New Work for New Classes

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Songline and Land Marks

These are the cover views of two new books that include textiles, stitch, woven shifu and white line printmaking. They also have been colored with some of my watercolors made from the soils of Australia. The one on the left has one of my favorite colors, Burke and Wills Track Gold Ochre. Here are some views of their pages.

Songline open

This one is called Songline and the one below is Land Marks.

Land Marks detail Land Marks open to page

There are envelopes placed next to stitched in prints in this book. Here it is holding a bit of shifu made from a thai kozo paper that I clean up the glass sheet and muller with after processing watercolors.

I am planning on returning to Australia to teach another six day masters class and then a intensive textile and pigments class for three days. To those I will add another class at the Baldessin Press Studio where I go to relax and surround myself with printmaking and interesting people. Hopefully this time I will be able to spend some extra time with favorite students that have returned to my classes over and over again. We would just like to share space while we work together.  No teaching and no expectations other than what we place on ourselves. Forays out for flat whites and an occasional dinner would be also be in order. I will start looking for a good place to meet up. It is not too early to start planning.

There are very interesting fellow teachers along the way at the conferences but I have always preferred to spend my time with the students. After all they are why I am there in the first place. Many students can name the teacher who has inspired them the most but for me it is the students, So we are going to make a plan and see if it can work out for all of us.

A note on my last blog. The novella is now in the hands of an editor. When I hear from her I can start to either begin again with another story or just see where her comments lead me.

Tomorrow I take some large canvases off to a new gallery. They have been hanging in the studio since their first outing two years ago.  The blank walls are going to follow the blank book shelves as I begin to rid myself of the “unnecessary”.

I might just have to print up and bind the last five of the Circus Diner Books. My collector has disappeared, our waitress is heading off to  a new career at the casino and I have finished the Dog series. Now I will spend Sunday mornings working on “Napkin Wrapper Occupations.” It is doubtful there are many more books that I will produce in limited editions. Other book artists can get over $200 per book and I am lucky to get the cost of ink and paper and a fraction of my time at $20 each on an edition of only twenty.  “Occupations” might be just too hard for me to resist. Since I will be the new collector, I can see them all gathered at the end of the series at a jobs market or meeting up in a diner. Some of them could even go on dates. All these thoughts and I haven’t even starting tearing the paper. Which by the way has returned to the old maroon and white. More later.

That’s it for the week.

A Novella

Posted on by Sandy Webster

A novella has a word count of between 17,500 and 40,000 words. I have got mine to between 25 and 26,000. Less and I am giving into my tendency for brevity, more and it felt like I was trying to just get wordy. So I quit writing. I like it more than I thought I would when I started. It is an interesting story with interesting characters.

As an artist the word “interesting” is not something we are happy to hear our work called, but as a commentary on a book/story it seems better than acceptable. Anyway that is my reaction to the words I put on the ninety-two pages.

It all started a few years ago when I was trying to find out why spending time in a group of women is not really all that comfortable for me. Men, fine. Women and I can get twitchy. Book club is where I lasted the longest but then that was only once a month, an easy endurance. So knowing I was not being really fair to whatever the joys of sisterhood are, I decided to write a story that only had women characters. If I got to know them individually, than maybe putting them together and keeping company with them would be a big step forward for me. It sort of worked but not totally.

What happened is I simply wrote down seven women’s names with their ages next to them. Then I went off with paper in hand and let each of them sort of “talk” about who and what they were. I pretty much stayed out of it. Giving them an age made it easier. Giving them a town to live in got even more interesting. Some were new comers and some lived there their whole lives.

When I read the prologue in a writing class a few months ago one listener and writer of plays said she thought I walked a tight line between insult and praise – not an easy thing to do according to her. So I took that as encouragement to just finish off the book. My first thoughts with what I had put together then was to turn it into a full length novel. Since the whole story takes place in twelve hours of one day, that would be hard to do without a whole lot of backstory and recollections. Frankly I don’t know these women well enough to give them more memories than needed for this story, so I decided to just let them be for now and then return to the town of Oliver, North Carolina and pick up some of their lives later with another novella. Why not?

The total number of women grew from seven to ten and I did throw in some men because I thought they were needed – when aren’t they?

One of the characters is Lydia an artist, divorced and living alone. I got into her head on how she paints, how she approaches the canvas and engages with the lone figure she places there. I thought I would give it a try. My canvas is only three foot square and not the four to five she uses, but close enough to get the idea of how to do what she talks about. It is not finished. I have scraped it down several times and sanded the daylights out of what I had painted. The hardest part is yet to come – that section where she encapsulates a feeling in a tight photo realistic space on the figure’s body. I may not ever finish it but if Lydia can do it and I made her up after all, I should really give it a try.

Lydias painting startedLydias painting revised

So for now it just hangs in the studio while I try to avoid it. I am wondering if bold black lines wouldn’t be a bad idea. Anything to avoid that small untouched, except for a penciled in drawing of subject matter section, located near the center of the canvas.

Here is an excerpt from how Lydia works…..”And there he is; standing so close that more than half his legs are below the edge of the canvas. At arm’s length she crosses his in front. Strange, but this arrangement of his arms seems to stop him from getting closer….the give and take of artist and subject begins.”

For now I am letting some people read the story. Hopefully I can get someone else to do an edit and then I am not sure where to go next. I avoid writing conferences and groups probably because there are so many women at them. Self publishing seems self-indulgent but my age is a consideration. How old does one want to be before they see some covers on their story? More on all that later. Back to the studio to work I do have some control over. Too bad I did not make Lydia a print maker……

Just Thinking / Wondering What To Do Next

Posted on by Sandy Webster

an autobiography by Sandy Webster

I am thinking about what it is I am supposed to be doing now. All the parts of me above were documented in this autobiographical drawing done a few years ago. It is far from a complete picture. But right now it is like I am drifting through things. Not settled in a direction. I tried explaining it to a friend this way, “Suppose you have your right shoe on and the laces are all tied up tight and even. Then you notice the left shoe is nowhere in sight, let alone tied, straight or otherwise. You were so careful to get the things just so in what you already have done, and now you are not even sure you need to wear shoes. Do you understand what I am saying here? Is it age? Is it a mood that will pass? I hope so because there are things that need doing. I need, really need, to find that missing shoe.”

