Creating Images/Illustrations and Words

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Out my window on a dew-filled sunny morning this week.  Something beautiful can come from the burden of holding up under the weight of the moment.

This morning I saw this image of English textile artist, Janet Bolton. I have followed her work for many years…the simplicity, the deft ability to maneuver thread and needle into such tiny appliques! Here is her work posted this morning along with my comment back to her.

Janet, I would like to thank you for letting me see your work made up of disparate small pieces coming together to shape something beautiful in its simplicity. The way it harkens back in time when there was harmony in our differences is like a tiny thread of hope for those of us in America who are seeing it slowly slip into history. Please don’t stop.
Isn’t her work extraordinary? Every collage tells a story that each viewer can interpret. Anyway I love seeing her work and when she gets past the ability to make more, I hope she will continue to show what came before.
Speaking of “pictures”. There is a recent book by English author, Chloe Dalton, titled Raising Hare. She documents living with a tiny hare (leveret) until it is grown. My friend brought her copy to our lunch date the other day. I was of course taken by the drawing of the full grown hare on the cover and flipped through the pages to see if there were more illustrations. Yes. Plenty of pencil sketches throughout. BUT nowhere on the jacket cover, on or in the book did it tell who the illustrator was. Nowhere. So I looked it up and found the illustrator to be, Denise Nestor. Why that bit of information was not important enough to be noted on or in the book itself is puzzling. Do illustrators not matter anymore? Was there an agreement that Ms. Nestor remain anonymous? Seems a bit silly since one can so easily look it up. Personally, I hope that we never outgrow the desire to know who draws such engaging images of animals.
Here is an excerpt from my essay (that I am still working on) about museum shops and the magic of what some of them can offer.

“Forget buying children’s books unless they have exceptional illustrations. You want to buy books that have pictures that look like they took time to create, and reflect the artist’s years of interpreting words into pictures. Think Tasha Tudor, Maurice Sendak, Jill Barklem, and almost any illustrator from England. In the Australia National Museum I found a reproduction of Night Fall in the Ti-Tree with extraordinary woodcuts that were famously inspiring in their simplicity, gesture, and narrative quality. The heavy card stock paper has a folded foredge that makes the book feel like it was just handcrafted in a studio nearby. With only two on the shelf and me being a carver of woodcuts, well…..this book has been an inspiration to hold and look at for years.”

Yesterday I wrote more on the temptations of museum shops. Then, because it had been a week or so since writing poetry, I wrote the following.

The Ones We Miss  

I don’t miss who I used to be

  just some of those who knew me then.

The ones who were there to be missed later

  when their memory is needed to return.

To sit by my side, reach for my hand.

 

I pull theirs close to hold against my cheek,

  and let them wipe away the tears of loss.

They stay with me and wait until I smile

  at the stories they tell of how we were.

 

After we both grow silent,

  they pull away, touch my face,

and say, “See you next time.”

S. Webster

Today is a good day for writing. It is cloudy. Words can’t escape quickly into the heavier air outside. They will linger long enough to be rearranged and shuffled into meaning. I suppose I should get to it.

There are thirty-seven new poems, five new short stories, and a few more essays to put into a new book. Maybe I will just do a second poetry book and keep the stories and essays for another.

When we are older…past eighty…we think of perhaps not being able to finish the plans we had for ourselves. The worry of that is like a small prod in the back and a whisper in the ear to get on with it.

So, maybe I will….

Til later…

 

Local Anti Trump Rally

Posted on by Sandy Webster

The International No Kings Day Rally was highly successful here in Hayesville, NC.  Not a trump support sign in sight! Here are some of my favorites from other places.

I took a like-minded neighbor for our drive through town support for all the wonderful people who turned out for No Kings Day. Kermit hung on out the window in support of the frogs of protest in Portland….an ICE infested city invaded by trump’s insanity and ignorance.

We handed out a bag full of cards and pins to the protesters.

I still have plenty left for the next rally. It was inspiring for both my neighbor and myself to see so many come out to support those of us who can see the damage that trump and his insatiable MAGAS have done to America. Thank you to all the countries who also rallied against the insane downfall of American values on No Kings Day.

Afterward a few (the few who are not trump supporters in my neighborhood) of us went out to dinner to celebrate the small difference we may have made.

I will have the rest of the champagne from a small dinner with friends the night before the rally and leftovers from last night’s dinner.

One thing I have noticed is that after the protest rally with so much support around the country…at leas seven million…it does not seem so hopeless to be an American. It feels that we might just get through this mess of manipulated madness.

Wish us luck!

Til later…

Treating Myself

Posted on by 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…

Making Your Mark

Posted on by Sandy Webster

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….