Within three years of taking classes at the Ah Haa School, the student had already become the teacher. The art school was founded in 1990, and by 1993, printmaker and textile artist Kathy Green was already offering classes. In the twenty years since, Green has become a stalwart of the local art scene. This fall, Green is teaching a 16-day intensive on breakdown screen printing. At the Ah Haa School, she explains the process.

“Over here she has a series of screens for doing a great big tablecloth,” Kathy says of one student’s work. “So these are white lines, but as you pull more the color in the lines starts to come out. So that’s why it's called breakdown screen printing.”

Green is pointing to fabrics which have been built up with various layers of dye. A colored gel is used to paint over a screen. When ink is applied to the screen, it seeps through and dyes the fabric underneath. As the screen is used more and more, the colored gel begins to break down, and it too starts to leave a mark on the fabric. The result is thus progressive and somewhat unpredictable, building and morphing over time. Student Amy Jean Boebel says that element of surprise is what keeps her coming back. 

“But, Kathy, don't you think the best part of this — for me anyway — is the experimentation? You never quite know how it’s going to turn out, so every time it’s a surprise,” Boebel says. 

Gesturing to Boebel work, Green says, “She had a screen that was all squiggles and black, and then when she turned it over and started printing with clear, the black started dissolving. And it looks a lot like rocks.”

“I think of it as nerve endings. Or a membrane,” Boebel says. 

“She likes thinking of inside the human body, and science, and space and I tend to think of nature,” Green says. 
The print room at Ah Haa is absolutely filled with paper, clothing, cloth, dish towels, screens, and pots of colored dye in up-cycled yogurt containers. Looking around, Green says that process is not about control but freedom, productivity, and experimentation. 

“I’ve done a little bit of woodblock carving as a child and linobluck stuff as an adult, but not much.” Green says. “[With those printing methods,] you carve and you carve and you make it all perfect and here we’re just squirting the dye on, letting it dry overnight, you make four screens, you let em dry, you print your screens from the day before….so we can make a lot of stuff. You can direct print, you can work with stencils…”

Many in the class are making finished products —a tablecloth, or an art book, or a series of dish towels to give away as gifts. Green says the dyed fabric also becomes a medium of its own, which can then be made into quilts, clothing, or sold to other makers. 

“When I say we made the fabric we did not spin it, we did not harvest the wool or raise the moths for silk. We acquired the fabric, usually from Asia, and then we dyed it, and then we kind of feel like it's our own because it’s different,” Green says.

Green says that practicing art is a way of approaching the world, and of surviving its difficulties. Thinking of creativity, she remembers her late Husband Chuck Korger. 

“It can push out the world affairs that are all kind of grim right now. It can push out your own struggles with emotional and mental health, because suddenly you see something positive and can feel more positive about yourself. And I certainly knew that when Chuck Kroger died, I was coming home to art, and that was very important to me. I knew that art was going to bring me through a life where Chuck was not physically present anymore,”  Green says. 

The room is full of wild color and is brightened by the sharp sunlight of early winter, passing in the day outside. Surrounded by her students, Green says that those pursuing creativity can find it wherever they are, and with whatever materials they have about them. 

“It can be really playful, you don't have to do something that makes this big of a mess and requires a giant room and special equipment,” she says.

“This is playful!”  Boebel interjects. 

Well, yes this is playful but you can be playful just at your kitchen table and color with markers and make a lot of notecards. You can put aside some of your struggles,” says Green. 

In the quantity and variety of prints all over the room, that sense of play was pervasive, even as it came about through dedicated and serious work.