Wrapping It Up – For Now

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I have set up the last of the 8 x 10 gessoed board’s subject matter. Sticking with the Nature theme, I just picked a selection of things from the large rock and stick bowl in the foyer.  More of the things that are just picked up and once in the hand, can not be put back.

gessoed-board-3-subjects

I like the feel of these pieces. They came from New Zealand and Tasmania mostly. Very seldom are there things from “here” in that bowl. It must weigh at least thirty pounds. Each thing in it told a story that is now mostly forgotten. Sad in a way. I wish I knew that the only thing left in a few short years of slipping these things into my pockets would be the feel and not where I was exactly and who I was with and why it caught my eye in the first place. Maybe, just maybe I would have left it lie there in the sand by a pounding surf of some place so far from where it was going to end up. Maybe. Do children want their mother’s bowl of rocks? I think they have their own and would feel badly having to say, “No thank you.”  Someone should start a home for the collected things like these that meant so much to someone so eager to own them.

I wrote a poem about them, those rocks and will add it here.

Owning Stones

 

I take the stones to own.

There is no thought

given that they are

removed from their

home, their place.

Once in my hand they

are mine. And other

things I own

will be left behind

to accommodate

the stones’ passage

back to my home,

my place.

Here they are arranged

to my liking…sorted

stacked and circled.

Each stone offering to

be held again and

again as I make them

into my story.

Each bearing the

marks of memory

from their own.

 Here is the finished board behind a mat and a detail of just how badly these boards were gessoed.

gessoed-board-with-watercolors-sticks-and-stones

gessoed-board-with-watercolors-3-detail

See all those holes and rough spots. They look and feel more like plastered panels and are the most thirsty surface I have ever painted on.

I am tidying up some other unfinished work in the studio. These books whose covers are altered images of details of large paintings are printed on both sides and folded in such a way that the front cover is three layers of imagery. For some reason I stopped making these in the middle of the assembling and decided this past week to finish the bindings. It is just a simple two signature three hole binding with the addition of complementary beads. What I do with them now is anyone’s guess. But at least they are finished and packed into clear envelopes.

layered-fold-cover-small-journals-lo-res

They are just plain blank journals and if it weren’t for the complexity of fitting the images together in the layout and printing and folding, I don’t think I would have bothered with them. But I like the look and feel of them. Probably the feel is nice because I waxed the covers.

A friend is coming down this week to work in the studio. We will do gelatin plates. Just playing really. And that is hard for me. To just do something because it might be fun. I need it to be more complicated than that. I need to be saying something or at the very least learning something. Maybe I can learn to just have fun, just expect nothing more from myself. But it is hard for me. I think I am still dogged by the two questions, “Am I doing enough?” and “Am I doing it right.?”

I remember spending so much time asking women artist my age and older if they asked themselves these questions. Every one of them said, “No.” And then once a friend and I asked a ouija board on the internet. It took a good long time to spell out the word, “maybe.” How silly is that? Not long after I asked a printmaker/artist in Kentucky and she looked at me closely and said that the answer to my questions was, “It doesn’t matter.” I was quite relieved at the time and thought it was all behind me. Now I am not so sure.

But I will have some fun this week with my friend and next week I will show pictures of what my fun in the studio looked like.

 

 

 

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.

Dry Point Etchings Heading in New Directions

Posted on by Sandy Webster

owl and several emus

I reworked the owl and boat etching to get the blacks blacker and ran about six more prints. With the emu etching I stayed a bit loose and found that the one emu was enough. The smaller one in the background of the photo just added confusion. But and this is a big “but”, I cannot get rid of the edge of these plexi-glass plates. It shows in the print no matter how well I wipe it off. The saw and then the sander create a texture that just soaks up the ink and will not release it. And of course it is never evenly colored. Blotchy at best. So I was thinking this morning, “what happens if I cut off the border and use the emu another way?”

owl and emu

AND I wanted to color in his beautiful large brown eyes with watercolor paint. Once those eyes got the color it changed him into something more animated, something more lively. So I decided to take him back to Australia by way of using the paper tea bags from tea drunk down under and shifu threads I had made using the soils of Australia to color them. I like the result below.

emu stitched

This piece is signed by the colors of Australia on the left and my name and color from my driveway on the right. It is on an 11 x 14 paper and will be matted in cream with an eight by ten opening. When I finished that one, I went to the gum tree from two weeks ago and chose an artist proof done in an umber ink. I matched it with some tea bags and more shifu threads stitched into the piece. Again it is signed by Australia and myself.

gum tree stitched

They are reminiscent of the altered wood block prints that I scanned into my computer a few years back and then added the cloth and other bits from Australia. I sold out of most of those while in Australia in 2014.  Here is an image of one of those.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I like the new ones better. Something about using the limited edition of prints made with dry point etching on plexi-glass. Only so many can be printed and then the burr of the line gets pushed down and does not hold the ink as well.

It has been an interesting process getting the details using this type of printmaking technique. There is still a whole lot of daylight between Rembrandt’s etchings and mine….but I feel better about my own the more I do.

As far as the stitching into them goes, it seems a natural influence of the scrapbook pages I have also been working on. Here is the fifth decade.

Scrapbook fifth decade lo res

Dry Point Etching Inspired by Another Artwork

Posted on by Sandy Webster

owlkayak

This is a four foot square canvas I painted a few years ago. It is the only one of the original six that I still have in its previous form. Others have sold or been donated, or covered over. I wanted to use just part of the owl and the boat behind it to be the subject for a dry point etching on plexiglass.

Here is the cropped image and the etching in progress.

Dry point etching of owl and boat with tool

Dry point etching of owl detail

I managed to pull eleven prints from the plate so far and will do more after I closely examine them to see if more etching is necessary.  It is the same size as the tree one done earlier, about 5 x 7 inches.

Owl etchings on line

Owl etching

The next one I will work on is the emu. I photographed him outside our classroom in Halls Gap last March. They have such beautiful big brown eyes. I altered my photograph to look more like the marks that need to be etched to get the flow of his feathers.

Dry point etching plate of emu

I only have the one tool that seems able to scratch the surface of the plexiglass. It is a simple one that I bought in Melbourne at a art supply store just off Flinders Street and a short walk from my hotel. The metal etching tool from undergraduate school days needs to be sharpened to be of much use to me so I will do that down at the shop or on my belt sander in the studio.

Maybe a kangaroo for the final plate this size. For now I am taking a few days off to spend with company and just playing in the studio.