Author: Sandy Webster

Mornings are getting crisper, fresher. The other evening I took myself out to dinner. I needed a gift certificate for my retiring eye doctor. We said goodbye at my last appointment this week. He has been putting plugs resembling fine fishing line in my tear ducts to prevent dry eyes for the last several years of our twenty year relationship. I will miss him and his staff who will also be leaving the office as it is taken over. I ordered a drink called the “Sandy”. It was nice and lemony.

Followed by shrimp and scallops.

The sun has moved just enough lower in the sky to give a lovely light through drying dogwood leaves and grasses.

I have been working on an essay about museum shops and the things that we buy from them for so many reasons. But mainly because you know that you will never see them again. It is your one chance ever to own this small thing that will so easily fit in your suitcase to bring home. And how the best section of those shops is the children’s area where things are scaled down in size and meant to be fun. The children’s books can be interesting here as well. That is if they have illustrations that are not that god awful flat big-eyed commercial drawings that look like they could fit into any story by just changing the little girl’s hair from a pony tail to pig tails. The over-sized kids are racing around frantically as the reader chases them from page to page. Anyway, avoid buying these mass-produced ideas of what children’s illustrators are striving for today. They are dreadful and all look copied from the same book that some publisher has told them will most certainly sell.

Instead, find the books illustrated by a person who can not only draw, but bring words to life with the careful mastery of a practiced hand. Maurice Sendak, Jill Barklem, Tasha Tudor, to name a few. Almost any book illustrated in England seems a much better idea than US illustrators. Our standards seem to have slipped in all aspects of what we used to take pride in. From our politics to our health to our cheap mass productions made for marketing, we are often not even a sad imitation of what we were not so many years ago.

Anyway, buy the books that make you want to save them just to pause over pages of finely done drawings.

I am going to do a bit of baking later today. Spinach phyllo triangles for the freezer seems a good idea.  I am toying with the idea of buying a new saucier pan. Maybe even add a one quart stainless pan for boiling up eggs and melting butter. My old pans have hot spots burned into them from my gas stove. It could be just me, but one wonders if there is a cutoff year for old ladies to stop buying pots and pans, and just make do with whatever is there. I will give myself another week and maybe by then will forget I ever thought it was necessary.

Next week I am going to write a cautionary tale about hanging onto things that make you wish you hadn’t…and do you call for another backhoe or bonfire to give a proper sendoff. In the meantime, each of them is worth writing down the story of how it came to be part of a collection that needed to be cherished forever….before it became burdensome. Our “forevers” are a bit short-lived as we age.

Anyway, out to the kitchen to see if the phyllo has thawed.

Til later…

I was thinking about all the workshops and artwork I see on the internet. How it is so much about instant finished work (almost framed and priced as the last bit of tissue or whatever is pasted on). The main thing I notice is how there is no way to tell one person’s work from another. There is no mark of the hand of the maker.

As I was giving a couple a tour of the house last night, they stopped at every artwork and asked about its story. It was nice to have that kind of interest. They noticed that everything had the mark of a particular hand in the finished work. It is what I collect and what I have always strived for in my own pieces. Why would I want to spend time on emulating some other artist’s work when my own mind and hand itch to create my own.

It made me think about what goes into my pieces…the need to bring my own ideas into a visual form that only I can see. Sometimes to get started it only takes getting out the tools we love to work with.

Or combining the spare parts of collected works with other materials.

And putting images together consecutively to form a narrative.

Or the gathering and processing of a medium necessary to finish an artwork.

Like drawing in travel sketchbooks using pigments from the soils of places that matter and mark the page with memory. And then coloring in a woodblock of a favorite tree that you had the good fortune to visit over and over again before knowing you would not see it again….but had this reminder.

And the simply being captivated by something picked up from the ground, brought home to draw over and over until you get it just right.

When you really want to create an imaginary world of Nature, you take more spare parts to make something new.

Then take the time to document with watercolor on gessoed boards as if they were ever so important to some scientific study.

And always there is stitching. Creating an image with thread and layered cloth.

This fox went on to be finished and framed with six other companions of “Night Critters”. They hang behind me as I write this blog. And this particular one reminds me of an offer I had to purchase it but only at half the asking price at the time. Very few of my works were offered for sale, and knowing that this offer was coming from a fellow maker, I decided not only to turn down the offer but to no longer tell anyone something was for sale. Better to simply give the work away to someone who appreciates your efforts or keep it on your wall.

And finally here is a gift from an 86 year old student I taught at Arrowmont many years ago. She worked on it privately away from class time and gave it to me at the end of the week. It hangs in my bathroom so I see it every morning as a reminder to just keep working. Keep putting things together…and then give it away.

I think it is time for a drink. Perhaps a Turmeric Old Fashion.

Til later….

