Unsettled in the Studio

Posted on by Sandy Webster

silverpoint-forrest

About ten days ago I decided to pull out several of these poorly gessoed boards, each about 8″ x 10″. I did them in a hurry quite a while back just to use up some newly mixed gesso made from rabbit skin glue and french chalk. I was thinking I could sand them to perfection later and then use them for the intended purpose of egg tempera painting. But in all honesty they were pitiful and look more like plaster boards or scraps of drywall with the paper peeled away.

I thought of a student in Australia who made the most lovely watercolor on a plaster board. It was an image of herself as a child and would fit into a memory alter that she was making in my workshop. I will post the image I have of it below with apologies for the blurriness.

watercolor-on-plaster

Beautiful isn’t it? Anyway the first one I attempted was the busy strokes of silver point. I was just drawing out of my head…trees are always a place to start for me. Something about the woods. Then the magical door going to who knows where. Maybe secret places.

In sanding the gessoed board with 400 grit sand paper before I started making the drawing, there appeared a weak spot right in the center of the panel. And the more I drew over it the more it chipped away. Then I put it away, but only for a few days. The above beautiful image made me think about watercoloring on the next panel.

I gathered bits and pieces from the studio and laid them out on my work table.

gessoed-board-with-watercolors

Then with watercolors and caran d’ ache crayons I made this painting. It was so soothing to be back doing something botanical in feel. I wanted to frame it in an 11″ x 14″ frame and mounted in into a box shape covered in what I thought was a nice background paper.

gessoed-board-with-watercolors-and-frame

It took a day to get this all put together and then I did not like it, not at all. So cut a mat of off white that just covers over those rough edges and it looks so much better. I will do more like this one. It was too satisfying not to. You know how it is, the careful bleeding of colors that is immediately soaked up by the dry plaster like finish. I could have been a fresco painter in an earlier life.

Then I looked at the silver point forest and thought why not? I covered it in watercolors, then a bit of caran d’ ache to smooth out the color. Of course the silver all washed away but I just kept on adding and wiping. What I ended up with after painting, rubbing, painting and finally sanding is this.

losing-memory-lo-res

There is something about this. The hole in the middle of the panel went all the way down to the board with all the “rough” treatment and the water mediums just washing it out bigger and bigger. I like how it is next to the window of the magic door. But I especially like how it feels like faded memories. The things that come back to us in a vague undefinable way. Those things as we age that become less clear but there somewhere. I like the image of this better than the piece itself.

And now I will pick out another of those boards that were covered with cloth and rabbit skin glue and then copious coats of hand made gesso in such a sloppy fashion. The surface is so dry and thirsty that it sucks the paint from the brush before I have much time to think. For now that is a good thing.

A Bit More for Taking Down Under

Posted on by Sandy Webster

australian-pigments-victoria-full-page

Something a bit different here in the studio this week. I opened my Australian watercolors made from the soils of there. I selected four from a location, state, territory or specific place. Then taking a printmaking paper cut to 5″ x 7″, I taped off the margins I wanted to have a small 4.5″ x 3″ section to receive the washes of paint with a white space between each. Then in those spaces I took watercolors made from soils in my driveway, I placed three different colors in dot form to represent my travels through that area.

Originally I was going to make small collographs to superimpose on the washes but after two days of making them and then testing them, they simply did not work. Too small, not enough detail and they looked too much like stamping images. Those small collographs might become part of something bigger another time as it is hard to just toss out two days work.

But I do like using the watercolors of home plus those of different places in Australia. I also like how they look in a row. Together they have the look of long travels. Take a look here at some of them.

australian-pigments-tasmania-2australian-pigments-queenslandaustralian-pigments-tasmania-1australian-pigments-canarvan-gorgeaustralian-pigments-ntaustralian-pigments-victoria

They also remind me of my white line printmaking with that negative white space between colors. The class I am doing at Halls Gap is a masters class using the white line technique to make prints that are stitchable into books or onto cloth. I can see the students doing something like this with their watercolors and then perhaps french knots in those white spaces.

After that workshop is over, some of favorite students over the past twenty years are renting a large house for several days just to be able to work together, share meals, ideas and time. I am thinking that since I will have my carving tools and blocks with me, all I need is to take the pigments of home and there to make a book of my travels throughout the land of Australia. In the meantime I think I need to make a larger painting in this style and perhaps change up the mark making. My brain is buzzing with this and all the possibilities.

More later.

More on the Scrapbook – More on Life

Posted on by Sandy Webster

It has been a very busy last ten days. Two resident students were here to do work in the studio. All my time is given to their needs. They each have something that needs to be fixed into a visual form. We first met in a workshop several years ago and have continued here to meet in a place where I can push just enough and do the mundane work of cutting, drilling, gluing while they make the work. I am exhausted by the end of the day. What they each are going through in their lives spills out into my personal place of making. Whatever I am working on simply goes on hold while I give whatever I can to see their plans realized. Sometimes I need to listen more closely, sometimes I need to step in and prod them to move ahead. And sometimes I just need to pour more wine. The seriousness of how much their work matters can be draining but I would not have it any other way. It is the least I can do in the face of what they are going through.

