New Way to Work

Posted on by Sandy Webster

 

Art Group met yesterday. They each had accomplished so much with exhibitions coming up to results from in depth studies to a simple compulsion to make stuff. I had more words than work. But they inspired me to try to forget the soaked ceiling, worrying so much about what Lee might be up to, what more I can stuff into a suitcase for Australia……..and make an honest attempt to not be quite so scattered and pick up a sensible practice that I could address each day.

 

Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.
– Rumi

This appeared the other day in a post by Robyn Gordon…..collector and presenter of words and images on facebook.

Here are the images that went with that quote by Rumi.

Work by Roxanne Evans Stout

Artist Anne Grete Laenkholm

And Ellie Beck

These were the ones that really caught my eye from Robyn’s post. It was the colors, the size and the look of quiet meditation about them.

Here was my response to her.

Sandy Webster Thank you for this group of images and words Robyn, there is a reparation of clutteredness that appeals and demands no excuses for not threading a needle, with the tiniest bit of random threads, to make the beginning marks of a healing narrative. I will send you a picture of the small satchel with bits of cloth, paper, and threads and needle that will stay close at hand ready to hold the marks of respite.

It is the “reparation of clutteredness” that will be the function of the satchel that will hold the necessary pieces. I want it to be mobile, easy to handle. I want it to be writings one day and stitching the next….or a combination of both. I don’t want the small worked on pieces to be any more than places to rest and work out a feeling, a grievance, whatever that will make me feel that I am doing something for just me in the moment.

And when I looked at these pieces in Robyn’s post they were so familiar to me.

 

 

It seems that I always put odd bits together. The problem was that each part was to be a contributing factor to a much larger whole. I am going to work smaller. Just busy work in my hands.

So now I am off to the studio to find small amounts of the necessary pieces…short pieces of threads, no spools!, two needles, two pins, small scissors, scraps of cloth preferably from my old clothing, a small blank book for the days I just need to write it down, a pencil, a pen, and patience. Lots of patience to take my time and make sure that what I hold in my hand at the end is a visual interpretation of what was on my mind and in my heart. And all of it must keep me company and be ready to cooperate….it is going to be the perfect container for all my hopes in finding a new way to work.

Soon I will show you what the container looks like. For now I am going to forage for parts.

Til later.

Inner Navigations

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Okay the studio is now drying out. It will take until I return from Australia to dry out enough to do the ceiling repairs. In the meantime I am ignoring the mess to complete some sewing. When I first turned on my machine there was an “Er” notice on the stitch width screen. Before I burst into tears I changed to another outlet in the extension cord. Magic! It worked. Nothing like having almost everything you have in electronic parts being made in China. Here are pictures of what I will deal with later this afternoon when all sewing is put away.

And our fixit man searching for the sources of the leaks.

When I finish cleaning up my studio will look like this….hopefully.

But for this to happen I need to have a major purge of things in the studio and storage room of supplies. I need someone to give a bunch of things to. I have a private student coming next week and maybe she can use some of it. The Art Group returns this Sunday and there is a chance I can pawn off some to them.

There are still way too many books that are going unused….to much paper that I will never use up….just way too many bits and pieces that at one time showed some promise. They have not kept their word and I am tired of forcing them into service. It serves no purpose to pile up finished work any more than it does to keep all the parts of that work.

My fixit man suggested ever so slightly that I might have a “hoarding” problem. No, I have the problem of most artists working in mixed media…..everything looks usable!

The funniest bit about this mess is that I stored so many “necessary” rocks and soils in cardboard cartons on the floor. I think my soil experiments for pigments are over and all those lumps will be deposited into a low spot in the yard as soon as I can heft them out of here.

Why I did not want to spend my life as an artist painting small botanicals is beyond me. It would have been a much better choice, easier to store, more marketable in a world where thinking about the message of art is passe and matching up to couches or filling a space across from the toilet seem much more likely to find a home.

When I clean it all up I hope to be left with just my two small presses, watercolors, brushes, pencils, etching plates and wood blocks, inks and the tools necessary. Anything and I mean ANYTHING not related to that is going away. And only a few books will remain on mostly empty shelves. There will be no more “see a space,  fill it” around here.

My journals will of course be on those shelves for, like I told my students,

“Make marks, write words because when you are old and in one of those beds that lifts you up while you are hooked up, your children will come in and ask, ‘What can I do for you, mom?’ and you can say, ‘Bring me my journals.’ Then and only then, because of those marks and words, you can relive all those times that seemed worthwhile.”

Yesterday was such a bright sunny day, Lee and I had our first drink on the porch. Thoughts of Spring are with us this week as temperatures stay pleasant before that snowflake shows up on my Iphone weather later this week.

So this was just an update…..next time it will be back to some pretty pictures and some order.

Til then.

Good Grief!

Posted on by Sandy Webster

This is an old collage I made about how the black bird brings bad news. Here I am in my safe house and the bugger arrives.

I should have been paying better attention to the crazy crow slamming himself into his reflection in the window downstairs. Who ever said that crows are smart. He has now covered his rival with excrement…..good grief!

But the bad news is this. Flooded studio.

It pours through the floor and wall corner under loads of stacked shelves and filling every carton of saved soils for pigments that are stored under the shelves.