But last week I did go back and redo a white line wood block. Before it was just the nest and about the third white line I ever attempted. I thought it looked good. I was wrong. It was just a nest floating there in space and took a whole lot of time painting and transferring the color of all those little twigs and leaves. I don’t know what I was thinking back then. Just go ahead and do it, I suppose. Don’t think, just carve, just paint.

Well to stay out of my students hair I decided to redo the block and put the nest in an environment. I did the same with the rufous-sided towhee birds – gave them leaves and ground. Here is the nest as of this morning. Both of the new images make for a good lesson to myself and to students. The lesson is: You can always do better.

Nest redone

And sometimes there is just bad stuff with good intentions. Here is a detail of a piece I made for an exhibit in Tasmania many, many years ago. The theme was something about island and we could interpret it any way we wanted I think. I chose how alone and subject to acceptance the new queen bee must feel when she arrives in a new hive of judgmental female companions. Do you know that if they don’t like her, they just kill her? But in the meantime they do help her escape her cage by gnawing through the sweet plug that seals her in. At least that part is rather nice. Anyway I made this many layers of glass framed with her delivery cage and a tin bee inside of it. Each layer of glass had some buzzing text and images of honeybees gathered around her.

She is Not Like Us 2

The whole thing is about 12″ x 8″ x 4″. And to get it in the mail in a hurry, I painted the metal frame with a gold paint (honey gold, of course) and wrapped it in plastic bubble wrap three times over and popped it into the box. Note: All the wax is well inside between layers of glass.

Anyway it arrived and so did a note from the curator that when they opened the box, the smell was so bad they feared for other pieces in the exhibit, so it was quickly wrapped back up and was waiting for me to advise them as to what to do with it next. A friend picked it up for me, kept it until I arrived on another trip down under and then we mailed it back home. I have not unwrapped it but still have it. Why? It was not that good a piece in the first place, but it was fun to make and I liked the new bee’s fate in the stingers of the sisterhood. I am sure the paint needed to be left to cure longer than the likely half hour I gave it but these details of the piece are fun to look at. So perhaps the documentation of the making is more important than the end product. There were lots of things besides “Buzzzzz”. I remember another thing the bees said was, “Will she look like us?” I am sure they would have killed her had she made her way out. She was a shiny, glossy tin bee and they were pretty plain and ordinary looking – for bees.

And that brings me to the pieces I recently entered into more Australian exhibitions coming up soon. All three are using Robert Hughes’ book titled, Fatal Shore. I am going to not do this again. Making work for exhibition in Australia is so much fun for me to do because I love the country and find it endlessly inspiring but then there is the cost of shipping pieces over there whether they are accepted or not. And the work should be there. No one here would be all that interested. But I will show them here on my blog because they have all been entered and I certainly hope are accepted. But if not they will still need to find a home there.

They are combining the book and it’s title with the effects of global warming in Australia. A new burning tool was essential to do the works….that and a blow torch. Each also includes the use of watercolors made from the soils of Australia.

Fatal Shore Raft lo resFatal Shore Boat lo resFatal Shore Dustbin lo res

By next week I will have found that shoe or be back into writing the novel….I really have no idea.

 

 

The Things I Used to Do – Figures

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Vining Pair

I was posting on facebook the other day some earlier basketry pieces that crossed loom weaving with basket materials and I remembered these two figures. They were made of honeysuckle vines and then small patches of “clothing” were darned into some empty spaces. Attached at the hip they happily hand the vines to each other. Their faces were sculpted with clay.

Since I only took slides back when this work was being made I had to use my scanner to adapt the slides to digital images. Quite the process and they don’t transfer as well as this particular scanner had convinced me of on purchase. But you can get the idea. And the one big thing I learned is that these slides just need to be tossed out. I can’t believe how many talks I must have had to give to still have loaded carousels and slide cases filled to the brim.

Here are some more figures made from turned wood and pine barks. Of course there is the ubiquitous bead added here and there. Back in the 90s you weren’t making “art baskets” unless you added a bead or feather.

Wood Kimono 2

 

Wood Kimono

And some more figures done in the knotting technique.

When I was looking through these slides I noticed that almost everything I was doing was in mixed media. How else can you get those beads in there?? Gourds were lots of fun to work with.

And finally the series I worked on in undergraduate school. It a nod to the patriarchal system of old men attempting to teach the next generation of old men how to be capable of the responsibilities expected of them in carrying out their duties so to speak.

Patriarch for Music
Teaching Cooperation
Teaching Stamina
Detail of Stamina
Face of Music and students
Other Languages
Teaching Other Places
The Graduate

The men in my community donated the tools to be parts of each piece. Cloth was from old clothes or my sewing bag. All the old men “students” listened closely perched in their mountain laurel seats. I still have all of them but my favorites are cooperation and the graduate. He seems to be waiting for the next generation of old men to arrive from a stone egg. These led to more work about men, their body language, their way of belonging and keeping afloat in a world of feminism. Below are the men moving from one place to another via the turning of pages and ending up just where they were before and in the perceived proper order and relationship to each other. The last is a detail of men navigating their way through feminist philosophies in boats bound to sink and dragging testicular anchors of stone while firmly clothed in what they were taught about manhood.

Navigations lo res