I wandered the grounds, heavy tracing paper in hand, and took charcoal rubbings of many of the surfaces on the grounds of the school, including “environmental art” pieces created by students in previous summers. Inside the box, red fabric and a pull tab housed the rubbings.

During the week, I made lots of prints using collagraph and chine collé techniques and carborundum printing. Essentially, you take a cardboard “plate” and paint on it in glue. Then you sprinkle the plate with carborundum, which sticks to the glue. You cover the plate with ink and use a piece of tarlatan cloth to wipe off all the ink except what hasn’t sunk into the texture of the carborundum, and pull a print. Then you can layer on areas of color to the print by collaging on colored paper, as in the work above. Again, I stuck to a single subject, in this case chairs, to focus on learning the techniques.

My secret? Pick my subject matter in advance of the workshop. Doing this allows me to focus on learning a new process or technique without agonizing over the content.

The images above are from a series of monotype and collagraphs I did during a summer workshop taught by Penny Barringer of the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. A coworker had been taking dance lessons with her husband, and the design studio where I worked at the time had a book of photographs of shoes, which had been the subject of a museum exhibit.

Voilà, shoes became my focus for the duration.

My mother and nearly all of her seven siblings suffered from premature cardiovascular disease and highly elevated cholesterol levels. My sister died of a heart attack at age 42.

This legacy has influenced me in a lot of ways. I strictly avoided taking up smoking. I regularly monitor my heart disease risk markers. And, sometimes, I fight a sense of impending doom.

One summer at the Penland School, I used the printmaking workshop to explore the idea of “broken hearts” in the medical sense. Here are some of the series.