The Art Barn summer 1972

I don't have much formal art training, but I did go to art school in a concentrated summer session in 1972. This was at the Boston University Art School's summer program which took place in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the scenic Berkshire hills near the famous concert hall in Tanglewood. I had an almost unbearably cultural summer there while struggling with my own religious path undergoing pressure to "accept Jesus into my heart" from Fundamentalist classmates. I also made a lot of student art in oil paint and watercolor. 

This piece was done in sepia pen work. In those days I had a pen called the Pelikan Graphos. This was a combination of a flexible point metal dip pen and an ink reservoir in the handle. You could use real sepia India ink. I did this picture and many others with the Graphos. But the pen had a lot of design flaws. The pen was constantly leaking as it didn't  have a sealed cartridge. And the handle reacted to the solvents in the ink and got corroded. You couldn't take your Graphos traveling because the movement of a car or even an art bag caused it to drop ink. Pelikan discontinued the Graphos and it is only available in relic form on eBay for too much money. But boy, when that Graphos was working, I could draw some cool stuff including this pen-line-fest of a drawing of our communal art studio. You can see the easels and the paint tubes and the wooden structure of the "art barn." I was always afraid that this rather shaky shed was going to either burn down from all the flammable art materials and a lightning strike, or else it would just collapse on its own. Boston University dropped its summer art school sessions some years after I was there, and the art barn disappeared along with the Pelikan Graphos. As for Jesus and my heart, that went a very different way and I don't want to talk about Jesus on this By-product blog.

"Art Barn" is sepia India ink, Pelikan Graphos pen on sketchbook page, 5 1/2" x 11", August 1972. Click on the image to see the mad pen line work. 

I'm off to DarkoverCon this weekend, so no By-Product till I return on Monday December 2.