fall rewind

 Maybe it's age, maybe it's the crazy tech-world we live in, but I feel like time is moving very quickly and I've had so many experiences since August that I have several moments each week when someone will mention an event and I'll think, "Dude, I forgot that even happened".  

Since this blog started as my electronic sketchbook, let's throw some images and moments in from the really fun Fall 2025 semester...

As best I can remember, this is how it started.  A couple of my current students and a former student came to see my exhibit at Public Works Art Center.  The coolest thing about this image for me is that I taught Rumminger and Rumminger taught Cathryn.  (I also taught Emily (not pictured) and Emily taught Elena.)  Anyway, it was a fun field trip with lots of laughter.

Cathryn and Elena had a couple of kids in August.  Congrats to those two and to Jenna, the Godparent.

I love teaching so much and I really love it when the Universe gives me great students.  This semester I loved every single one of them and their cool personalities made the Sculpture Studio a great place to be.  I also LOVE getting to teach students to use power tools and seeing how badass it makes them feel.

Twinning with Luke.  I've really enjoyed watching Luke change into a completely different student over the last year.  

I got to dress up with the girl gang for an early Halloween party.  We were people from the Lorax movie.

And I didn't have to wear a dress or wig this year for the actual Halloween party.

Slogging is back as a regular, weekly event thanks to these people.  Even Blue joined us a couple of times.  (I like that Blue goes to school here, but don't tell him.  I don't want to scare him off.)

I traveled so much this semester that the dogs start getting anxious every time they see a duffle bag.  It was all good travel, though and I got to see people like Tom and Kathe Stanley, Jana and Dan Riley, Katherine, Logan, Kevin Jones, Kevin Morrissey, Devann, Jay, and so many other heroes and aspirational friends along the way.  That's Katherine and Logan at the end of the Public Works exhibit.

I definitely don't want to forget the time we went slogging and found a 2x4 and took it back to the Studio.  Nevaeh would later use that board to create the frame for her door painting.  

Each week, these Ninjas of Kindness gathered in the plaza to make people smile.

It's one of my favorite things.  I love them.

Molly came to campus!  I loved seeing her artwork and getting to hear about her creative process.  She's so cool.

I think I only managed to do 3 episodes of Coffee With McAbee this semester.  Maybe I can fit more in during the spring.  The Jenna episode was great.

I got to teach a whole new batch of people to weld.  It was amazing.  I love it so much.  

We had one open Saturday to do the Art Hike and we made it work.  It was a great day with great people.  So much fun and fresh air.

Dan was kind enough to invite me back to be a guest artist at the Blackwater Boogie.  I always feel like a VIP in and around Summerville because of Jana and Dan.  The Boogie gives me a badge and wrist band that actually says "VIP".  So much love here.

This is Mir.  Actually, Mirte Van Roosebeke but for the life of me, I can't pronounce it without making Mir laugh at me.  Mir introduced me and the girl gang to field hockey.  It's not easy to learn from the sidelines, but we're getting the hang of it.  We enjoyed going to several games this season and watching Mir hurt people.  This pic is from the Championship game where they came in 2nd.  Hope Christmas is good in Belgium, Mir!

I'm so honored to know so many cool people.  I don't know how I got invited to Mrs. Emmette's 70th birthday party, but it was one of the highlights of my year.  What a sweet and kind lady.  What a treasure to have her at Lander.

I mentioned Tom earlier and I just mentioned how it's an honor to know so many cool people.  I don't know how I won the lottery to get to know Tom and Kathe but dang, I consider myself truly blessed.  Tom is a legend and he's so supportive of me and so many other artists.  He gives all the time and I love him so much.  It was a ridiculous honor to be featured with him at the Greenville County Museum of Art's "At This Moment" exhibit and book project.  

I got to serve the annual Charlie Brown Thanksgiving feast to my students again this year.  This is fast becoming one of my favorite traditions.  

Ali and Emily at the SCAEA conference.  They're both art teachers now and I remember back a million years ago when they were my students roasting me with a poster for my 40th birthday.  I still have the poster on my office wall.

The puppet parade was a cool showcase for how awesome my Sculpture 1 students were this semester.  I was so proud of what they created and shared with the campus.

Keith Haring may be my favorite artist of all time.  I got to see an exhibit of his work recently at the Columbia Museum of Art and it was inspiring and wonderful and great.  (A weird side note: The CMA posted a black and white photo of Haring drawing on a wall before the exhibit opened and several friends sent me messages saying they did a double take when they saw it because they thought it was a photo of me.  It also fooled me briefly.)

The Elena project will definitely be one I remember for many years.  There's a whole post about this if you scroll down.  I was so impressed with how she rose to the ridiculous challenge.  I'm thrilled to say we were accepted into the juried exhibit!

As a bald man, I believe hair is magical.  I love a good braid, some twists, a bus-down (Taylor, did I spell that correctly?), highlights, waves and the way hair frames a face.  I also have very strong opinions about bangs.  Somehow all that has translated into me having a collection of student hair I've cut in the studio.  Hit me up if you'd like to donate.

This one is very recent but a great memory already.  I spent the day with upper level students at Fort Dorchester High School and got to teach them to use the jigsaw!  Based on the Elena project, we cut out figures and began drawing on them for a school mural.  Such a fun day with amazing students.

