Simon Kogan Printmaking Workshop

I'm not gonna lie: I struggled at this 3-day workshop, held at the Scottsdale Artists School. I had envisioned blissfully chiseling tiny lines onto metal plates, working in black and white, learning the rules of classical composition from a Russian master artist... Instead, all we were to do was "play" with acrylics painted onto plexi-glass plates and run them onto paper with a press. For three days. The instructor wanted us to just respond to the paint on the glass. No plans, no design, just give up control. Give up control?! Me?? As soon as I had something down and started getting any idea of doing one thing or another with it, Simon would bark at me from across the room, "STOP! Print it!!"

By the end of the third day, I got into a more creative groove and found myself enjoying creating more abstract pieces in 5 minutes, even landscapes (which I do not really care for, normally). The above piece is one of my favorites, and it was one of the last ones I ran. Here are some other landscape pieces.

Here is a set using the assistant Sarah's copper plate doodle as inspiration. Same plate, different paint runs, with the 2nd one worked on later from home:

Here are some other pieces I ended up with that I liked. Again, all of these were done very fast, about 5 or 10 minutes max to keep the paint wet on the plate.