Adults say the stupidest things.

Janet came up with this idea some time ago, and I'll be stealing it for this post. You simply take a stupid question that a tourist or other visitor to the studio asks, and examine it critically.

This week's installment comes to us from a visitor that had come by with a group collecting information for the government that will be used to better exhibit this region in tourism material. The speaker was to represent an uninformed tourist and help the facilitator gain insight into what the average Joe needs to know about our space and this one didn't disappoint with the newly "most mocked" querry..."did you learn this skill from your mother?"

Now this might be a reasonable question for knitting, quilting, or say...mat hooking. Shit, it might even be reasonable to some folks out there that grew up in traditional printshops, if those people weren't deformed freaks that lived to the ripe old age of twelve as a result of hanging out with those nasty chemicals during those good developmental years. Now, I have tried to gain some good info on boatbuilding from my elders, and as traditional skills go the question could be applied to almost anything from baking a cake to good oral sex...just testing to see if you were still with me. But, the point is this isn't really one of those traditional skills for outport Newfoundland, and many of the locals still have no idea what it is we do in the studio. What this means is that what was a stupid question at the time of it's asking turned out to be an eye-opener for those of us that assume people know the difference, and the asker was in fact the best equipped person among the group for having the guts to voice everything and anything that came into his mind. Now if we could infuse that enthusiasm into many of the locals, and more of the visitors to the studio, it can only be a good thing for all printmakers everywhere.

I wasn't sure where this post was going when I started and I'm still not sure it actually went anywhere but it killed a little time and did seem to come across as sharing some little insight. I can't promise they'll all be like this but I'll take another Crack At It in the future.

Photo Credits: Janet Davis
Photo Captions: Top: Duke placing dampened papers on inked lino-plates. Bottom: Hard to Port! Duke pulls the press bed through, printing cards, mini-prints, and bookmarks for Norton's Cove Studio.