Another recent but important event for the semester.  I got invited to create artwork at Beeple Studios during a live event last weekend.  I was a team leader and I got to select my pod of artists, Devann, Maddie and Katherine.  (I also had Creighton and Katelynn but they ended up having other commitments and had to skip)  Together with all the other artists, we helped raise almost $30,000 for the upcoming Public Works Art Center expansion project.  You can help by going to their website and making a donation!

And this was just two days ago, but Sunday ended up being so beautiful when I went out to run that I decided to delay my departure and go to the Charleston waterfront to enjoy one last summer day before the harsh winter set in.  Literally, the temperature dropped 30 degrees during my 3 hour drive home and it was something like 15 degrees the next morning.  But, before that, I enjoyed a beautiful morning in Charleston with blue skies, perfect light and 71 degrees.  

You may have come here because you were interested or maybe you wondered if your name would be mentioned.  As I said, I have the honor of knowing so many miraculous humans and while that's great, it makes it unrealistic to mention every single person who positively impacted my life this semester.  There were so many!  My running friends on IG who I know better than most people but have never met in person deserve a mention.  People who have said nice things about my artwork deserve a mention.  All my current and former students deserve a mention.  Oh and the dogs.  There was an image that wouldn't load and it was of Walter, the menace.  He and Timmy have brought smiles and comfort in spite of their minor irritations and major vet bills.  But they can't read blogs, so back to you, kind human, reading this.  I am also grateful for you and your interest in my weird, ridiculous life.  

a chaotic year

Hey y'all, check on your friends in academia.  They're probably not OK.  

This academic year has been so chaotic that when it finally ended (or at least, we had graduation) I felt weirdly unresolved.  Part of that is that I'm still having to do school stuff and even drive there several days this week, but it's also because it's just been impossible to process all the weirdness in real time.  

I process most of my days on the commute.  Sometimes through music or a good podcast, but sometimes I talk to myself out loud.  When there's more to digest, I take care of that in my sketchbook by logging some events and documenting the happenings for future reference.  This year has been a Lego type year, though.  Each strange and unprecedented event was followed by another and they just kept stacking up to build this very tall, very unstable tower.  I feel as if I've just been dodging missiles one right after another with no time to really reflect on the events.  Since that's one of the goals of this blog, I figured I owed it to myself to sit down and really recall and reflect a little.  One way I do that is through images.  I open my camera roll and thumb my way back to August before slowly scrolling through the academic year.

Dude.  It's crazy how much has happened.  So much has changed.  And then I get distracted by all the funny photos and crazy events that are documented on my phone and I forget that I started out trying to process the weirdness.  

Like, remember when I had to do surgery on one of the welding machines and we treated it like a real operating room situation?  Remember when Elena hated me on the first day of classes and then we became school besties?  Remember when MG and I had a snowball fight while delivering sculptures for an exhibit?  So many good memories.  See how easily I get distracted?

Anyway, we'll look at some photos together.  Let's start with a few things that just happened to me...

I got to be a part of Wim Roefs' memorial exhibit.  I was proud to be grouped with so many cool artists.  

I won an award from the SCAEA.  It was a big surprise and I was really honored.

I had a solo exhibit of my drawings and that was pretty cool.

I (we) got to visit Emily at her school and hang out with her.

Oh dude, there was a whole hurricane situation with school canceled for a week.  We lost power, had a bunch of trees down and I did a jigsaw puzzle obsessively on the dining room table.

Freakin' Walter joined the family.  What a chaotic mess he is.

Violet ran in state XC and did great.  She had a great year despite constant hip pain.  Today she had an MRI for that hip pain.  Still not out of the woods on that.

Blue went off to his first year of college.  The cool thing is that the college is the same one I work for.  It's been really cool seeing him several times each week.  

Then we have all the student related things in my camera roll.  This was really the thing that saved the academic year - the students.  There's some sort of tide that rolls in and out with student groups and this year, the tide was high.  So many great students who provided me with so much entertainment and joy.

This was our Charlie Brown Thanksgiving feast.  We had toast and popcorn, just like in the Thanksgiving special.  

Shine tormented me with cats and weird music all semester.

Babushkas!

Halloween costume fun with Payton and Mac!

Art hiking with the cool kids.

Ali got her masters degree.  I'm so proud of her.  I love her.

I took the cool kids to a jewelry workshop with Katie Poterala and they made very cool things.

Freakin' MG.  What a blessing to us all.  I got to spend 4 years with her talking about all the controversial religious things and helping her really understand what she needed to be making and why.  It was all so much fun.  Well, except the fact that she holds the record for the number of urgent care visits.  Everything else was great.

MG also made me another award and I was just as honored to receive it as I was the other one.  This seriously meant so much to me and I haven't fully processed that yet.  

The spring Art Gala was so much fun.  This group is the coolest.

We had a whole year of ninjas of kindness missions.  We made people uncomfortable and made them feel loved.  A win.

I got to teach all these people to weld and this was just one of three classes of Sculpture 1 this year.  I LOVE seeing people realize sculpture is amazing.  This was a fun group.

I'm not even sure what this was but it made me super happy to find it on my phone.  I think it was a film camera shot on exam day?  

So yeah, some really negative and irritating things happened throughout the year.  It was annoying and unnerving on many occasions but these students and their antics made all of it worth it for me.  If you want to know about the bad things, maybe take me out for a drink and I'll tell you.  The tea is hot and I'm all about spilling it in the right environment.  But today, let's just think about these happy times instead of dealing with the negativity.