I love my art class.

I'm in the process of taking a yearlong series of introductory drawing and painting classes through the Cultural Arts Center here in Columbus. The place is really one of this city's treasures. It's located in an old armory at the edge of Bicentennial Park, pretty close to I-70. There's all sorts of classes in anything you might want to explore, from painting to textiles to beading to pottery (they're pretty reasonably priced too -- I've found them very affordable and I would characterize my income as lower middle class). There are rotating art exhibits throughout the building (including a recent huge exhibit of John Cavanaugh's sculptures), and a pretty nifty gift shop which (I knew this blogging thing would get me in trouble, I just burnt the spaghetti! Crap! Anyway, as you were) has faculty and student works for sale. Columbus Alive agrees with me, CAC made the Best of Columbus issue this week. And the place smells like paint when you walk in. You can't beat that with a stick, folks. Actually, you could but eventually you'd get arrested, especially if you did it for hours on end.

I'm a pretty mediocre art student. I'm better at painting than drawing, because painting is easier to fudge unless you're a photorealist and I'm, well, yeah. But after the six months from hades (parent seriously ill, friends dying, car being broken into, job continuing its descent into the depths of suckitude, etc.) it's great to just go somewhere, pick up my pencil or my brush, and focus my attention on something other than myself and my woes for two and a half hours. The physical end result is, in a very real sense, irrelevant. When I have the technology I'll post on this blog some of what I've done, mostly to make up for the fact that you will probably never see a picture of me on here. I get a bit squicked out by the thought of people stumbling on this blog, seeing a picture of me, a total stranger and not a great beauty either, and going, Nope, ain't having that. I'd rather be judged on my words, and if you judge me on my art too, I can live with that.

Anyway, especially if you live in our fair city but even if you're just passing through, CAC is worth a stop. And now I need to scrub out my pan...

I suppose it'd be great if I could come up with something profound to say for my very first blog post. But it's about 11 PM on a Wednesday so I think I'll let it go. One thing I do have to say, though, is that when you've been reading as far back as you can remember, it's fricken hard to pick out three or four books as your favorites. I think my choices are OK, although in light of what I've talked about with Miss Lynx, perhaps I should have chosen The Valley of Fear over The Hound of the Baskervilles?... oh, well, I can always go back and change it later.

Oh, and the company that had the nice minty envelopes ended up laying me off. I did wonder at first if it was because they'd spent too much money on envelopes, only to realize later after several indictments were handed out that envelopes were probably irrelevant to the company's survival. I did spend many an excellent afternoon with my friend Em at the coffee station discussing The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings though. No experience is ever wasted. I was raised in a rural Midwestern household by the descendents of German and Scottish immigrants, so you'd better believe that I learned not to waste anything. Not even minty envelopes. I (with my then-manager's permission, thief takers!) ended up taking a box home. It makes paying the rent slightly more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.