April 12, 2015 by Michael Booth
Fran Ramírez, Madrid, Spain
Fran Ramírez is a talented and dedicated artist. We have been doing collaborative work together in my studio for more than 10 years. As you can see from the images below, Fran has his own particular view of life in Spain plus a unique vision in his paintings and prints. He has recently finished the restoration work on a new studio in Madrid for himself and his photographer wife, Marta. It also includes a discreet exhibit space. We’re anxious to see the work they hang up there.
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Posted in Featured Posts, Granada, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Fran Ramírez, Gyla Friewald, IB School Bremen, Louis Netter illustrator, Maureen Booth printmaker, Maureen printmaking workshops, Maureen studio retrospective, printmaking in Spain, printmaking with Maureen | Leave a Comment »
April 7, 2015 by Michael Booth
Dave McConnell, Boston, USA
Dave McConnell was a special person and it was a privilege to have him in my studio for a week’s collaborative work in photogravure solar plate. To begin with, a few days after he returned home to Boston he turned 90. He was accompanied on this trip to Spain by his son, a banker with the Boston Fed. Dave, who had spent his working life as a photographer at the Boston Globe, was the quintessence of the charming Irishman with a young heart, excellent humor and that glint in his eye. His project was to make a four-color solarplate photogravure print from a color photograph he had made many years before. This was new territory for me; we both learned a lot from the experience. And we had a grand time in the process. Here’s some pictures Mike made.
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Posted in Featured Posts, Granada, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Dave McConnell, Debbie Haskard, Deborah Maris Lader, Edith May, Maureen Booth printmaker, Maureen studio retrospective, printmaking courses Spain, printmaking Granada, Spain | 2 Comments »
March 30, 2015 by Michael Booth
Beatriz is from Málaga, an authentic Andalusian provincial capital located at the edge of one of the world’s biggest tourist booms, the Costa del Sol. She had been primarily a portrait painter (one of Andalusia’s finest) for years when she decided to expand her repertoire and, along with her compañero Eduardo Guille (see below), came to my studio to try printmaking. Already an accomplished artist she quickly started turning out colorful and creative solarplate prints at a professional level.
Shortly after returning home she and Eduardo exhibited in Málaga the prints they had made with me. Not only was the show successful in terms of print sales, but it resulted in a series of commissions for editions.
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Posted in Featured Posts, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Beatriz Taillefer, Catherine Ryan, Cathy Naro, Eduardo Guille, Maureen Booth printmaker, Maureen studio retrospective, printmaking courses Spain, printmaking in Granada | 1 Comment »
March 24, 2015 by Michael Booth
Audrey Feltham, Deer Lake, Newfoundland, Canada
Audrey and her husband Jim were here for just a few days but in that time she did some interesting prints and we learned a lot about the Canadian northeast. Jim told some wonderful stories of his experiences as a high-school teacher and basketball coach in a village on the northernmost coast of Baffin Island, which enjoys low winter temperatures of 40-50 degrees below zero. “How far is it from the nearest town?” I asked. “About an hour,” he replied. “By road?” “No, by plane. There aren’t any roads.” And like that. Here’s wishing the Felthams well, and do bundle up, won’t you! Continue Reading »
Posted in Granada, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Audrey Feltham, Barbara Milman, Isabel Fallow, Isabel Mitchell, Janet Stahle-Fraser, Maureen Booth printmaker, Maureen workshop retrospective, printmaking in Granada, printmaking in Spain | 1 Comment »
February 22, 2015 by Michael Booth
Twice during the academic year–in October and in February–the students of The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) disperse around Europe for a week of academic travel. This February the TASIS art department chose Granada as their destination, both for its rich multicultural history and for its storied Moorish fortress and palace, the Alhambra, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Granada also offered them Maureen’s printmaking studio where, accompanied by Martyn Dukes, Chair of Fine Art, and Frank Long, photography teacher, they spent five mornings with her learning the basics of solarplate printmaking.
