This Is A Catch Up Post

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Here is the snake monster finished!

And his frightened victim about to be bit in the face. Something fun in the woods by the driveway.

I went to Asheville this week and stayed over with a friend. We shop and then we stop at the Grove Park Inn for a drink at the Edison bar….mainly for the view.

The drinks are of course over priced and often we will have a bit of something to eat…just a snack. I think that there can be a problem when chefs are left unchecked. Would you believe that they removed a decent home made potato chip plate with cheese, served warm, only to replace it with complete confidence because it is now printed on the menu, tepid stale homemade chips with chopped beets that appear to have mayonnaise stirred in. The mound of purple and pink sat in the middle surrounded with limp chips. I think we are going to find another place to have that drink.

The view from my bedroom yesterday morning looked like this.

From there off to Trader Joe’s when it opens at 8 am and then home by 10:30. I took a bucket to put bottled water in so I could fit in lots of flowers from TJs. Here they are on the table and should hold up through the art group meeting here on Sunday.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that lifts spirits like bunches of sunflowers and Eucalyptus.

The latest work on Driveway Messages are now framed behind glass and ready to show Art Group.

Also this week I returned to the Specimen Journal….Here is a catch up on that as well.

This last page appears to be some sort of record keeping of a hatch happening near the water. So the next several pages will be about the things he spots around the water….including some of my favorites like the water bug.

Now I am headed back into the studio to make the leather journal covers for a class in Australia. In Asheville I found the best worn looking pig skin for them.

I think that is enough for now. Back to work.

 

Just This Morning – And Just This Week

Posted on by Sandy Webster

This was the sunset a couple of days ago. It happens about the time I go to bed….7:30 pm. If I don’t go to bed  that early I won’t make it up to head to the gym by 5 am. And I won’t get the steps in that I require of myself every day. This week in a five day period I almost made it to 75,000. That’s a lot.

On Saturdays I can sleep in. So last night from 8 pm to 6 am. Ten hours of pure luxury!

Now it is 10 am and this is what I have finished this morning.

Filled the fish pond with water, moved the sprinkler three times, trimmed some dreaded forsythia bushes back so Lee can see out a shop window, finished three loads of wash, vacuumed the porch, cleaned up the kitchen, helped Lee wash the porch chair cushions, changed the sheets on the bed, fed the fish and the cats, checked my emails and just now took a look at facebook and was reminded again just how much I despise the present administration.

On the bright side I am hoping that our neighbor gets back to working on this.

Originally they thought they would turn this downed pine into a pencil….but everyone is doing that! I suggested since we see it as we drive up our driveway that it be a monster-type snake attacking something that just poked its head out of the ground. It is very long and now has good stable legs propped underneath….plus his other thin ones. The snakes eyes will be bigger and likely he will attach the diamond shaped thick boards I had handy to give him some fins. He will also have banded stripes along his body. The stump’s bark looked like flowing hair and with some judicial chainsaw cutting he now has an open mouth in full scream.

He just needs to get some googly eyes and a nose. I am sure that the neighbor wishes this pine fell on our property and not just over the line on his. But he is taking my suggestions well, being a good sport about it. But he goes to bed a lot later than me and gets up a lot later.

If he kept to my schedule he would have at least two of these monsters chainsawed by now.

In the studio this week I have returned to the specimen journal and completed the framing on the Driveway Messages. I think I am going to now work on a larger piece using the etchings on cloth and more of my contact prints of leaves. Since I went to using the sewing machine it has increased the possibilities of what I want to say about correspondence.

Earlier in the week I made a trip over to my under graduate school, Western Carolina University. I talked to the book arts students about my work, showed some of my books and left a couple of cartons of books from my studio library to add to theirs, and donated almost all of my personal artist books that were either collected, purchased or made and exhibited by me. It will be a good home for them. After Christmas they will receive my collection of over ninety pop up books.

Also this week the trip to Australia has been finalized with a travel agent. I now know what I am doing and where I am going to do it, not to mention when! Now just keep the dialogue of ideas going with the students….my favorite part is the planning with them way before we meet over tables and tools.

More next week after an overnight in Asheville and having a bit of scotch at the Grove Park Inn. And Trader Joe’s on the way home with a bucket of sunflowers and a box of wine.

Til then.

A Waste of Time? – Rethinking – Stalling

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Okay an update from last week. I spend days trying to figure out how to get the shadows of leaves over other shadows. Thinking about the marks on the driveway. I made several transparency images in deep black to tape under the thin etching plates. Here they are keeping company with that deplorable pincushion that has escaped the company of like kind in the toilet paper drawer. But only to allow for daily jabs of frustration at his carelessness and stupidity. But I digress here, sorry.

