Finishing Yard Work – Getting Ready for Recovery

Posted on by Sandy Webster

These yellow irises are quite stunning close  up. And there are more than ever along the driveway this year.

Even the Siberian irises are more plentiful.

And this is the first time we have seen some of their offspring show up white.

The deer leave these along but have ravaged all hostas not five feet from the house, azaleas further out in the yard and anything along the top tier of the stepped plantings on the other side of the drive. It is only because we have fed the deer and it is a thing that Lee still does each morning. So of course they see anything we have as a food source.

But the garden shop informed me that Eucalyptus was deer retardant. So I bought all seven that they had. Six went in among the bushes they have paired down along the driveway and one I am keeping on the porch in a pot.

I am not sure how long they will last. But just the idea of having something like this in the yard and house is nice. When I ask the local florist if they have bunches of Eucalyptus they tell me only during bride bouquet season. Funny, I think most people want it year round….especially those using it for contact printing.

The only other news this week is that I will have to bring studio work upstairs to work on for the next couple of weeks. By this time next week I will be in one of those big boots from foot surgery and getting up and down the stairs will be problematic.

I ordered memory sticks to move material from this computer in the downstairs office to my laptop upstairs so I can work on photos and some writings.

The small sheets colored with the watercolors made with Australian soils will come upstairs to be stitched into and bound together.

There are the rest of the new Norwegian crime stories on my Kindle to read. And I will order the new book by Jon Meacham titled, The Soul of America. He has written about several presidents over the years and after hearing his interview on NPR, I think this might be a book for most of us to read that are living in the nightmare of the present administration.

We are having a small dinner party this week and I want to put some things in the freezer to make cooking easier for both of us later on.

Til next time.

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.

The Reason for Writing “Kind Gestures”

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I don’t have any pictures for this blog entry. If I did one would be the entrance to a diner, a diner in a small southern town. There would be blue chipped paint on the door and a sign hanging inside the window that said, “Open”. Then there would be a picture of the town taken from the top of hill looking down Main Street. And if you had a magnifying glass, you could make out the diner, Marty’s. You might also make out Veronica’s Boutique, a framing shop, the library, the corner gas station and the town park and cemetary. All the places that came to life as I attempted to tell a story whose action only takes place in one day.

I wrote almost all of this story about three years ago.

A friend pointed out, correctly, that I seemed a bit uncomfortable when in the company of a group of women. She was right. Groups of men are easier for me. There is something so familiar about them from my childhood. A comfort that drove me to write and do artwork about much later in graduate school.

She was not only right, but I was being unfair by staying away from women in groups. One on one I was fine. I thought of women as being more honest when singled out. In groups their personal stories changed to fit some desire to be “one of the girls.” Or so I thought.

I really needed to pay better attention. I needed to not be so sure that, “Being in a hardware store with the low rumble of men’s voices was so much better than being in a beauty parlor with the chattering of more than one woman.”

So I took my yellow dog pad of paper to a private place here on our property. I wrote down seven women’s names. Next to the names I wrote an age.

And one at a time I listened to what they had to say. I gave them one fictional day only for me to care about them. And even the ones that took on a less than favorable light, I gave second chances. I listened to each one and made a place for them in my story.

When I finished writing what was later to be titled, Kind Gestures, I realized that some of the women did not even like my company, let alone the company of others in the book. And I wonder what it was about them that made me put them in the background and on the periphery of what was happening that day in August.

I actually miss them. I miss listening to them. They are so much more than I shared in this short novella.

Louise Penny who wrote the captivating stories about Three Pines, a small imagined town in Canada, said in one of later ones that while living with her husband’s dementia, Three Pines was a place she could go to. I think she went there because as a writer, there is a control that might just not be in our daily lives and we need to feel that something can happen by just our saying so.

Oliver, North Carolina might  be my very own Three Pines. I have wanted to go back there and see more of these women and the lives they live.

When I wrote the story I thought like most writers that I might try to get it published. First by some famous publishing house, then maybe even self-publishing. But I have lost interest in doing that. It takes time and one hell of a lot of self-promotion that is not anything I have time or interest in.

But I did feel that unless I let these women’s stories out, I could not go back to see how they are. My time with them in that one day might be all there was.

So here they all are in the story titled, Kind Gestures. By putting the story on my website, I can do just what they and I wanted….a place for them to be seen and heard.

It is just a story. The kind of story that if you had a series of Saturdays in a bar and a comfortable stool and just one person to listen, it would be enough. Saturdays and bar stools are far and few between for me at my age, so this will have to do.

Next blog comes with pictures!

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.