The students, who arrived with a solid grounding in art and a healthy enthusiasm for something new, took immediately to creating images on acetates and burning them onto solar plates. They were delighted with the speed at which solarplate techniques yield results. Before the first morning’s work was done they already had the drying racks filling up with images. In the following days they refined their techniques and learned the importance of creative approaches to printing solar plates. What follows are some snapshots of the TASIS students at work and at play in Granada. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)
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Posted in Workshops | Tagged Maureen Booth studio, printmaking workshops Granada, solarplate printing Spain, TASIS in Granada | 2 Comments »
February 3, 2015 by Michael Booth
Abbie Luck, London, UK
At the time Abbie came to my workshop, in 2005 I think, she had just gotten a job as art teacher at a fancy girls’ school in London and was eager to expand her repertoire of techniques. She took naturally to solarplate printmaking and did some interesting work while she was here. She liked solarplate particularly as it was something she could teach her students without getting involved with acid and resins. She quickly made friends with Karoline Piedra, the American artist from Massachusetts who was on holiday from her day job in Switzerland. That’s the two of them below, captured on a day that Mike and his mate, Curro, were doing some electronic flash tests that somehow got mixed with a wine tasting. That’s probably why the two girls seem to glisten in the photograph.
From a comment by Abbie on my Printmaking Courses in Spain blog: “Thank you for everything. I am leaving with a wealth of knowledge, but also wonderfully relaxed. You have been so welcoming. I have come to feel really at home in your studio and in Granada. I couldn’t have asked for a better working holiday. I will most definitely be back to visit.”
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Posted in Featured Posts, Granada, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Abbie Luck, Karoline Piedra, Lorna Ryan-Burden, Maureen Booth, Maureen studio retrospective, printmaking courses Spain, printmaking Granada, printmaking Spain | Leave a Comment »
January 28, 2015 by Michael Booth
Here’s What We’ve Been Up To for the Past 15 Years or So
Mike and I were reminiscing the other evening about all of the wonderful people who have come to Granada to work with me in my studio over the years when he said, “Why don’t we do a multí-chapter post that is a tribute to all of them? Do you have samples of their work?” That’s how this project was born, and it’s turning out to be a fascinating stroll for me through years of printmaking, teaching, and collaborative work with other artists. I hope it will be that for some of you, too.
What follows is the first chapter in a retrospective virtual exhibit of work done by the artists who have worked with me in my studio over many years. They have come from all over the world, from Canada and the U.S.A to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Australia, and many places in between. They appear here in roughly chronological order. Their work includes a wide variety of techniques: traditional acid etching, collage, variations on solar-plate printmaking, liquid metal, photogravure, linocuts, etc. The photographs used here of the artists and their work were mainly done by Mike while they were here. Where available we have included excerpts from the messages they left in my visitors’ book as they were leaving. Let’s start at the beginning.
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Posted in Featured Posts, Granada, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Barbara Pflanz Nagasawa, Berto Concepcion Medina, Carmen Almécija, Esperanza Romero, Maureen Booth printmaking, Maureen Booth studio, Maureen studio retrospective, Michieletto, printmaking Granada | 1 Comment »
September 5, 2014 by Michael Booth
Lovely Mild Weather, Wonderful People, Four-Legged Lilliputians, Printmaking and Painting
More than anything else I wanted to paint this summer. Though I’ve made my living for many years doing printmaking, a painter has to paint. So I made up my mind to devote this summer to oils and pigments on canvas. In the end it was an eventful summer–including a brush fire that ravaged 2,000 acres of foothills just four kilometers down the valley from us. And, thanks to an old friend who showed up unexpectedly I even managed to squeeze in some painting.