Lovely morning over my subdivision. On my way to coffee with the corner crowd.  One of them simply cannot resist being one of those annoying evangelicals wanting everyone to believe all the things he reads in “his” bible. I asked, no told, him to just put a sock in it! Is there anything more annoying than being told how and what to believe!

As my basket friends were going home after their conference in Tasmania, the blank parts of the page got to me so I filled in more drawing. It is so peaceful.

Then a bit more baking…..pear in puff pastry.

And a delicious pumpkin cream sauce over pasta and spinach.

I took a more recent picture of myself the other day after seeing on FaceTime an old friend from graduate school. We tend to look a little rough after a certain age so I will put a picture out there now, so we can ease our way into how it will be.

Yesterday I worked on getting 35 poems all in the same font for a new book I am putting together. It will also have several short stories written since my last series of books and a few essays. Something about a good check in the mirror makes me want to “hop” to it. Trouble is the “hopper” has slowed a bit.

I do love my new routine of exercises and punching the bag to get out aggressions. Isn’t it odd how one leg is stronger than the other when it comes to balancing? I am quite sure I used them both the same for the last 81 years…so why is one weaker than the other? I am determined to get it up to speed and perform as expected.

Not sure if I posted this one before. But with Australia on my mind, here is one of the poems coming in the new book. There were six more trips down under after this was written.

Come and Gone in Twenty-Nine Hours

I continue to come back

eight times in thirteen years.

I am more tired

and this tiredness is beginning

to feel familiar.

It is harder to be here alone

and I sense this may be the last time.

 

I have opened myself to this country

in a deep private and personal way.

But this time I feel the loneliness

of solitude

quietly seeping in.

I am more a foreigner

than I had hoped for.

 

Australia has not lost its magic.

I am older

and the vision for that magic

is somewhat diminished

due to a combination of age

and awareness of time

that have more or less

besieged me on this trip.

 

And I am here

on this precious soil

just twenty-eight hours.

I think I am feeling the loss

of this country before I have left it.

 

Australia feels like an old dear friend

that I am seeing slowly turn away.

Or am I shifting my gaze

toward the comforts and familiarity

of home.

 

Is it becoming time

to give up the adventure

and content myself with memories

of what we used to be to each other?

 

I am feeling the loss

with each eucalypt I see

as if for the last time.

I miss it already.

 

Seems a bit of a sad poem about loss and age. But there is not a time I read these words and not smile. I wrote it in my sketchbook after a long walk to get to a park to just sit down among the Eucalyptus trees. My feet were sore and I was just beginning to feel some of the aches of aging. I love the drama of a woman with sore feet trying to put her feelings into words to look back on.

Anyway, back to the sorting and font sizing needed for the book layout.

Til later…..

 

The National Basket Gathering was going on in Tasmania this week. I try to join them by working in my Gathering Book just to pretend I am with them. So many good memories that pull me back to all those with materials and such desire to share information. Anyway, I got my sketchbook out and started drawing some odd beads that I hung onto….just in case. Then on the next page a very old Mary Hetts basket of ash and oak caught my eye because of the attachment of handles. It felt good to just sit and draw.

Next I drew in one of the combination pottery/basketry pieces that Ted Cooley and I decided to turn into a workshop. The negative spaces were filled in with random strands of weaving materials.

Turn the page and a bit of sewing and patchwork that so many at the gathering do while together. A rock because it was handy to the page. The scraps of cloth came from Wafu Works in the Hobart area and my first stop when arriving in Tasmania. My most favorite hostess, Jude Walker, would fetch me at the airport and we’d head over there before stopping for a savoury muffin and a flat white.

The opposite page and latest drawing is another clay fish with woven fins and tail. And a scrap of cloth with bits of grasses peeking out. The conference has ended and they have all headed home. It was wonderful seeing the posted photos of so many familiar faces beavering away over bits and pieces of unruly natural materials, contact printed cloth, and dressing up stones.

It brings such calm to just sit and draw…and remember. Thank you.

And another bit of relaxation is a good gin and tonic drunk from the first glasses Lee and I made from wine bottles. This was a dreadful Corbet Canyon wine that had the best shape for fitting in the hand. We did very simple bamboo leaf resist shapes near the top. They fit the hand perfectly and are just right for a gin and tonic.

I was catching up on the latest alcohol book of labels. The new ones in the book are mostly from wine tasting events where I think a bit more of something good should be in the cooler or on the shelf at home.

Now that the latest and perhaps last political installation is in place, I will return to writing and drawing/stitching. A couple of lunches/dinners out with the friends I miss seeing, coffee with the fellows in the morning, and I have exhausted my social skills. I have accepted that ignorance has brought this country to new lows and it is likely to continue in a society of fear from retribution. I see a soulless-ness when I look into the eyes of those now in control as well as in the eyes of  more and more of their supporters. Thank you to those who still protest to regain the rights we all fought so hard for years ago and now see eroding.

Sadie keeps me company when Dilly is busy napping. A cat’s purr is so comforting…

Til later…