I received a note from Rhonda Horton yesterday. She is an artist from Alaska who worked with me for a month a few years ago. The unique thing about Rhonda’s course was that her husband is a guitarrist and, on lucky days he would play in the studio while we worked. In this recent note Rhonda was worried about me. Was I alright? She hadn’t seen my little newsletter on my website in many months. I was moved by her concern. I’m fine, Rhonda. Thank you so much for your note. I owe you an explanation. Things don’t always work out the way we expect. After four and a half decades of printmaking, I was yearning to paint again. I adapted my studio from printmaking to painting—everything but the press, which is too heavy to move. And I started painting. It was like coming home. I had somehow lost the hesitation that I encountered whenever I approached a blank canvas. I could paint!
Occasionally a special occasion would arise when I had to take a week or two off painting to help out a friend who required some printmaking. The first one was our longtime neighbor and friend, Antoine, whose sister was coming down from Bordeaux with her two children, Sofía and Bruno, ages seven and five. She wanted to introduce them to printmaking. “Children?” the expression on my face said. Antoine said just, “You’ll see.” You must remember, this is a good, old friend. I spent a week making prints with the two children and their mother. All had artistic talent. But the five-year-old boy, Bruno, was a genius. That was my first experience with special-needs children—whose necessity is to be treated as artists. Later I encountered another one close to home. It’s my five-year-old great grandson, Samuel, who has been drawing since he was two. Whenever he arrives, he asks for a pen and paper and spends half a day drawing. The results are fascinating. I would love to see what a child psychiatrist would have to say.
When Sofía and Bruno left I went back to painting, seamlessly. I discovered it could be done. A couple of months later I heard from Iram, an art professor from the National School of Art in Islamabad, Pakistan, who spent a month with me a couple of years previously. I couldn’t say no. There was a period of years when I had a series of women from the Middle East here making prints, and they all ended up my friends. They were from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh… Little by little, the trickle of special-needs artists became a slow flow. I did nothing to encourage it, but all those years of printmaking courses left a clear path to my door. Some of these print pilgrims were friends. A fellow artist, Esperanza Romero—I got her started in printmaking and she introduced me to working with clay—showed up one day with her sister, Paloma.
Paloma has an interesting story. She left home in Málaga, Spain for London, when she was seventeen. It was the late 70’s and there she discovered punk rock and accommodation in London’s squatting community.. She signed on for the program. Paloma became “Palmolive,” the drummer in an all-girls punk band called “The Slits.” Later she married a Scot, became Paloma McLardy and moved to Cape Cod, in the States. She was back in Spain this time for one of her periodic visits to her family. Her sister, Esperanza, brought her to me because she loved fine-art prints and stayed to do some printing with me. The result was a lovely artist’s book.
It was also Esperanza who brought me my next unique assignment. She had also spent time in London from the age of 17 and had kept in touch with a talented young guitarist called “Youth,” (Martin Glover, b.1960) who was one of the founders of a group called Killing Joke, and has since branched out as a record producer and painter. Today he lives between London and el Valle de Lecrín, a lush valley halfway between Granada and Motril on the Mediterranean coast. Esperanza heard Youth was in Lecrin and went out to visit him in the warehouse he had rented to paint some oversized paintings, something like two meters by two and a half, and larger. Halfway through that job, Youth asked himself and confided to Esperanza, “Who’s going to consider buying these monstrous paintings.” “Maybe you should talk with Maureen,” she told him. “She might have some ideas.” He showed up at the door to my studio, and a few days later, we had a plan. Youth would make some drawings based on his big paintings and I would turn them into editions of fine-art prints that he could offer for sale. They are done and the show is scheduled for next spring.
I do have some occasional clear time that permits me to paint, and I found I could skip fairly lightly from one medium to the other. Curiously, my clients for printmaking courses lately are mainly painters. I also have more commissions both for paintings and prints than I ever had before. I want to share with you a couple of ideas that you might find interesting. Over the years, I have exchanged prints and paintings for all kinds of things everything from 20 years of gynocology treatment, dental treatment, a year’s dogfood when we had big dogs, to a rental car. We weren’t expecting that. It was, after all, a brick fence. But the massive growth of ivy vines had converted it into the sails of a three-masted schooner. When our friend, José Rescoldo, saw that, he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll fix that for you in an afternoon. He was right, and he did a beautiful job on it. A few days later he dropped by with a photograph of his grandfather and asked if I were up to doing a version of it in oils. Of course, José, “¿cómo no?” A couple of days later he showed up with a new washing machine and installed it.
This last suggestion is my favorite, the art of taking people by surprise with the gift of a fine-art print. This generosity tends to come back on me. My favorites are doctors and nurses. Here in Spain we don’t pay for medical services, or insurance companies—from vaccinations to open-heart surgery. I have arthritis and occasionally I need to see a specialist. The first one I saw about twenty years ago, Dr. Salvatierra, a wonderful rheumatologist—and person—who said, “If you had come to me five years ago, I could have cured your arthritis. Now we’ll have to settle for containing it.” He was right, they have kept it under control ever since. Recently I was suffering constant pain and swelling in my left knee, to the point where I could hardly walk. I made an appointment at the University Hospital with a rheumatology specialist. He attended me with two medical students, both girls, one on each side. He asked my permission to insert two needles in my knee joint in order to extract the liquid causing the pain. I walked out of there, renewed.
The next day I asked my husband, Mike, to drive me back to the hospital. It’s on our side of town. I took a big etching for the doctor and two small ones for his two students—one of whom turned out to be his daughter. They were so delighted This ploy works particularly well with people who refuse to take money. We see a lot of those folks in Spain.
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Printmaking Courses in Spain 