Above: My classroom in the Weitz Center on the Carleton College Campus, Northfield, MN. There is additional room at the back where I am standing and taking the photo. There were 7 tables and 14 students. The back wall of the room also had one of those marvelous blackboards. There were high windows on the inside walls into the hallway. Click on the image to view an enlargement.
On Wednesday, August 8 I left Minneapolis for Northfield, MN which is about 1 hour south of my home. (My drive home on Sunday night was only 45 minutes as there was no traffic.)
From August 9 through August 12, 2012 I spent from 9 a.m. to noon and then 1:30 to 4:30 teaching color theory to 14 engaged and talented women.
The class was part of the Midwest Art and Lettering Retreat put on by the Colleagues of Calligraphy. You can read the class description here.
(People have asked me if I'll be teaching this course online. At present I don't have any plans to do so. I do believe that I will reconfigure these lessons in a less intense format and at some point make those into an online class. This won't be for at least a year, so if you see me offering my 6-week color theory class and you are local, you might want to take advantage of it.)
I don't have photos of the stunning charts and discoveries that the students made and I didn't ask permission to post the class photo we took at the end of the last day. I do, however have some photos of the facilities that I want to share with you because I thought the whole campus and the facilities were great. (You can click on the "continued" line to view the rest of the images.)
The group does a retreat each August and in 2013 the retreat will be one week later. It's a great group of people and it was fun to get to know them. My students were fantastic. They gave me the great gift of working hard and trusting that I would take them on a path worth traveling. And they laughed a lot!
The retreat was unusual for me in a couple ways. I didn't have any chocolate from Tuesday evening before I left until Monday after my return. (I can't teach if I'm eating chocolate.) I also had to miss 4 days of cycling. (I rode before I left on Wednesday.) That was difficult. Cycling centers me and gets my energy up, but it also focuses my mind and clears out stress. I found that it was difficult for me, though I sketch all the time at home, to find the concentration to sketch during the retreat. I did a sketch the first day in the rain (the drops spreading the ink), and I sketched Hector (my rubber Toucan Puppet) a couple evenings before bed. Other than that I didn't sketch at all and it's the longest I can remember going when I didn't paint. (I did some class demos of course, but most were charts; and always I was talking.)
I stayed focused enough to capture in photographs some interesting details that I didn't have time to sketch or write about, because I needed to get back and set up the room for the next session. All of these, and some written notes from the evenings are in an 8 x 10 inch kraft brown paper journal from Hahnemühle. I feel things went the way they needed to go. (Next time though I really need to find a way to take my bike!)
So here are some things that caught my eye.