But that water that does not make it down the outside wall to flood that storage floor fills the ceiling and runs through selected pockets by the drip….continuous drip.

And then goes down another outside wall to flood the floor in the corner near the work table in the corner.

And of course dripping through ceiling lights along the way.

And dripping continually onto my work table in the center of the studio.

But here is the good news…..So far only the ceiling will need replaced.

So in the last few days all I have done is use every towel except for Lee and my bath towels to drop along the small lakes on the floor, pull up the soaked ones to put only two in a garbage bag to take upstairs a few steps at a time because they are so heavy. Lee is not much help here as his leg seems to be crook.

The sound of the haul upstairs is like this: SPLAT (tossing the bag up 2 steps) and then Clomp, Clomp as I follow along. That takes whatever seventeen divided by two is….my brain is useless right now.

Then a haul out to the laundry room, lift with everything it takes to get the bag of soaked towels onto the dryer so they can be manhandled out into the washer for a good spin and then toss them into the dryer. This is repeated every two hours except when we stop and head to bed only to see the large lakes in the morning.

So far I am seeing little let up. Our fixit guy came over on Friday when I noticed the lakes and said that I had neglected to shut the valve to a cracked outside spigot to the “off” position after filling the fish pond and with the very cold weather, it froze. He will eventually get around to replacing the pipe that he has now taped securely to the “off” position. Likely he will do it all when he has to come back to replace the ceiling.

In the meantime I am looking at this as the crow telling me to get rid of everything in the studio that is not essential.

I am reduced to taking direction from an angry, stupid crow.

Be back when it dries out here and that crow kills itself!

Oh, and one more bit of good news. Our daughter has ordered an automatic deer feeder that is solar powered and can be timed as to when it sprays corn for forty feet. This is because she does appreciate the brace of cool air at dawn with buckets of feed in each hand while navigating the slope down and up.

It is one of those generational things….different ideas of what gives us joy!

 

Just Thinking, Just Talking, Just…….

Posted on by Sandy Webster

The silver point drawing did not work….the surface is too rough. But the watercolors hold a line on the gessoed surface. I am just picking up things at random around the studio. Things small enough to sit in front of me. This is the first twelve inches and so far stick of willow, a rock, a cork, an awl that I use for etching, an irresistible little bamboo brush and a stone clothed in cane toad hide with a strip of rawhide. I had to tell myself to stop or the whole five feet would be filled in one day.

When I finish this strip I will roll it up into a bottle and cork it with the addition of wax. Then I will have to find someone to put it in the ocean for me. It would do little good to drop it in a creek or body of water in western North Carolina where it would smash against a rock and ruin the images as it returned to paper pulp. No, I need the ocean. I need to know it took time to get somewhere.

But in the meantime I will keep making these scrolls of the bits of things of my life…my artist life. And one day they will ride a wave to shore and someone will see a bit of me when I needed to remind myself of who I am.

And, please do not tell me that the ocean is full of the unwanted already. I don’t want to hear it. The wine bottle will turn into beach glass and the scroll of images will feed the imagination of the finder. There will not be any contact information on the scroll, but maybe a story of why. It is the one small piece of magic that I can do for now. Isn’t that enough for anyone?

I put that picture in there because no one wants to just look at words. And I needed to change the subject.

Here is a message and my response from this week regarding the last blog.

 “You write so beautifully. I feel like you’re just talking to me.”

 “Thank you, actually it is because I really do not have someone on a daily basis to talk to so the blog helps me have a conversation on what it is I think about or remember, or need to say “out loud”. And besides there are no interruptions when I am talking…a one way conversation! If someone is painfully “listening”, I do not see it on their face….I don’t see them waiting to get a word in edgewise.”
And here is another thing I wrote this week in response to Robyn Gorden’s post of poetry and pictures.
The poem:

When the things you did not ask to happen
have placed a heavy burden
on your heart and mind
it is okay to take time
to rest and to breathe
practicing the art
of surrender,
the bravery
of trusting,
for this, right here,
is peace in uncertainty.
It is not acting as though
the unknown does not exist,
but it is finding freedom
from the fear
and disturbance of it,
knowing well within the soul
the unknown is still unknown,
but it has no hold on you
it has no hold on the present moment,
you are still free
to rest and breathe here.
– Morgan Harper Collins

And my response:

 “I wake early and at 4:30 in the morning I read this post, these words, see these pictures. Already fresh from bed, I try to breathe and rest. Then I glance into my rear view window and see me there, standing on the side of the road, the me that was me just months ago, and find it hard to speed away. I want so bad to go back and give her a lift. More rest and a breath away from such longing is hard to do. But thank you for a place to start.”

It has been a contemplative week. The dreary days, the waiting for something that I have no idea about, the looking up the driveway and then wishing I hadn’t. We all have days like that. And if we don’t, we should. Someone needs to just remind us once in awhile that we need to just rest and breathe, rest and breathe.

And more pictures for the patient reader while I get on to planning my trip to Australia and thinking of their bright warm sunny days and sunny students. I need to get on with applying for my visa to teach there. I need to check on my hotel in Melbourne. I need to get a box of interesting things in the mail to Australia to avoid having to haul them through airports.

I am good. I have a smile on my face now. Here are some pictures as promised.

Til next time. Now off to share a beer with Lee.