, if you can learn this, you can draw anything. I actually came up with a short formula for drawing the hand and they get it rather easily. Then I ask them to draw a hand grasping something and that is when the wheels come off the cart. Actually that is unfair. They did an exceptional job transitioning from the formula to simply finding simple shapes and measuring. So after a couple weeks of hands we will move on. I also had some advanced students working on portraits of our school board members and they did a wonderful job. I now have a small select group illustrating a children's book written by my brother in law. I had to take a class to recertify as a teacher and I was lucky enough to get one in Children's Book Illustration online from the Academy of Art University. It was hard work and is one of the reasons I haven't done anything here but I asked the kids, who had been watching my progress, if they wanted to try it and almost had to do try-outs it was so many willing participants. If I can find my pieces from that class I will post them here. I will also try to add the school board portraits my kids drew. Why? I don't know and you're right to ask why? Nobody reads this anyway.
