Dixon Gallery and Gardens has their main museum building closed for renovations this summer and was looking for some classes to offer to keep the education program going during that process. They asked me if I would teach a printmaking workshop in my studio, since I have a printing press there, and they said they would bring the tables and chairs. I was delighted, and the workshop was this past weekend with eight students.

I hadn't taught it before, but the two afternoon format turned out to be perfect. I asked everyone to come in with a black and white image or two that they would like to make a print from, and I was impressed with everyone showing up with drawings or photos to work from. They progressed from tracing the drawings to cutting the linoleum blocks, transferring the drawings onto them, carving, prepping their paper and setting up registration, and printing. Everyone did one full print and went home with a small edition of prints, and some people started a second print to take home and keep working on.

Block printing is one of the few forms of printing that you can do at home without a printing press. I did three years' worth of professional prints rubbing on the back of paper with a wooden spoon, and I wanted everyone to be able to go out and keep printing if they wanted to. Everyone did some printing with the spoon to get the feel of that as well as trying my press, and the class materials included a set of carving tools and some other basic materials that they could keep and use at home.

It was such fun to have a whole group of excited and motivated students in my work space all weekend. I work alone at home for much of my work time, and it was such fun to have a neat group of people to spend the weekend (two four hour afternoon sessions, which was just about right) making art with me.

I was also deeply impressed with the quality of the prints everyone made. It was exciting to see all of these progress from the first drawings into finished prints. Here are the prints created by the class.

I would really enjoy teaching this workshop again and am pondering hanging out my shingle for it again in January. Let me know if you'd be interested in joining me for some printmaking.

Dixon asked me to come up with some thoughts about my upcoming exhibition that they can use for the newsletter. Here is what I came up with. (Above are color proofs of the print I created for the exhibition poster. That was way fun to do.)

"My work and work habits both are highly influenced by John Constable, my favorite artist. I took the title of my show, "My Own Places," from his letter to a friend in which he writes, "I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." Constable did not follow his generation on the grand tour to paint Italy. He painted the river he grew up next to, his village church, his home, his best friend's home at Salisbury, and later Hampstead Heath just outside his door.

Similarly I spent the first dozen years of my career painting the landscape in and around Memphis. I could easily say that my family's farm and Overton Park made me a painter. Constable was also one of the first painters to do finished paintings on site instead of just studies, and his practices influenced the Impressionists. He also did hundreds of small studies of clouds and plants on site to inform his studio work. All of my work starts with an onsite sketch or watercolor. Any print I create grows out of work I created sitting in that place, recording that moment in time and what drew me to the scene.

A summer in Greece in 2003 gave me the gift of painting beautiful and exotic places, and I have enjoyed painting on my travels in the years since. But I was delighted to be invited to create a show of current Southern landscapes to complement the exhibition of Southern Impressionists that Dixon will bring to town this fall. It's a beautiful opportunity to refocus on the scenes that made me a painter and which continue to delight and enrich my work. In the tradition of Constable, the places in the this show are my "heart places." Overton Park, where I walk daily; my family farm; a farm in North Carolina that have visited and painted through the years; and Dixon itself. Growing up in Memphis I have been amazed and schooled by the exhibitions here while I simultaneously kept painting the lovely gardens. Dixon has helped make me the artist I am, and I could not be more honored to create a show of my home landscapes to hang in the place that has inspired me over the course of my life."

I've been in and out of town and also working on some other projects, so this print has been limping along for a few weeks. I was really ready to get it all put together in a first color proof and see what it's looking like. With some prints I have a pretty good idea as I'm going along, but others are harder for me to visualize, and this is one of the latter.

I wish I'd been a little more conservative carving the "windows" in the green areas. I would have liked a little more shadow on the undersides of those areas. There's no going back in carving -- once it's gone, it's gone. But I can try some shading in the ink to see if that would help.