I just finished this scratchboard and gouache piece, “About to Bloom,” for the art auction to benefit Haskell Indian Nations University. The auction is Saturday, May 3, at 200 McDonald Dr., Lawrence, Kansas. The silent auction starts at 5:30pm and the live starts at 8pm, with performances in between. All are welcome to look at the art and bid if you like!
A Few Recent Drawings
Here are a few drawings that I’ve made over that last couple of years — enjoy!
Click on each to enlarge.
Hold On, 2024, 11″ x 14″, Pencil
The Sky is Falling, 2024, 14″ x 18″, pencil/colored pencil
Blue Butterflies, 2024, 11″ x 14″, Pencil/colored pencil
Rainy Mood, 2024, 8″ x 8″, Pencil/colored pencil
Light, 2020, 22″ x 30″, Pencil and gouache
Take a class: “Imaginative Drawing” at the Lawrence Arts Center
Imaginative Drawing is a beginning-level drawing class. It is one of my favorite classes to teach, and I’ll teach it again this spring at the Lawrence Arts Center. This class begins on Tuesday, January 14, 2025, and meets each Tuesday evening for eight weeks, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm.
The class is based on drawing prompts and exercises that we do together each week in our own sketchbook-journals. By the end of the eight-week session, we’ll use what we’ve learned to begin creating a drawing-related work of art in any medium we choose, as a finished piece.
For the first few weeks of class, we’ll explore drawing as making expressive marks on a page using all kinds of pens, pencils, and other mark-makers. We’ll make comic-style “timed” drawings as a way to doodle, and we’ll also doodle by building up a series of spontaneous lines that eventually turn into pictures and patterns. We’ll “noodle” our doodles, using a controlled hand to create a finished look by adding color, texture, and shading. We’ll make drawings that are based on observation, drawing the objects and people that we see, as we see them. We’ll consider how observational-drawing informs imaginative-drawing, and vice-versa.
Sometimes we’ll draw at drawing “stations” where we choose from a menu of exercise options, staying for as little or as long as we want to at a station. These sorts of exercises will focus on stretching, distorting, or abstracting images that we’ll draw from observation. On a different station-day we’ll explore the use of “randomness” as the basis for making something new: random squiggles on a page, random cracks in the sidewalk, or random shapes of clouds can provide the building blocks for making faces, creatures, or monsters. Each week we learn something new about the creative process. Along the way we’ll ask the question, Where do creative ideas come from? We’ll engage exercises that seem to get to the heart of creativity, bringing disparate ideas together in ways that are new. We’ll also learn about how to keep a sketchbook-journal, using artist Corita Kent’s focus on the journal as a “sense diary,” and cartoonist Lynda Barry’s “daily diary” formats to bring words and images together. Towards the end of the eight-week session, we’ll discuss composition, that is, how to arrange the elements in our drawings with attention to the drawing as a whole. We’ll then imagine a drawing that we would like to make, plan it, and make it.
A writer-friend who took Imaginative Drawing several years ago recently said about this class on Facebook: “Take this class! About two hours ago, I pulled out my sketchbook from the class. It is part brain health, part creativity, part stress relief.” And I would contend that the class is also a way for students to build confidence in their drawing abilities and to learn imaginative drawing skills to be used in art forms as different as comics and quilting.
I strive to create a warm atmosphere where students will feel encouraged and comfortable drawing in ways that are new. While I encourage students to share their work with others in class, because there is so much to learn from each other’s experiments, I also make it clear that no one is ever required to share; “passing” is always an option. And homework is optional, too.
Register now for the Spring session, beginning the third week of March. Senior discounts and financial aid are available. Register either on-line or at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire St., Lawrence, KS, phone 785.843.2787. To register for “Imaginative Drawing” on-line, go here.
Heat Wave
June Final Friday at Art Emergency, Lawrence, KS

Art in online exhibit, “Anger Into Art”
In light of the overturning of Roe, Kansas City-based artist David Titterington curated an online exhibit called, Anger Into Art. I have a couple of drawings in the show, including this cover image. (Click link to see the show.)
New Drawing at the Lawrence Art Guild’s All-Member’s Show
I have a new drawing (and a new collage) in the Lawrence Art Guild’s All-Members show July 15 through September 30, 2022, at Landmark National Bank (4621 W. 6th St., Lawrence, KS). All are invited to the opening reception on Friday, July 15, 5:30-7:30 pm.
“These Days”
2022
Pencil and gouache on paper
Chickadee and Berries
I’m excited to share my new piece, “Chickadee and Berries,” at the Lawrence Art Guild’s All Members’ Show that opens with a Final Friday reception On November 26, 5 – 9pm, at the Cider Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas. The exhibit runs through January 21, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 1 – 5pm.
Exhibit and Reception at Lumberyard Gallery, Baldwin City, Kansas

Art for “Just Imagine” exhibit

I made this piece for the recent online exhibit, Just Imagine, that Cooperation Humboldt’s Arts and Cultural team (based in California) debuted during the Arts Dismantling Capitalism Symposium, “to bring together our local community and beyond to collectively create a more just, regenerative economy and society.” Â