Your last assignment is due tomorrow...

I have been participating in a ten week workshop with Lisa Call, “Abstraction”, whose work I have admired since I first saw some on slides and  heard about her. Although we have one more week to go before the real end, we received our weekly reminder-email today with a slight difference included in the message. Usually it read “Your assignment is due tomorrow at 5 p.m. Mountain”, and this time the little word ‘last’ was included. No more assignment this coming week.

It has been an interesting experience taking this class. First of all I learned that I don’t seem to be the type to take online classes. Despite that fact that I had thought these were ‘quieter’ months in the year, thus very well suited to take a class, set aside some time for my learning benefit, I found it extremely difficult to arrange/change my schedule so that reading the three-times-a-week mails on various stages of art history concerning abstraction in art, listening to the lecture, and finding time for the almost weekly assignments would be possible. This is bad news, for me, as we live in a pretty remote area, and if I don’t do good with online classes I really have to figure out what I am going to do. It means I would have to be VERY VERY strict with myself if I do that again, to make it worth the while spending money on online classes – no matter whether I am talking about a class in the realm of quilting, or any other online/long distance class (I’d been considering various options). But I think already I am a person with a strong tendency to be rather strict with herself. And to be honest, I really don’t want to be even stricter with myself.

So I need to travel to places to take live classes with the real people really there. Which, of course, means heavy organizing at home before I go, but once I’m gone the two guys usually manage pretty well. And when I return they appreciate me being back a lot, an additional plus in the weighing of it all. Of course, add travel expenses to workshop fees, and most likely hotel costs – uuugh.

Nevertheless, what I really like about real classes with the real people there, teacher plus other students, is the interaction. With all of them. I never got completely comfortable with doing an “exchange” about homework/questions mentioned in the e-mails in a facebook group, no matter how private it might have been. But doing this with people I don’t know at all – it just did not turn me on. There was one person in the class whom I actually know personally, but she was very quiet, perhaps because of the language, as she is German.

So I learned a lot about me and taking online classes. And am a bit annoyed at myself about this, because it feels as if I am robbing myself of chances that are out there, and could be used, if only I got my act together...?

Nevertheless – I learned a lot in class about abstraction, and how to work on it, and which procedures I like, which I should look into a bit more, which exercises I should do over and over and over...

Oh, and yes, I finished this week’s last assignment, one day earlier than the deadline. Because it is one of the pieces that will be ‘doubling’ in function, I won’t show it here in full, but you can get a view of the back:

I may tell a little more about things I did in class later on.