But, after they were gone and the studio and apartment put back in order, I went back to my own life and the scrapbook of decades.

Here are a few details of some of them.

scrapbook third decade detail 2

This is part of a page that represents my twentys. I am married with two children and am so much about family, friends and the small town we lived in

scrapbook fourth decade detail

And the thirties. It is all about experiencing “craft”. It was such a fun time and somehow at that age one thinks it will be like this forever. Just sit and weave, make baskets and put beads on everything.

And then the forties….a move to North Carolina, the children on their own. I am returning to college to finish an undergraduate degree and start on my MFA. Craftsmanship gives way to idea driven work and accountability as an artist. Tough times with so much more thinking, so much more passion. And no more decorative beading.

Scrapbook fifth decade lo res

I like stitching on these pages. They are very raw in a way. Picking the bits and pieces that capture the essence of who and what I was for that decade is challenging. I know when the page is complete. I know when I say, “Yes, that is how it was”.

I have enough of them now to see how it feels to turn the pages and see the marks of the previous decade influencing how I view the next one. They have made me think about life and how lucky I am to be living long enough to work on an eighth decade for this scrapbook.

I also took time to work on an etching. Again trying to channel Rembrandt and his lines to make a tree.

gum tree etching pages

It is a plexiglass plate about five by six and one half inches. I am trying out two inks, a dark umber and a black with a bit of umber to warm it. Only ten prints pulled. I colored two of them with watercolors and found that they then became “illustrations”. Something out of Winnie the Pooh book. Not sure I liked that. The print suddenly needed a context, a narrative and of course more illustrations. And the uncolored ones just need signed and framed. Funny how that happened with just a bit of watercolor. I have two more images ready to etch and I will see how it goes with them.

 

brown gum tree etching

dark gum tree etching

colored etching of gum tree

But definitely I am thinking, no color and the darker ink.

Recollections in Cloth, Paper and Thread

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Scrapbook first decade stitched

I could just be my age. For something different to work on in the studio I decided to break down my life into decades. Now I am into my eighth, not by a lot, but enough to make some choices of how I see that decade unfolding. There are eight panels of cloth all close to 18″ square. They were selected as a background feel for that period of my life. Here is the first decade. I am a child in a rural community who spends an enormous amount of time outside in the woods and meadows. Old farmhouses in northern Michigan.

I am not a very accomplished stitcher. It takes a while just to get that needle threaded and knotted at the other end. Then it is poke in some place and come up in another.  All the added pieces of papers and cloth were fused into place with a fabric bonding film. Loose bits were tied into place until they could be caught with the stitches.

This piece is trying to capture how those years felt to me, the things that stayed with me. The constellations in a very dark and star filled sky, old wallpapers, some falling away, marked cloth, grandmothers’ influences, the dullness of winter and snow, using only two crayons to wander out of the lines of coloring books. But most of all was the freedom to come and go, come and go and be by myself.

Here are some details of this “page”.

scrapbook first decade grass

scrapbook first decade snow

And now I have finished stitching the second decade. Those teenage years. A move from the woods and privacy to the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Florida in 1955 was a unwelcome adjustment. But being a teenager is constant adjustments, constant changes.

These pages will be bound into a very large scrapbook like we used to have many years ago. The kind we pasted in all our plans for the future. Now it will be pages of how things actually were or at least how I recall them to be. As the pages turn, there will be the marks of the previous decade shown to the left of the new decade. The viewer can see the marks of influence more or less of what is happening next. I think that this is where being a lousy stitcher is an advantage. Those threads and how they travel around on the back of the previous decade’s page is very narrative in its own way. Here is how a section of the two pages will be seen where they intersect.

scrapbook second decade pairing lo res

Wandering in the woods no longer possible with sandspurs everywhere. A red tide that came often enough to make the beach un-navigable. And finding it hard to fit into a predetermined system. I managed like we all do and actually found this a fun page to work on.  See below.

scrapbook second decade stitched lo res

I was now making my own clothes and still maintained my freedom for most of the time. Some details of the page.

scrapbook second decade if you alter

scrapbook second decade detail of shell lo res

I may go back into both of the pages. More is bound to develop in thought and manipulation. And some of these details I really liked and took them into a photo program to play with. I see possibilities for etchings using my press or maybe even collographs. Maybe drawings.

What I do like is finding the marks that are possible with needle and thread that capture my thinking. Better stitching may come as I work on each page. Before I show you the altered image of a detail from my first decade, take a look at how much my eighth decade shares a similar palette. Interesting I think because those other pages get pretty colorful with marriage, family, entering the craft world, then graduate school and travel. Interesting.

Here is the roughed in eighth decade that will take some time to get to as I must do them in order.

scrapbook 8th decade lo res

And the altered image of my first decade detail.

scrapbook first decade detail adjusted 2

I will show more as they develop.