Thanksgiving

I remember the smell of it and also the feeling. First on Tuesday nights and then Monday and Wednesday mornings and then an evening class again, sitting at big square tables and trying to get my brain around it: process, material, product. And my tendency, my natural way, is always to go for what seems prettiest and most immediately possible. That isn’t to say that is always where I end up. Because I do work hard against that urge (a kind of urge to the decorative or ornate or simply pretty to the exclusion of thinking work through and ideas through) and I have to consistently shore my thinking up against that urge. And this isn’t to say that I don’t value the ‘simply’ pretty, because I do. You should see my house. And also, to digress yet further, I think that an active choosing of ‘pretty’ is also about the development of a certain aesthetic, and not necessarily uncomplicated or itself uncomplex for that.  But I was talking about printmaking and the smell of gum arabic and the teacher walking around shouting  at us to fan harder and the feeling of my stiff black apron and the way the tarlatan snapped and going back after class into the grad students’ area and feeling completely out of place, out of my depths, and also quite completely and warmly welcome, and thinking now, much later (although it doesn’t seem so long, but lo, at least these five years, goodness, since I’ve been there) about how much I appreciated that, the space and the company and all of it (including a friendship that brought me to Norway a couple of springs ago to see a printshop there), and the warmth, yes, and working together, but especially the warmth.