And of course when I get a plan, I always assume it is going to work out just fine. So why bother to test out the theory with only one etched plate?

I make four the size of the image to be printed on the page. These I can use in different directions to look different. Then I make four small ones to use over text from a letter. These are tracings from asphalt patching marks that look very much like writing. And the good part is that I decide to use my Dremel tool to carve and scrape into the thin plates. There are going to be no clear lines, just shadowy blurs, which I thought at the time was a good thing.

They have to be taped onto the press bed because they are slipping and miss being directly over the photo image on the paper being passed through with them.

This is messy and very blurry and not always well lined up. But several sheets later I manage to get something that made me question why bother.

If I want the black image over the grey image, why not just do it all on the computer? It would line up easier. It would all be so much simpler. But it just misses that layering of messages that seems most important to what this book is about. And I think I would like to physically layer the marks on the page with stitching and/or cloth. What I have so far seems too cold, too letter press, too distant from the hand, the touch. So next might just be using those plates on cloth to fragment and stitch. Hand stitch the text….maybe.

So I am letting ideas percolate while I go back to other things. The plates are still laying there, handy and reminding me to find a perfect fabric. Also reminding me to just do a test page first and not assume just because it is a good thought, it is going to be a good product. Seems that is a hard lesson for some of us.

So I went back to the Specimen Journal pages.

This last image got me to thinking about the journaler’s tools. Here he is using the tweezers and magnifying glass. So the next several pages are all tools.

Besides all of this, I am watching the approach of Irma, trying to read a book called The 36 Hour Day about living with dementia, finishing off the latest Louise Penny Inspector Gamache novel, thinking about the pile of mending, getting involved in Australian students projects for next March, scheduling short times away from home, and wondering if I have lost the art of focusing.

Next week I am sure something more will get done and hopefully it will be done right. For now I will concentrate on just taking it a day at a time and make something even if it is only dinner and some cookies.

Til next week.

Back to the Stitch

Posted on by Sandy Webster

This is a detail of a very large quilted paper piece that asked the viewer to record on scraps of paper the first stitches they remembered learning.  The response was mostly predictable ….. from grandmothers and mothers teaching them how to sew. I still have this somewhere I think. Anyway it seemed that stitching was always there for me. Poking that needle in and out not with the intention of making a good stitch but more about holding ideas together.

Or making marks…

Sometimes the stitching went with words as part of illustrations. Like this in my artist retreat book. After all our time together as artists came to an end I made this book about what that felt like…to be with others who were just as passionate about their ideas. We all had egos to match our intentions and I love how I saw that and then recorded it here. The sound this book makes with the stitched in rattly pages is just wonderful. I love this book…the words, the images, the sounds and the stitches.

Then there are the books that are held together by stitched spines.

Many of them remain blank because they became about the binding and not about the content. I should go in there and mark them all up….maybe just stitch on the pages.

And this book was all about mending. I steamed and pressed the paper to get the pages to feel more like cloth and receptive to needle and thread.

Sometimes what is happening on the back side is a better story.

And this print on cloth done in undergraduate school. I was warned that I was getting “dangerously close to craft.” I love that and understood exactly what my advisor meant back then and held off on stitching into these prints until after graduation.

And another use of print with stitch and cloth.

I find it harder to thread the needle and notice the feel of the cloth more now. It needs to “feel” like what I am trying to say with it. So with the tattered shawl now being about dementia and the holes left by what we took for granted and now can’t quite put our finger on, I am working slowly on the holding it together part. It feels good….it really does.

And it has sparked a return to the shifu threads colored with the soils of home and travels. These will be used in my journal of the Land of Lethe…a map of what may or may not have happened.

I have moved all this cloth and threads and shawl over to a corner because I have two of my favorite students arriving for an extended time working here in the studio. What is important to me today will not begin to be as important as their plans starting tomorrow. I will be in their heads and well out of my own.

And the good news is I have been asked to talk about my artist books to students at my undergraduate university in a few weeks. They will be receiving many of those books along with my extensive pop up collection. It will be good to share them and talk to students who want to not just know how to do something but why to do it.

And in looking for images for this post I found this one. An altered image of cloth and stitch. It is sort of the essence of something. It is like poetry I think. More will come of this….later. But in the meantime it is an evidence of things held together. It is the holding close by jabbing something in and out that drags a line along behind it….knotted at both ends to stay put. Some very rich stuff in that I think….or it could just be sewing.

Til next week after the students have left me….maybe they will let me post images of their work and talk about the why….or maybe they won’t. Passions are sometimes hard to talk about.