This summer’s been a pretty good one, but school’s started and it’s time for show and tell!

In July we flew back to London to see our daughter graduate from Central St Martins with a degree in Fashion Journalism, while at the same time our son and his girlfriend were heading in the opposite direction to Denver, CO, to start new jobs. So proud of them all!

Thanks for the photo, Jo!

For the three weeks that I was in the U.K., London was in the middle of a heatwave. I’m well old enough to remember the heatwave of ’76, which is the summer everyone compares hot weather to, but this was far hotter in my mind. Most days were in the mid-80s with a few in the low 90s. And remember, buses, tubes, houses and flats aren’t air-conditioned… But it was a good trip, seeing lots of friends, lots of museums and galleries and having so much fun staying with our daughter and her boyfriend in their new flat.

There were several outstanding photography shows — Vanessa Winship and Dorothea Lange, both at The Barbican, Tacita Dean’s Landscape at the Royal Academy and The Shape of Light at Tate Modern. A small show of work by C.R.W. Nevinson, Prints of War and Peace, at The British Museum commemorates his gift of 25 prints to the museum in 1918. They span his time in the trenches of Flanders as a war artist during World War I, as well as prints of New York, Paris and London.

C.R.W. Nevinson — Looking Through Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1921, Drypoint

Ed Ruscha — Parking Lot series

Alison Rossiter — Gevaert Gevaluxe Velours

After three weeks of family, friends, art and walking, all sustained by copious amounts of flat whites, I returned to Minneapolis and went straight into teaching a week-long polymergravure workshop at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. And if that wasn’t enough, the following week I was teaching Kerik Kouklis the process. Kerik travelled to Minneapolis from California especially for a one-day, one-on-one workshop, at the end of which he had made 3 perfect plates and about a dozen prints!

If you’re interested in learning the process, sign up for my infrequent email newsletter for details of upcoming workshops.

© Kerik Kouklis