Back in the Studio

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I am back in the studio…even sleeping down here now. Lee needed his own bed and one time on that couch I could see why. So for now things are going good.

Stitching did not work on these small folios because the stitches had to be too far apart to keep the paper from tearing. In other words it was a dumb idea. So I got out my Japanese hole punch and picked the proportionately right size to make tracking marks on every one of the one hundred ninety-two folios. I was careful to make sure that no holes were punched in the fold.

Here are just the red ones.

The coptic bound book will start with this top one as it goes through all the colors of Australian soils that I have made over the years.

I am hoping that when all bound, the book will be hard to hold in my hands…..much like the memories and strong feelings for my time spent in that country.  Sort of thinking impossible to hold and always showing me something else as it flips about.

It took a while to do each page and then get the colors flowing nicely as they change from one section to another.

I think this is the order that they will be stitched. Probably a white thread but a soft green waxed linen might work better to support and not tear at the folds. After each page was painted I gave it a coating to help keep it strong. It was only a Thai kozo paper that I love working with.

Here is the punch with the color dots that I could not part with.

So they ended up here for now.

I am finalizing the trip back to Australia next year. I like getting the details all taken care of well ahead of time. Starting in Newcastle doing a workshop for Timeless Textiles in early March, then onto a few days in a Melbourne hotel for sightseeing. Catch the train to Halls Gap, stay on with friends when the workshop finishes, back toward Melbourne and Baldessin Press for those special few days of printmaking and book arts before catching the train down to Geelong to do a final workshop there in white line printmaking. All of this will take just under a month and I am so looking forward to being back in the midst of good times with good friends and super students.

Sadie is glad to see me back in the studio. She stacked a few stones from Australia. The two largest ones were given to me by an artist I met while staying at Baldessin Press last March. She had read my book and thought I should have some from her. Kim Evans is her name and her fantasy type drawings/paintings are simply stunning. Some are part of an exhibition going on now in Seattle.

Here is Kim’s view from her studio. Very lucky girl!

A beautiful wild parrot, a crimson rosella I think, flies into an open window of her studio to watch her work. Amazing and I was thrilled to be invited for dinner with Kim, her husband and another artist working at Baldessin Press before she was taking off to walk the Camino in Spain. Good times, good company, good memories.

And here is Sadie.

I think I will start stitching the folios tomorrow. It is a holiday weekend through Monday and Tuesday the window washers and a tree man come in the morning. Too much green too close to the house feels oppressive…..so some thinning is needed.

Later today I will have a single malt and visit with a good friend. For now I will return to Jon Meachum’s new book on “The Soul of America.” We survived McCarthyism before and he feels we can do it again. This time we have so much to clean up. The mess is getting worse each day with the selfish incompetency in government.

I sold this small boat after it came home from exhibition. It is going to a very good home to someone who really loves it. Can’t ask for more.

Til later when I get something done.

Something With Pictures

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I saw one of these on someone else’s blog. They are made from Lake Michigan rocks and encased in vellum. How could I not want to buy the last two available from Shanna Leino. She is an extraordinary book artist and tool maker. Now my responsibility is to keep them clean. Do not sit them onto painted, smeary, muddy, gluey surfaces. They are between 3.5 and 4.5 inches and quite heavy. Perfect for holding things in place….clean things.

This week in the studio I painted 192 small 2″ x 4″ sheets of kozo paper with 153 watercolors made from the soils of Australia.

When they were dry I sealed the color in on both sides. Sorting them according to colors so that they move through the country by color was a bit of a challenge. I am fairly satisfied now.

Even the very pale sheets have some color clinging to their edges. Here you can see that they go from the greys to creams to light terre vertes to pale yellows and then on to more intense colors. Deeper yellow ochres through the browns to reds and finishing with a nice caput mortuum…deep brownish red….old blood.

My intention with these is to stitch on each sheet before it is folded into a folio and then coptic stitched to the next one in line. I want the long book to flow like the endless landscape of Australia. I want to roll it back and forth between my hands. At least that is the plan.

The thread will be something I bought over there. A cream or beige or Eucalyptus leaf green. Not sure about that yet. Maybe all three?

I have been dipping into these watercolors for several projects.

This one now housed in the South Australia Museum.

This one now in Australia’s National Library.

The Lake Mungo book housed in Queensland State Library.

There were many, many hand pulled prints colored with these same watercolors.

Another thing I did this week was take all of my pop up book collection to Western Carolina University where I received my BFA in 1997. There were over ninety titles. So many were gifts and so many more I just found irresistible. Many came from museum gift shops and were extremely complex in their movements.  They were very happy to receive this collection and told me that the artist book collection I gave them late last year is now housed in their museum. I like that students can have access to these books. Much better than having them in boxes here.

Here is the only pop up book I kept, the one I made myself….Art History Pops Up.

This one was so much fun to make. Ten iconic art images throughout history. We do not have access to the shiny slick papers that make pop ups work so well. It is tedious and very wearing on the movable parts to make one. At least that was my experience so far. I have been asked to work on another with someone knowledgeable on the history of the book. I hope I can live up to his expectations. More on that project later in the year.

Meanwhile that is it for now. But one more thing, the novella, Kind Gestures, is now on my website, offered in spaced out chapters.

Til next week.

I Am Back With More Randomness and Clarifications

Posted on by Sandy Webster

But first! I was just notified that one of my entries to the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize was accepted. This is very exciting because there were four jurors involved in making selections. I have not had work accepted since 2011 in this extraordinary exhibition and the theme of integrating natural sciences with art fits so much of the work I do using pigments of Australia for commentary.

But otherwise, back to the original blog that I had a hold on until I talked with my web adviser.

