Week 1 begins

There's Stanley's painty bike , and below . . .

That blurry man with the gray jacket and white shirt is Garrison Keillor! Week 1 in Chautauqua started with his visit to the amphitheater, plus the 52nd Chautauqua Annual Exhibition (which I'll get to in the next post). Keillor's performance consisted of twenty minutes of singing (with some audience participation) peppered with jokes about Lutherans and Unitarians, followed by several long monologues about Lake Wobegon, one of which had to do with the necessity of making potato salad for family get-togethers from scratch. He wrote up a short web version of this skit on Salon.

By now, all the students are here. The ballerinas (also known as bunheads) have also arrived so that they can stomp around to loud music below our apartments when we are all trying to take naps. The art students just finished a two-day marathon of figure drawing, the instructors are all here, and we've started a regular class schedule. Stanley Lewis, one of the painting instructors, arrived yesterday with his painted bike in tow.

We had our first printmaking class today with about fifteen students, which was double what I expected - good for printmaking, not as good for our office, which will not have enough tools or proof paper for all of them until we can order more. Tom launched into an etching demo immediately and paused every ten minutes or so to allow me to interject some Rules of Communal Print Shop Usage, such as, Do Not Mix Bleach and Ammonia, or, I Just Repainted This Studio So Please Clean Up After Yourselves. We got a big new ventilation system installed in the print studio to cut down on brain cell loss from acid and solvent fumes, too. We mixed the first batch of acid up today, so I will be etching soon and hopefully have photos of some new work to post!