Jerry Bedor Phillips

Nick Younglove, charcoal/graphite, 2009

I started going through what pictures of my student projects I had. Those of you  who know me, remember how devastated when I had lost my Bradley University USB drive President Glasser gave me as a gift. That little device had well over 100 images I had taken.   I thought my entire teaching career was lost.

Thanks to my somewhat not idiotic self, I discovered a good majority of those files in my external hard drive connected to my desktop.  I’m still looking for that usb drive as I believe it is floating around my apartment under a pile of junk.  I will find it sometime in the future.

Now that I have some proof that  I have been teaching courses, I decided to start a Student Work section of my website.   Work from my Beginning drawing students are up and I’m getting some student bookbinding projects ready to post soon.

Please take a look through as I’m very proud having taught these students when they were just mere freshmen and sophomores.  It’s also very surreal to realize that some of these students have graduated with their bachelor’s degree this past May and are on to bigger/better things.

Humbly,

Jerry

Location: Backspace Gallery, 606 Rear Main Street, Peoria, IL

Time frame:  4pm to about 930pm

I haven’t spent a lot of time working on some art in a while.  The last two weeks, I was lazily getting ready for the annual Moss Avenue Sale, here is Peoria.  It’s a rather large yard sale of types, where a good percentage of the city shows up to sale off items and/or come and buy such items.

Cassandra Lawlor (graduate student in Ceramics here at Bradley University) and I both signed up for a plot of land (someone’s yard) in which we put on display a selection of our work and anxiously waited to see if the public would be willing to purchase anything.  We did fairly well.  I sold about half the small handmade books I produced and a handful of prints and a gouache painting. I made a little over $350 profit that day. I’m not sure what Cassie pulled in, but she was selling regularly throughout the day.   I think we both agreed that we had a good day.

Days pass and I only go to Backspace to check on my ivy plant.  I decided this plant was a boy and I gave hime the name Samsonite.  There is no real reason behind this decision.  This morning I popped in to see if he needed watering and I was greeted with a surprise…

Samsonite has friends!

After work I managed to work on the goauche drawing a bit more clearing up some messy edges in the Jellyfish and solidifying some of the tendrils.

I made some progress to this guy.

Not as much progress as I was hoping for but I have a great reason why I was somewhat unproductive.

I present my distraction….

Meet Charles Barkley (get it?)…Charlie for those who know him.

Meet Charles Barkley. Charlie for short. He was my guest studio buddy after work today.

Charlie is a doberman puppy. He’s very quiet and somewhat timid, that is until he gets used to you.

Needless to say,  a good majority of my time in the studio today was spent exactly like the picture below.

*sings* In Your Eyes….

Great reason to put off working on art, right? Right? Don’t Judge Me!