So, since I've been blogging, I have thought about my hIgh school AP Studio Art teacher, Mrs. Judy Barton. Maybe it's because she was the last teacher I had in regard to any kind of formal art training, or maybe it's because I've just been feeling a bit sentimental lately, but either way, this has been the case.

I tried finding her via Facebook and the usual social media outlets, but I could not seem to connect with her. Therefore, I decided to write her a letter. I looked her up in the white pages and found that she's still living in the same house, in the same town where I lived during my high school years. And since online searches yielded data that she is a director of the Boulder City Art Guild, I assumed that this was all current. I also she had a show a few years ago, exhibiting watercolor landscapes of her travels around the western United States, so I assumed she was still working on her art.

I thought, that since I'm now pursuing my art full-time (aside from husband and fatherly duties) I would drop her a note to let her know how her former student was doing.

That was my letter! I also send her a disc with past work and flyers, etc. I am curious to see what se might think of what I'm doing. I wonder if she'll gently smile and shake her head like she used to do. Looking back, I think I was one of the few students who took the class seriously as most of the other teens treated it like a goof-off time, or were doing their homework for their next class.

It was a great concept for an Advanced Placement class: the first semester we had assignments and experimented with various types of media, the second semester, however, we would basically write an artist's statement about what we planned to do for a show at the end of the year, then we spent the whole time working on art for that show. Very free-form and exciting and unlike any class I have ever attended. That was the one place in school where I could just put my headphones on and listen to music while I did classwork. How cool was that?