Remembering those old time summer yummies - Ambrosia

A friend was just at a party where one of the things they served was ambrosia and we were talking about how rare it is to see ambrosia anymore. We both agreed about how delicious it was and how much we enjoyed tt!

I was reminded of green vegetable jello mold! When I worked as a volunteer in the historical society world, at our annual lunches, those green jello vegetable molds always showed up and I LOVED them! There were the clear grren jello molds with the grated carrot stripps suspended in them and the molds with mayo mixed in and a more pudding quality to them - all absolutely delectable especially in the hot summer time.

They are not easy to make; I know because i have tried. Even jello is a challenge. Those foods reminded me of Murphy's Book Loft which used to be in Mullica Hill, NJ. It was a huge old barn behnd a victorian farm house and it housed thousands of second hand books in its two floors with nooks and crannies with chairs and foot stools so you could browse in comfort for as long as you liked. The smell of those old books ----- They also had a magazine room - a large area lined with walls of date labeled brown boxes contining magazines from the last 100 years. I liked to buy magazines from my birth year 1945, and also sometimes from the 60's because the advertising was so glorious - especially holiday issues. I have no idea where those magazines are now - maybe lost in the attic. But those magazines had the recipes for these lost food treasures.

The more I though about it the more I remembered. The advertisements had a beautiful brunette housewife in a dress and apron in her itchen of gleaming white appliances and the ingredients for making these splendid treats spread out on the table. To make ambrosia you needed Delmonte canned diced fruit. Delmonte was the sponsor of the ad. To make jello mold, of course, you needed jello and that was the sponsor. Then I remembered the Campbell soup recipes - the cream of mushroom which mixed with canned tuna made a delicious casserole, especially if topped with canned roasted onion strips or potato sticks.

Although I ate all of the above dishes, I can't say I ever made any. I really never became that aproned queen of the kitchen, I was, instead, a wage slave and my cooking amounted to putting things in the microwave from the frozen food section of the Supermarket. Was it healthier? I don't know - canned or frozen? Your guess is as good as mine.

As of now, my food choices are very simple and very spare. I eat Siggi's yoghurt with walnuts, bare naked cereal with almond milk, and cheese and pickles with Daves' multi seed bread. Also I have a lot of beverages like lots of pulp orange juice, low sodium V8 juice, apple cider and coconut water. Also I drink a 30 g protein drink (Premier Protein) every day, sometimes two.

I don't eat enough vegetables but I do get Chinese vegetarian delight sometimes on brown rice and their veg soup, and I often buy Pat's Select's creamy potato soup to which I add peas and corn. That's it. I guess I eat like an astronaut without the proper calculations for nutrition, but I am 80 years old and predominantly vegetarian since 1970, so I guess I am ok nutrition wise. I could do better but the truth is I don't care that much about food. I jsut want to be fed.

"This is what we wanted, isn't it? A fresh start in a new place?"

When I was leaving Maritsa's Cafe' in Maple Shade today, a man said something about the awful heat and I replied "Thank God for air conditioning." And he replied "Carrier is my big hero. Imagine living in the old West before air conditioning or even fans?" And I added, "before dentists or doctors, going to the barber shop for a wound treatment or bone setting." We both chuckled and said a little gratitude for modern times.

In another conversation with a friend, we were talking about favorites and I was thinking how many of my favorite books were connected to an event such as Pioneer Women which I read in airports when I was in my 30's and flying out west to meet up with my fiance' Rob Sweetgall on his around the perimeter of the USA ultramarathon venture (I blogged about him when I foud out he had died). I was in an air conditioned airport reading about women going mad from the sound of the wind howling on the prairie when they were isolated from all other human beings and their husbands were off on ling trips to acquire lumber or some other resource. It reminded me of a short story that I think was by Hart Crne about a man going crazy trying to fend off the wolves that were after his wife's dead body in the winter in their isolated cabin in the forest. The wolves could smell her corpse.

Having given birth, a terrifying and hideously painful experience, I always think about women in the years before anaesthesia or in places where there were no other women to help or midwives. Another great book The Midwife's Tale. My final comment to the lunch man was "Best to leave the passt in the past."

The comedian Kathleen Madigan has a funny bit about her roots in the "middle" - St. Louis, Missouri, where her pioneer family decided enough was enough and just stopped there. She fantasizes being stuck in a covered wagon with her adventure seeking husband and fantasizing where to shoot him and leave his body before she turns the horses aroound and goes back home. "I don't know" she'd say, "It was a tragic accident."