May at Our House
The month of May in Granada is quite summery, at least by English standards. This one was made memorable for me by the Toronto artist, Jennifer Morgan, who wrote to ask if I could mount a one-day workshop for her and six other members of her family. Nobody had ever requested anything like that before but I said sure, we’d give it a try. The Morgan family solarplate experience turned out to be a big success, thanks in large part to the uniformly high level of artistic talent of Jennifer’s entire family, starting with her mother, the Canadian novelist Bernice Morgan.
Then mid-month Mike finally got to meet Patricia Wood-Wynn from the Spanish Tourist Office in Chicago. They had exchanged emails for a couple of years but had never met till she showed up in Granada shepherdessing a group of American travel writers. The evening before they arrived Mike took Patricia and a reporter who arrived early for beer and tapas at one of the sidewalk cafes on the Paseo de los Tristes (“Melancholy Walk” because it used to be the path up to the Granada cemetery.) The terrace is located directly beneath the Alhambra fortress and palace, perched high on the opposite side of the Río Darro. The monument–lit up on summer nights–made a profound impression on the two midwestern girls, who kept repeating: “I can’t believe I’m sitting here in Granada right underneath the Alhambra!” Continue Reading »
Posted in Featured Posts, Maureen's World, Workshops | Tagged Granada, impresiones gigantes, Maureen Booth, Maureen Summer 2014, Pomegranate Editions activities, Spain, Summer in Granada | 2 Comments »
September 5, 2014 by Michael Booth
Maureen and Cuca’s July
July was full of surprises. After two months of what we assumed was a false pregnancy our nine-year-old Shih Tzu bitch, Cuca, gave birth to her first-ever litter, two lovely female puppies. We named them Dolly Brown and Pony. This birth, we are told, is the equivalent of a 55-year-old woman having her first child. In two-and-a-half short months Dolly and Pony have developed from a couple of blind worms, capable only of sucking and sleeping, into semi-professional hell raisers adept at harrassing the cats, digging up flower beds and chewing up anything that even remotely resembles a shoe. That is to say, they are a delightful addition to our family, providing untold joy every day. Pony is more Shih Tzu and Dolly (above) more terrier so, as you can understand, we’re obliged to keep them both.
While we’re on the subject of pets, do you remember Rosie, the pussy from the pantry? She had her first litter, too, just a couple of weeks before Cuca, so her two kittens, Alley and Dolly Black, can run a bit faster and jump a lot higher than the pups. Lucky for them.
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Posted in Featured Posts, Maureen's World | Tagged Granada, Maureen Booth, Maureen's summer 2014, Maureen's summer newsletter, Spain, This Summer's Listening | Leave a Comment »
July 14, 2014 by Michael Booth
“Expert:” A Stranger with a Briefcase
An expert recommended that I start building a serious list of followers–people who sign up to receive the odd newsletter and updates of my sites. He said it was easy to implement; just look it up on Google. So I went to our old friend Google where I found mainly:
Information on “full-service” email marketing companies offering a lot of services I didn’t need at prices that would make your nose bleed.
Free apps for creating pages to gather email addresses. All you have to do is fill in a longish form, then hit a magic button and–Shazam!–the app creates a fully-functional page for you. The problem is that the page it created looked like one of thousands out there selling hair restorers and snake-oil remedies for biliousness. You know, all red and yellow, brash and tasteless with lots of text in capital letters. This clearly wouldn’t do.
To Thank You for Your Loyalty: A Free Learning Video
So I decided to invent my own low-tech solution, at least until something better comes along. So, if you would like to be notified whenever this site is updated or I get inspired to send a newsletter, just drop me an email with your name and email address. To thank you for your loyalty I’ll send you back a link where you can access the Printmaking Tips video from my Printmaking Master Classes series of tutorials.
P.S. I promise I won’t sell or share your email address with anybody.
Posted in Maureen's Work | Tagged free printmaking tips, free printmaking tutorial, Maureen Lucia Booth, printmaking courses Spain, printmaking tips video, printmaking workshops Spain | Leave a Comment »
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Printmaking Courses in Spain 
