The Kanuga experience

For the second time I spent a week in April at the beautiful Kanuga Watermedia Workshops in Hendersonville, NC, at the Kanuga Conference Center. Again, I traveled there with my close friend Danie Janov, a veteran of 20 or so years both attending and teaching at this wonderful event. This year, 240 attendees and instructors were in attendance from 31 states. Fully 91 of them came for their first time.

What is not to love about this week? The place is special. It is quietly remote yet close to the town. There is a beautiful lake often shrouded in early morning fog just begging to be photographed. Accommodations are

rustic in over three dozen old cabins with porches or modern in the newly renovated hotel of timber frame beams and stone walls. All the meals are excellent and served in a lovely dining room by smiling and friendly people. And the workshops--what you mostly go here for--are incredible. A dozen professional artists come every year to share and demonstrate and inspire. You make new friends, reunite with old ones. You learn amazing new ways to do art. You get excited about the creative process again or disappointed because, for a minute or an hour or a day, you struggle to be the artist you want to be. You keep going to every event offered in the evenings and you push through to the end. Maybe you have reached that lofty goal you set before starting this week, maybe you don't; but, through it all, in the end, you know you are better for having come here and you sign up to return yet again, a better artist still reaching for a lofty goal.