Something I never thought about that I learned from Pioneer Women was that most of those westward covered wagon women were educated and comfortable in small towns with family and churches and conveniences like stores and neighbors nearby, and midwives! Their husbands craved the "Free Land"(that wasn't free, only stolen from the Indigenous people - a concept they were incapable of holding) and the adventure of someplace new and the women were kind of dragged along in their husband's dream. Living in a soddy.

I have a doll from my early 50'6 childhood, an Effanbee doll given to me for Christmas one year by my beloved Godfather Neal Schmidt. She is a walker. Along the years, she lost her hair and her original clothes. At some point I bought her a wig. At another point after I read a new biography, Prairie Fire, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I bought my doll a Little House on the Prairie Outfit and a bonnet to dress her up for Christmas that year.

little House on the Prairie has been reprised in tv series and I am watching it on Netflix (I think - could be amazon - I will correct this when I turn it on again). That's what reminded me of the biography and the set of books I read after I read the biography. I hadn't read the Little House on the Prairie books before but I had bought them for my daughter and I believe she did.

Doing what your husband wants when you don't want to reminded me of traveling in Europe, in North Africa; in Morocco, Mike met a young Moroccan man who wanted to show us the 'real' Morocco when we were in Casablanca. he took us to a coffee bar, off the beaten track, entirely composed of male patrons. Mike was glad to go on this adventure; I was horribly anxious, first that he would lead us somewhere we'd get lost and rob us, or that he would drug us at the cafe' and God knows what would happen to me. Neither of them considered my discomfort as the only white woman, 5 feet 8, blonde at the time with Western clothing in an all male establishment in a Muslim country. Fortunately, everyone was polite, perhaps stunned, and all was well. Still......

The book I read on my way to Europe to meet up with my drafted and deployed soldier husband was "Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle." While living in Germany, I read the only book I could get in English translation (it was 1969) Gunter Grqss's The Tin Drum. I didn't understand the political implications at all but I was captivated by it and the main character never understood anything that was happening to him either.

It is hard to list favorites because they are, of course, so tied up with time and place and experience. That was the theme of one of my daughter's favorite films, High Fidelity, John Cusack, main character is organizeing his record colletion by experience, specifically heartbreaking losses in romance. Food for thought - Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Premonitions and strange encounters

For the past couple of years, I have had such strong thoughts and memories of people from the past that I have searched for information on them via google. One was my cousin Susan Atmore. She was 3 years older than I and we grew up near one another in South Philadelphia. She lived on 10th Street and I lived on Warnock Street. She and her older sister, Lavinia, seemed so exciting to my childish girl mind, so sophisticated! Her sister, Lavinia was 6 years older than I was. I remember them in high school and the high school girl friends coming over, the make-up and the clothes and the boys they were dating. They seemed so sophisticated and I was thrilled and grateful to be a little drab mouse on the periphery of their colorful and grown-up world.

We had lost touch years ago, despite my best efforts with Christmas cards and so on. Susan and her sister moved a lot and eventually they didn't send their forwarding addresses and I lost touch. When I began to think of her and remember things so intenseley, I looked her up and found she had died and was buried in Gloria Dei, Old Swedes church Philadelphia, our family church in my childhood.

Eventually I tracked down her sister, also dead, in Texas. Same thing for a man I was once engaged to, and a couple of boyfriends. Even a couple of male friends from the 1980's cropped up in my memory and I searched them out to find they had died as well. That isn't too surprising since I am 80 and to my shock I often remember people and think, "Holy Cow, they are probably dead too as they were alder than I am!"

A male friend of mine from the early 1980's, Dave Brier, was kind enough to build a tree house for my daughter when she was about 4 in our back yard in the house I had just bought in Mt. Ephraim. He had also given me a forsythia he had removed from a yard where he did landscaping work. That forsythia that he saved and planted in my yard had 30 years of flourishing sunny life until about 2 or 3 years ago when it died.

DAve and I used to send one another Christmas cards and we seemed to run into one another on an almost annual basis. He frequented The Station Cafe', the train depot converted to coffee house and art gallery where I show work in the group exhibitions seeral times a year. We ran into one another in Knight's Park in Collingswood where I used to walk regularly with my dog and he bicycled regularly from his home in Haddon TWp.

Dave used to work as recreational director at the YMCA in Philadelphia and he worked a lot of races, so we knew one another from the Edward Payson Weston 6 Day Race that used to be held at Cooper River where I lived. My sister and I had worked a race with him at Byberry Institution in Pa. before it closed (he supplied timing equipment and banners and accessories to races).

