Saturday was our favourite semi-annual outing! You may know my friend Lori as the cheery and helpful woman at my face-to-face sales table. During the year, we have our seasonal hot date to the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) Show & Sale. This time, we packed up Calgary newbie Jill with us to check out the creativity of the students. The artwork was a mixture of hilarious, provocative, inspiring, technically awe-some and as much as I don’t want a larger house, I do want one with more walls and display areas. There were several pieces that made me think differently about pattern and design, and other pieces that I marveled over the planning and execution.

And I regret not buying a linocut of a trash bag. Really.

We also took a walk through the ACAD Open House that was happening at the same time. The Open House gave me my new swaggy ACAD hat that keeps my head at perfect temperature during the cold nights in the studio. Please excuse the busted iphone camera selfie but this is as clean as it’ll ever be, so I thought I should capture the moment while I can.

The Open House had several interactive components, and we did stop to take part in the observational drawing. A multi-part still life was set up in the middle of the room, and each person could choose their marking tool aka chalk, pastel, conte, charcoal, and take a large piece of paper to a drawing easel and get to it. Lori cracked a joke about the people across from us drawing US, so I decided to do the same.
Sadly, my model left halfway through completion, so I tried to finish the drawing without the “observational” component. It was a very freeing exercise to draw rather quickly without hindrance of end goal, then simply recycle the piece. Lori chose a bone from the still life and used a white conte to catch the highlights – she seemed very pleased. Jill, a fan of using pen, really wished that any of us had brought pens.

I’m always so envious of the ACAD students but they may be envious of me because I have my own space, my own studio, my own equipment. It’s definitely in the cards tor me to take an extended education course at ACAD, but not quite yet.

I’ll keep making things in the studio, reading books, pour over potter forums, and experiment with my own practice until I can be the old gal in the class, asking odd questions about that one time I tried to make a mold and whoa-doggy, I’d like supervision when trying that again.