Text and drawings by Amy Forsyth, 2019 Sketch Artist
This week, our scholar, John-Duane Kingsley, joined us. His arrival gave us the opportunity to pause and assess what we’ve been doing over the past few weeks and adjust our course for the last three weeks. John chatted with us informally, at first, to get a sense of who we are and what informs our work, and then he came up with a series of thoughtful and informed questions for us to answer on the record. At the end of his visit, on Saturday, we hosted an open studio session, where people could come and see what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, listen to us talk about our research, have lunch, and finally, do demos, where we each chose a favorite tool and demonstrated it or spoke about it. After a nap, we all went out for Ethiopian food and a couple of drinks before sending John off to the airport. Here he is, with his computer in the bench room…
This past week, our student resident, Jacob, was working on making molds for casting concrete. When I stopped in to sketch him, he was working on casting some long extruded rectangular bars.
Ellie has been working on many things, one of which is a series of chains, which she’s making in a variety of ways, to make as many as possible. Here’s a sketch of her trimming edges with her great grandfather’s chisel.
Joshua continues to make his sculpture a day series. I’m trying to keep up with them and catalog all of them. Here’s the next installment. His sketches of them are really beautiful, I’ll make a point to include some of the other residents’ sketches next time. Heide also draws beautifully, as does Hartmut.
Ellie was hand planing some legs for a bench at the bench next to Josh, so I managed to catch them in action in the same drawing.
I’ve neglected to draw Heide this week, although she’s been working away on her beautiful series of cabinets with door variations. I’ll make a point to spend some extra time with her this next week.
Hartmut has taken one of Phil Brown’s bowl blanks that his wife Barbara encouraged us to transform, and look what he’s made with it! 
It sounds good, too! He spent a lot of time tweaking it to get a good sound, turning different mouthpieces with different size openings. We tested it today, and it prefers C and F in two octaves.
As for me, in addition to my documentation of our activities, I’ve also started a series of long horizontal drawings that I’ve been calling my “Train drawings,” although I think some will be pedestrian based instead of trying to capture the higher speed of a train. I’m interested in how we perceive our surroundings as we move though space, and I’m investigating ways to represent motion, the things we see clearly and the things that just become impressions of color or shape. Here are the first two. I’m making frames for ten of these, so we’ll see where they go, next. I have two more underway that aren’t ready to be photographed, just yet.
I think at some point these might become three dimensional, but for now, I’m just drawing and building frames.
I didn’t have time to draw during the open studio, but we had a(nother!) major shop clean up and welcomed visitors to come talk with us about our work. Everyone seemed to enjoy the visit, and it gave us a chance to take a breath and see all we’ve accomplished in our weeks here. I’m impressed at the sheer quantity and quality of the work, everyone is so productive! We’ll see what emerges next week. And we’ll miss our resident scholar, John, who has returned to Detroit.
Let’s see if I can leave you with a video clip of Hartmut playing his horn.