I guess we lost touch, like so many other people, around the time of the Corona Epidemic. I still sent Christmas cards but he didn't send any back. I knew he had a housemate named Margaret. He invited me and a friend to his house once when he had received from an aunt a large reproduction of a painting of a famous race horse. Dave gambled on the horse races. His dining room table was literally covered by prescription medications and when I remarked on them he said they were Margaret's. I said, "Is Margaret your girlfriend?" And he said, "She thinks she is."

He was like that, kind of roguish and also cynical and leaned toward depression. He always used to say "I am an angry man. I have a lot of anger."

Still he had a boyish charm and a friendliness that was engaging. I had met a couple of his best friends too, Arnie, and Michael. There were a couple of other friends who called Dave on the phone regularly and Dave talked to them in a kind of therapeutic way according to DAve. He also had a son struggling with mental illness. Who at some point was in residence in a group home in Merchantville and dAve met his son, Chris, at the Station (in Merchantville) for coffee regularly.

Once when I had met Dave in the park, he told me he'd had a heart attack and had gotten by-pass surgery. He was doing pretty well though, as he had bicycled to the park. He was still smoking cigars though, and I mentioned that but he countered by saying he didn't smoke them so much as he chewed them.

I got to know a lot about DAve's life, his father, his brother, and his former wife, also his problems with alcoholism, which he had miraculously conquered and had been sober for decades. I admired that.

When he popped into my mind, I searched google for an obituary as he was 5 years older than I and had suffered heart attacks so I thought he might not have sent a Christmas card because he was dead. Nothing about him anywhere. I metioned this to my sister and she said, "Call his best friend, Michael." I hadn't thought of that so I looked up Michael Tearson.

Michael Tearson is a regionally famous dj, radio personality and also musician, singer, and performer. His e-mail was easy to locate and I wrote him. He responded very quickly and gave me Dave's phone number and said he would call Dave and tell him I was going to call so that he would answer the phone and not hang up on me. He warned me that Dave was declining and didn't answer the phone or go out places.

When I phoned DAve, he answered in the creaky voice of an old rocking chair. Despite that, we had a fairly cheery conversation of about 15 minutes or more. We talked about all the marathon runners we had known from the 6 Day RAce, most of whom were dead, and he told me he stayed indoors on the sofa now with his cats watching horse racing on rv. He had lost touch with Arnie after Arnie married, but Michael Tearson phoned him every day.

Dave said sadly, "No one visits me or calls me or even sends me a birthday card." I said, "I will send you a birthday card, when is your birthday?" And he answered, "I don't know, but I know I am 85." I chided him, "Come on Dave, you know when your birthday is!" And he answered "Novemer? maybe?"

It was heartbreaking to think of him curled up in his sofa cocoon all day wqatching tv and not getting out or seeing people. I told him that when the weather got better I would come over if he would make the effort to come outside and sit on lawn chairs for awhile. He said he didn't know if he could do that."

Afterwards, I fell into my habit of trying to fix things and I thought, maybe if he had a ramp down the front steps or the back steps to the yard, and a wheelchair, he could get out a little. He was pretty adamant that he didn't want to get out. So maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.

Meanwhile, Michael Tearson, his best and most loyal friend still phones him every day. And Michael Tearson still has a flourishing career dj'ing all the summer concerts for the Camden County Summer Concert series and he is about to be honored for his extraordinary career in the next two weeks at a local concert venue. I need to get the date and put it on my calendar.

I sent them both some of my postcards made from my paintings and I will periodically contact each of them. Michael has had his own life altering tragedy in the death of his wife, and his soul mate, from cancer, just a few years into their happy marriage. But he is not crushed into despair. He still participates in the carnival of life.

Happy trails - and don't get sucked into the sofa!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A Glorious afternoon with Art Journalist Tamarie Bitgood

Today, Wednesday July 8, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with two delightful artists, Victoria Meade, a watercolorist and Tamarie Bitgood an immensely gifted Art Journalist. Tammy shared her portfolio of art works and the cards she had made from them. This is the second time I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy's work; the first time was a year ago when we met at the Station, Eiland Arts in Merchantville, NJ. I had some work in the show and Tammy joined me there for lunch and to show me her Art Journal.

Tammy's work is hard for me to describe. It is abstract design work where she works from an impulse into a pattern. It is very precise and detailed, kind of Mandala-like in its hypnotic appeal.

