rollertrain

What Happens When You Pay To Go To Art Skool - Size 8, glitter on a fine cotton/polyester blend.

Destruction: No faith in practice. Wrong time for patience. Blame your parents. Claim mania or intoxication or the democrats or green products or republicans or some clever excuse. Fuck the world! Also, expensive and spoiled rotten. Time for an effective plague.

[see also: someone who does his job better than you ever will. ever?]

[heh. nccu kinda rules now, dukie boys.]

Pop That Teacher Cherry

Two years ago, I learned a little bit about encaustic painting at Penland. I met the unsinkable diplomat artist Sarah Kuhn in that class, and after stints in Kentucky and Brooklyn, she ended up settling in North Carolina. Since then, we’ve become good friends, and, now, business buddies.

A couple months ago, she came up with the idea that we should take what we learned at Penland and teach it to anyone interested in archaic anachronisms. When you’ve never done any sort of artfag entrepreneurial deal that involves investing your own money in the risk of hoping it might pay off, this can keep you up at night.

We happened to have enough money and time to try and pull off an all-day encaustic collage class for beginners. Neither of us was sure it would work, and we worried a lot, and we did a lot of work, and math, and buying materials, and advertising and business crap, etc.

Thankfully, I worked the 3AM shift at the Maxxipad last night (this morning), which led to three hours of REM sleep in lieu of staring at the ceiling and worrying about shit. The class was great. No hitches, no drama, no money issues, no figurative or literal fires.

I can’t speak for Sarah at the moment, but I’m very stingy about giving myself credit on a job well done. Today, we did a great fucking job, and we even made money. But the best part is the cliché: All the students learned some good skills, and everyone had fun. Here are some photos for any hot-wax geeks out there.

Learning the madness of art making is insane. It’s sweat and blood and tears and shame and lies and truths and fun and hell. I can count the times I’ve been truly proud of myself since this art skool insanity began on my good hand, and today is one of them.

Thank you, Sarah. This grand hell makes much more sense when you’re working with someone wiser and younger and full of just as much uncertainty.

Cutting up old t-shirts for cleaning hot wax and griddles (hint: paper towels catch fire), my scissors hesitated at the following:

1. Parkman Family Reunion t-shirt: XXL, white cotton, green and yellow font, Deere tractor graphic. Gift from my grandmother, Mary Parkman.

2. Big Ridge State Park t-shirt: L, pink cotton, illustrations of butterflies found in the region. Bought in the souvenir shop with Matt and my best friend.

3. Hematovore t-shirt: M, beige cotton, black iron-on lettering, covered in paint. Gift from the band, who put on the most holy-fuck shows I ever saw.

4. Museum of Sex t-shirt: L, black cotton, red logo. Gift from a friend. Cutting it up marked some kind of shift between selling and seeing people eat the sausage.

[#3 lived.]

You’d think that after blogging since 1998, I’d learn to promote the projects I’m working on. I’m gonna guess that all five loyal rollertrain readers probably wouldn’t be interested in taking an encaustic collage class with my friend Sarah Kuhn and I -

[This Saturday, 11/7, at the Arts Incubator in Siler City - ]

but if you are, you know how to contact me. And you get the friends and family discount, plus a bunch of paint and skills to take home. Holler.

[count the ways.]