What’s a “Gallinero?”

What’s a “gallinero” and why should you want to stay there?

Anglo-Spanish Printmaker Launches Learning Videos

Granada-based master printmaker, Maureen Booth of Pomegranate Editions, announces her new Printmaking Master Classes series of printmaking learning videos, now available for download.

Maureen Booth in her studio for the Printmaking Master Classes videos shoot.

Small World, Milanese Connection, First Writer

Our old friend, Barbara Mason (from the Atelier Meridian in Portland, Oregon), was kind enough last summer to recommend my etching workshop to a friend called Mary Marjerrison. Mary showed up a couple of weeks ago with her friend, the author, Nancy Tomasetti, the Gallinero’s first writer. Did they come from Oregon? No, they came from Milan, Italy, where they both live. It’s a small world. Hence the silly title of this post.

Mary, who works in administration at an international school in Milan was able to rob a week for printmaking thanks to the very civilized Italian tradition of the “Settimana bianca,” a week off school in March. Perhaps it’s because she was previously an art teacher, or because of her high energy level (How many grandmothers do you know who run marathons?), but Mary got straight down to work, preparing her solar-print acetates in the Gallinero in the evenings and showing up in the studio each morning prepared to burn the images onto plates.

A Surprise Visitor from London’s Art Workers Guild

The phone rang the other morning and it was Monica Grose-Hodge from the Art Workers Guild in London.  She wasn’t in London, though; she was here in Granada doing three days of interviews with local artists and craftspeople. She found me through my Granada Studio Visits display at her hotel, and wanted to know if she could come out for a visit and an interview.  Yes, of course.

A Print Workshop Central Interviews Sampler

It’s about Interesting People Doing
Interesting Things in Interesting Places

The Print Workshop Central work plan calls for an interview with a representative–usually but not necessarily the studio director–with every studio we put on the PWC site. We knew that this would mean extra work both for us and for the participants, but we thought the interviews might provide a means of seeing printers and print workshops from an inside angle. In the beginning we had no idea how rich and varied these interviews would turn out to be, but we have been delighted to discover a wealth of curious anecdotes, true confessions and delightful surprises from professional printmakers all the way from the tundra of Newfoundland on the North Atlantic Coast of Canada to the semi-tropical balm of New Zealand’s North Island.