Visit to my Former Critique Group

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This summer I have the awesome opportunity to return to Santa Fe, N.M., where I lived for six years before I moved to Florida two years ago. While living in Santa Fe, I belonged to a couple of critique groups. They were helpful for a whole variety of reasons: Getting feedback on paintings, having social interaction with other artists, and bouncing career ideas off one another. Recently I joined one of the groups at their monthly meeting. There were some new faces in the group — Alison Keogh and Larry Fodor — and some familiar ones — Jamie Kirkland, Chris Richter and Kathleen McCloud.

The meeting was at Kathleen McCloud’s Studio where she was working on a fascinating project, Open Letters from the Hotel Central: a Correspondence Between Henry Miller, Emil Schnellock and Posterity. Kathleen inherited the remains of a correspondence that took place between Schnellock and Miller between 1930 and 1958. This project is her immersion with the materials and content of the collection she inherited. What started as a last dance (a fecund fest using Henry’s vernacular) with an inheritance before donating the collection to an institution has created a whole new archive.

The experience of sharing ideas and work with these individuals was incredibly inspiring. They are very talented and driven artists.