I was so inspired by Tammy's work that I bought an Art Journal but my work turned out to be completely different from hers and very much like me - narrative, realistic, illustrtion-like. I tried her technique of free association, but I always veered into a story. We are what we are. Fish don't fly and birds don't swim. I do think there was a period, early in my art school experience where I was more drawn into a design format. I had a series of pages in an old sketch journal that were devoted to things in circles, like the Aztec Calendar, a half of an apple, the inside of a cataloupe, and so on. There was a time I was influenced by Celtic illuminated Manuscripts too. The knotted patterns fascinated me but I was not diligent enought to master even the simplest ones. Gave me a whole new respect for the monks in the scriptoria monasteries.

Victoria is a watercolorist who had work in the show up at SJAC last month, the members show. Like me, she is a member o SJAC (South Jersey Artists Collective) and last month was the members' show. This month is a whole new show, Foundlings, Chris Hillman. I will put a photo from the work here on a side panel.

What a gift I have been given to have a gallery and a group on the grounds of my Friends Meeting in Woodbury, 122 Broad Street. This allows me to view new art all the time and spend time with other artists! I am so lucky!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Kelce and Swift wedding - an option and on celebrity privacy

July 6th, while listening to rolling thunder outside! It sounds like heavily overloaded carts are rolling over a cobblestone road in the sky right now. Not much rain coming down, just noise!. My dog is under the piano. I was reading the e-mail news since we have not lost electricity here in Camden County, NJ. Something that has long bothered me, since the days of Princess Diana is the entitlement the press and fans seem to have to the privacy of performers or famous people. Fans have a right to see their favorite performers on the stage, but leave them alone in their homes, please! Why do fans and papparazi think they have the right to hound celebrities constantly throughut their lives, as though somehow they are owned by the media?

Princess Diana of course was the worst case in this situation. She was thoroughly persecuted by the papparazi and I think they should have been treated in a criminal way for hounding her. It goes without saying that a good part of the blame is the avid, even predatory invasive interest of a segment of the public that creates the financially driven predation on the lives of the famous. If people didn't avidly buy spy style magazines, even magazines like People, and if newspapers and magazines focused on the REAL news for awhile instead of pandering to gossip hunger, we would all be more educated and better.

I remember when rags like the National Enquirer were scorned and mocked. Intelligent people looked down on that monstrosity of ignorance and depravity - endless stories about women being sucked up into alien shps and probed and impregnated. I only know this because that disgusting front page used to be at eye leven on the check out aisle of the supermarket where we were trapped until we paid and bagged. Thank heavens it is gone, however the culture of it has flourished and taken the place of real news about important happenings.

Ignorance has been pandered to rather than people's interests having been elevated by education and the media, so now the standard of public information has declined into gossip and sports and repeated superficialities.

I think there should be laws protecting the privacy of people famous or not. Invasion of privacy is what it is called and how it should be criminalized just like slander and defamation. I don't know how to address the avid gossip mongering desperation of those who have nothing better to think about. I did my best as a public school teacher to open young minds and help them sample the vast and nourishing world of ideas, but now I am old and all I can do is observe the way the world is turning. I can tell you that high school was an uphill battle too - when the minds of the post industrial low socio demo culture in which I taught was captivated adn enslaved by drugs, alcohol and sex.

The ignorant have won, for awhile anyway, and their leader is in charge of the rest of us, at lease for the time being. Bad times come and they also go - all I can do now is wait - and listen to the summer thunder.

Happy Trails to you until we meet again!

wrightj34@yahoo.com

4th of July - a Music Post - Oh Susanna

Since the political climate is as hot and oppressive as the actual temperature, I am avoiding the 4th this year. But this week I have been into music again. When I read my e-mail this morning, I came across ths interesting piece about Stephen Foster. i knew him best for Beautiful Dreamer, which, by the way, as soon as I saw his name I began to sing. But after I read on, I realized half the songs in my beginner ukelele book and my beginner piano book were Stephen Foster's such as Oh Susanna, and Old Folks at Home! So I copied the article and I am pasting it here for you:

Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?

Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?

Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the interest nor aptitude for business or much else, but he managed to find a niche writing songs, often either for minstrel bands or to be sold as sheet music. “All he had was his ability to create poetry and melody and put them together,” Deane L. Root, a professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. By doing that, he created the model for the professional songwriters who have followed—Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville’s Music Row, and modern-day hitmakers such as Max Martin.

The guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster’s music since the early 1990s and even named a group “Beautiful Dreamers” after the Foster composition, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. “It’s just the perfect model for what a melody and the form of a song can be,” he told me. “There’s a million other composers, but just thinking of popular-song form, in a way this seems like ground zero for so much stuff that we have now.” Frisell has recorded “Hard Times” as both a rollicking swing tune and a wistful lament, which he said is a testament to the song’s craftsmanship. “The melody just gets so deep down in you. It’s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of the tree, and then you can start climbing around up there.”

