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On Friday we went to Karen Gorst's studio upstate. You walk into her studio from the street and sort of go wobbly at the knees because it's piled up with all the fun toys you ever wanted. Then you wish you'd brought knee braces, because you look at some of the artwork she has on her walls, and your knees give out, and you fall on the floor in a swoon. More or less.
We (me and DMV who is my fellow-acolyte, or I should say I'm his fellow-acolyte since he was there first) were supposed to be being galley slaves for the day, although looking around at the various swoon-inducing things I couldn't think of anything at all we would be worthy to do. However, we learned how to do blind embossing, which is theoretically pretty easy - you make paper wet enough to be stretchy, and persuade it to mould itself to the shape of a template - and in practice a touch tricky (wet paper likes holes and moulding itself to things you weren't expecting, and it slips around). We spent most of the day having what I shall charitably call learning experiences, but hopefully we'll be better next week.
Karen is jolly interesting. I mean, you'd expect it, because if she isn't World Number One in mediaeval illumination, she gets to sit next to whoever is at dinner, but she talked interestingly about various different things having to do with art. I'm still awfully intimidated, but since she knows things I want to know, I'll just have to deal with that, won't I?
Actually the most striking thing about Friday was the amount of time we wasted - we did perhaps two hours of useful work in the whole day, and the rest of it was variously taken up in traffic, farting about, and various forms of inefficiency. My world and the Art World are apparently very different things. But acolytes are paid by the hour, so I don't have to revolutionise the art world just yet :)
We (me and DMV who is my fellow-acolyte, or I should say I'm his fellow-acolyte since he was there first) were supposed to be being galley slaves for the day, although looking around at the various swoon-inducing things I couldn't think of anything at all we would be worthy to do. However, we learned how to do blind embossing, which is theoretically pretty easy - you make paper wet enough to be stretchy, and persuade it to mould itself to the shape of a template - and in practice a touch tricky (wet paper likes holes and moulding itself to things you weren't expecting, and it slips around). We spent most of the day having what I shall charitably call learning experiences, but hopefully we'll be better next week.
Karen is jolly interesting. I mean, you'd expect it, because if she isn't World Number One in mediaeval illumination, she gets to sit next to whoever is at dinner, but she talked interestingly about various different things having to do with art. I'm still awfully intimidated, but since she knows things I want to know, I'll just have to deal with that, won't I?
Actually the most striking thing about Friday was the amount of time we wasted - we did perhaps two hours of useful work in the whole day, and the rest of it was variously taken up in traffic, farting about, and various forms of inefficiency. My world and the Art World are apparently very different things. But acolytes are paid by the hour, so I don't have to revolutionise the art world just yet :)
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