BRNK

TAD Workshop KC, 2010

Last Friday marked the end of the first ever workshop put on by my school, The Art Department. This event was absolutely amazing, and it was a shame it wasn’t better attended because people missed out on a ton of awesome classes, crits and demos. The list of visiting and participating artists is hard to believe: Gary Kelly, Mark English, John English, Brent Watkinson, George Pratt, C.F. Payne, Anita Kunz, Jon Foster, Sterling Hundley, Andrew Jones, and Francis Vallejo.

In the last month I’ve forged personal relationships with some of my heroes and had some amazing one-on-one experiences. I’ll be posting more anecdotes in the future, but I’ll start with a little story about George Pratt.

George's monotype demo. (Photo courtesy of Simon Boxer.)

As you probably know if you follow the man closely or if you’ve ever met him, George is an absolute music fanatic. Not only is he the driving force behind See You In Hell Blind Boy, a documentary about his quest to track down a mysterious bluesman known only as “Blind Boy”, but he’s also a walking encyclopedia of music. Armed with his iPhone, George is like the  tooth fairy of good music; dropping by randomly to sprinkle you with little bits of music. One particular Sunday morning, a big group of student and instructors were having breakfast at a greasy spoon place near the studio. I was sitting next to George and he played some Cat Stevens at his son’s request (Georgie is also a burgeoning music aficionado). I made a quip about “Yusuf Islam” and George’s eyes lit up, sensing a fellow music lover. For the next 15 minutes George and I sat slumped over his iPhone, listening to awesome rough cuts and alternate versions of Cat Stevens songs like a couple of kids pouring over classic issues of Batman.

Later on that week, we got to see just what George is made of when he gave both a monotype and oil painting demos. Let me tell you, this guy is a badass! George is the kind of guy you could hand grocery bad and a broken crayon and in 15 minutes he’d hand you back an amazing work of art. He made two images of WWI doughboys, both dripping with the visceral, energetic mark making that George has come to be known by. If you are a student of the arts and have ever had the opportunity to see a master work first hand, I suggest you seek out the opportunity. I learned so much from just watching George make pictures that would have taken me years to figure out on my own. The whole time he was painting, George dropped hilarious anecdotes, relating to us tales of how he met his heroes and how he himself learned to paint. He is one of those rare people that is both incredibly talented and incredibly sincere… in fact TAD’s roster of instructors is somehow loaded with just such people, which is why I’m so damned excited to be in on it at the ground floor!