The girls are back doing the weeding, putting down mulch, placing pine straw, resetting loose stepping stones, etc. I dug out my snake who sunk rather low this winter and put him in a new spot. Just looking at the yard work makes me tired so it is wonderful to have some enthusiastic help.

Now if I could just find someone to do the inside things like replace faucet washers, patch water damaged ceilings, tighten things down, etc, that would be really nice. It is the maintenance that is beyond us here, but “here” is what we know and it seems that here is where we will be.

I took this picture and the next one just sitting and watching the morning sun come through the window and fall on my New Zealand flax baskets. Each year when I went to Australia I would weave one of these. This last trip I did not. No NZ flax and even less time. So this wall full of them is likely to be all there will be.

 

Barbara Rowe, an Australian basket maker, inspired me to make these baskets. Hers were simple perfection in structure, technique and shapes. She would place them in her house, then apartment where the light created shadows and the slightest air movement shifted their positions and made them seem alive. I saw her this last visit and she has not changed one bit. Over eighty years of age, still weaving and still an inspiration.

Speaking of perfection, I visited Kerr Grabowski’s class this week at the Folk School. She and her students came over to see my studio. A very talented bunch doing what I think they call “de-constructed silk screen”. I could not resist buying this very long and beautifully patterned scarf from Kerr.

I liked this end detail of her cat supposedly dreaming of a fish.

Kerr’s work is so distinct and if you ever get a chance to take her workshop or buy her work, just do it. The next time she is in town we are hoping to work together here in my studio if at all possible. I like sharing space with others that are so passionately involved in their work. It creates a good atmosphere in the room where we both can just get on with it in our own spaces and then break for sustenance later in the day.

I was going to tell you about changes in the website.

Soon you will see a “https” in front of the sandywebster.com. That means that the website is safe. Without having this done, and paying the extra cost, there could be warnings saying something to the effect of “website not safe”. This would be a total off-putting message to see. So to understand more about that little change go to:

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html

And next, very soon, due to new regulations and warnings, there will be a notification at the bottom of my website that there will be “cookies”. These are not as invasive as we used to think. Everyone who has a website will have to have this information posted in the next two to three months. To learn more about just what that means please go to this sight and read.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-cookies

These are new compliances that are necessary if you have a website followed internationally. For me personally, I do not mind the “cookies”. They help me get to what I am looking for much quicker when using the internet.

I can not think if there is anything else to post this week. So just in case, I will put this post on hold for a day or so.

And while I was on hold, I started new work using even more of those watercolors from Australian soils. These small pages will be made into individual folios and then sorted by colors to be stitched together one after the other to shape into the contours of Australia.

So here is only 24 of the near to 300 watercolors to date.

Just Some Randomness aka Spring Fever

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Day before yesterday – Snow!

Today this:

And this:

Flowers even under foot:

Last week I trimmed all the Japanese maples. I was told they look best when their “bones” show. Bones being their trunks and curved branches. But you have to stop short of having it look like Dr. Seuss designed them.

Art Group met here last Sunday. For about twenty minutes I got to relive the recent trip to Australia. I showed them the lovely gifts I received and purchased. I went through the pages of the latest and thirteenth book on alcohol labels….especially those collected down under. Here is a page of the latest 19th Crime wine label….so far only available there and not here yet.

A couple more pages.

They were good wines in very good company. They know I peel the labels and save them in books where I write about the wine and them, so they help by finding good ones and after the bottle empties, they help me get the labels off and onto a napkin to pack into my sketch book or whatever is handy to bring home.

I put away all the treasures that I brought home. I stacked up the prints I made while there and tucked them away…never sure what to do with them next. Some I will take back next year to sell at the tutors vending tables…maybe.

I mailed off a large painting that came back from a recently closed gallery. It went to a buyer out in Seattle who was baby sitting another one I mailed out to a friend. Here is the one that she baby sat:

And the one I sent out to go into the babysitter’s apartment:

I really loved working this large. But they are hard to sell when there is so much to chose from, when there are so few commercial galleries that do not already have there “stable” of artists, when you do not have visitors to your studio, when you do not sell work online.

But I did buy some very large pieces of paper. And I can stitch as well as draw, paint, etc on the surface if I am careful not to get too heavy handed. Then I could roll them up. I could roll them all up together like a guy in our art group…..just one bundle of very large amazing images all sharing a relatively small space. Then if someone wanted to see them, I could toss them out onto the floor like the owners of the galleries showing Australian Aboriginal artworks. The viewer could walk around them and ponder chin cupped in hand, eyes squinting…looking for something that probably is not there but something they think they see.

I may have just talked myself into giving this a go. If I took them to a gallery, they would simply get pinned to the wall or clipped on the ends of those carefully measured lengths of fish line. Then if any one of them sold, the buyer would have to deal with the framing.

Speaking of framing, I just finished framing three prints…the large crow and two large white line prints…crow and heron. They hang where the large nest above was hanging since it came home. Not sure what I will do with the pieces that return from the two exhibits out there now. I am trying not to make work….but it is not working.

The one good thing is that I am on the tenth and last of the Karin Fossum crime mysteries. I am glad of it. Not sure how much more murder and mayhem I can take right now. I say that but I also ordered another recommended series of three Norwegian crime stories by another author.

I am quite sure they are escapism from the real world and the need to strangle members of Congress and their leader…..and the idiots that thought it was a good idea to put them in office.

Next week I will address new things that will be visible on my website. Things that are becoming necessary in today’s world of internet. More on that later.

For now I will just go back to the cleaned studio and look for something small to get involved with. Something that can make me smile. Something I can tuck away out of sight. Something that can easily fit into the waste bin.

Spring Fever will be over next week. Promise.