Musical skill, then as now, was not enough to guarantee financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a major hit with “Oh! Susanna” in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to earn a consistent living, making $10 to $15 a song—$400 to $500 today. “He didn’t have an agent, he didn’t have a lawyer who could work this for him. He didn’t have somebody who knew the business on his behalf, writing up contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,” Root said. Foster died destitute in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in the bathroom of a hotel on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to legend, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.

Foster’s songs became ubiquitous—people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime—and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became best known only after his death, thanks to a fierce reputation-building effort by his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others formed ASCAP, now the leading performance-rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.

Speaking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he’d lain awake the night before we spoke, thinking about how difficult it was to discuss. The leading popular music of the era was minstrelsy, which, as the musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, “presented the version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.” White minstrel musicians would either commercialize Black culture (a pattern that persists in popular music) or else perform exaggerated stereotypes of it. Many of Foster’s songs were written for Christy’s Minstrels, a major minstrel troupe of the 1840s and 1850s that performed in blackface, and his lyrics traffic in slurs, pro-Confederate sentiments, and revisionism about the horrors of slavery, even though he’d witnessed it himself. (Foster’s personal politics are tough to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and he seems to have been most interested in getting a paycheck.)

“My Old Kentucky Home” is that commonwealth’s state song, and it’s a staple of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass praised the song for awakening abolitionist sentiments. Yet the words also include a slur that was sanitized in 1986—jarringly late. Some of the many Looney Tunes segments that feature his music were later withdrawn from circulation because of their offensive material. But the great Black bass-baritone and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” in its unexpurgated form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.

The musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American songs, told me that discussing Foster’s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. “I don’t know if he was any more racist than the average person” of his time, she said. “He was just trying to make a buck.” She finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than who he was as an individual.

For a May concert at Carnegie Hall, part of commemorations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, she closed a set with “Hard Times.” Giddens doesn’t perform Foster’s music much, looking to spotlight lesser-known work, but she decided it was the right piece for the moment. For me and for many others, it’s Foster’s finest work. The song is untainted by dialect, with a memorable tune and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a salve during recent hard times. Whatever the flaws of Foster and his music, Giddens said, “The man could write a tune.” When she and her backing group played “Hard Times,” it brought down the house, just as it has done for some 170 years now.

Related:

Stephen C. Foster and Negro minstrelsy (From 1867) Track of the year: “Hard Times Come Again No More” (From 2016)

Happy Trails to you until we meet again (written by Dale Evans - 1951) wrightj45@yahoo.com

Learn to Draw!

There are so many benefits to drawing that it could take a book to describe them all from health for your brain through this excercise to enhancing concenrtion, providing a fully engaging distraction to get your mind off other things. Also to appreciate life and the things you see, drawing is the way to improve perception. I have loved drawing since I was a samll child and indeed most small children enjoy drawing. Here is your chance to develop that new hobby, that new practice, that new entry into a world of beauty; that's why I wanted to put this e-mail notice in my blog which I had rceived minuters ago in my e-mail news feed. At present, I am gathering resources for my own next project - I am going to make two paintings for the next show at The Station, also in Merchanville. it is the re-purposed train station on Chestnut (the rails to trails railroad line). The theme is big bold flowers and I have photographed some hyacinths that caught my eye at Platt's Farm this morning. If you want additional inspiration or motivation get some coffee and a lunch or breakfast or a pastry at Eiland Arts (The Station0 and see what art may still be on display until the new show goes up.

Register for Summer Still Life

Register for Beauty of Summer

Drawing for Grown-Ups: How to Draw Fruit Summer Still Life

Thursday, July 9, 2026

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. | Adults

Merchantville Public Library

Drawing for Grown-Ups: Celebrate the beauty of summer

Merchantville PUBLIC LIBRARY

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville Public Library

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville, NJ 08109

Contact Number (856) 665-3128

fundamentals like line, value, form, composition, negative space, and color. Students are not required to have attended previous Drawing for Grown Ups courses. In this class, students will learn how to draw using form, color, and composition under the guidance of Jen Tracy, professional illustrator.

The goal of this workshop is to give adults the confidence they need to embrace drawing more often in their personal life. Daily drawing practices improve cognitive skills like memory, emotional regulation, and hand eye coordination. This class will focus on the basics of drawing so grown-ups can gain pride in their artistic skill. Students will make a drawing of fruit using the still life provided.

My note if you have ever wanted to learn how to draw - here is your chance! The same class is being held at Haddon Twp Library in the evening.

wrightk45@yahoo.com