“Where are the art classes?” Kathy Faass would ask every time she and husband Mike visited the Midcoast. The Georgia resident wanted to move to Maine for years. “I grew up on Long Island and my first job was selling clams,” she explained. “I wanted to move to Maine and we kept coming back to the area.”

After learning there were no art classes, she sent a proposal to Boothbay Region YMCA offering to provide them. Executive Director Andy Hamblett responded in 24 hours, accepting her proposal for the classes for children and adults.

It took a while to get ready for the move but in 2019 Faass said “Everything finally fell into place,” and she started teaching fine arts classes at the Boothbay and Damariscotta YMCAs.  Last year, she started teaching art at Y Camp and this past spring she started teaching adult fine arts classes.

Emily Mirabile, the Y’s arts and humanities director, is glad Faass joined the staff. “She has great knowledge and talent and is an asset to our team,” she said.

Executive director Andy Hamblett is glad to have Faass and her expertise. “The Y’s always had a great presence with regard to the performing arts and the visual arts add another layer to this program. We are about building relationships, adult life skills and positive adult role models and Kathy is one of them.”

Faass teaches children and adults at BRYMCA through the Y-Arts program.  For students ages 7-14, she offers weekly one-hour classes for seven weeks, including graphic design and mixed media. The graphic design class covers sketching, digital design, color theory and design of comic books and characters.

Her mixed media class uses drawing skills to make prints and collages and to paint fabric.

The glass fusion class gives students basic safety skills for working with glass; students design items that can include plant stakes, wind chimes and others. The glass fusion classes are for ages 6-10 and 11-18.

This spring, the Y-Arts program offered adult workshops for wind chimes and scarf painting and adult classes will resume in the fall. Faass will hold a scarf painting workshop at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in August.

Fine arts classes for children are part of the daily schedule at the Y-Arts camp this summer.

Faass holds a master’s degree in art education with 18 hours in printmaking. She interned with celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser and is a part-time professor in the design department at Rasmussen College.

While living in Georgia, she taught at assisted living facilities and worked with patients with memory loss. “Art therapy for dementia is good,” she said. “It gets the brain moving again.”

Since moving to the Boothbay region, she has also been teaching at Harbor Montessori School, helping youngsters learn design by, among other projects, doing glass fusion with tweezers. “You plant the seeds to appreciate and create art by starting at an early age,” she said.

For more information about Y-Arts Camp, visit https://boothbayregionymca.org/camp-knickerbocker/yartscamps.html