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I am going to Asheville, NC tomorrow and stay overnight with a friend. We try to get all the interesting things seen and done in just twenty-four hours. This is a photo I took in The Tobacco Barn on one of my trips there. There is always an effort to make things look interesting, make you want to come back and look again.

I can always find interesting things that fill empty spaces in my work.

Some of what the Tobacco Barn offers simply will not fit anywhere in the house. Like this bronze boar.

Or this ostrich keeping company with a chicken.

Or this stag and bunnies combination.

Or…..

The Biltmore Estate is an attraction in Asheville. I have been there a few times. I even dressed for the occasion of viewing the Clothes of Downton Abbey.

Just being in Asheville and you fall under the influence.

I do like the design of this particular fountain. The way the water is cascading in the stone work and the fierceness of that fish slithering down from the perfectly formed shell. It’s very nice.

Whatever I bring home from Asheville this weekend will be small and/or useful. I need to find some tool that will make rivets, and I need a second inexpensive steaming pot to use in a workshop in St. Louis week after next. Maybe some new tongs. Steaks from Trader Joes are on the list.  I suppose what I really need is to just go there and come home with as little as possible. My house is full enough as it is with the things I couldn’t leave behind.

I am just going to have a really good time with a very good friend and catch up over a single malt scotch. Perfect. Maybe I will take some pictures of more things I loved and left.

Next week I am taking a smorgasbord of printmaking techniques for five days. It is going to be a very good next two weeks between Asheville, printmaking and St. Louis.

 

 

 

 

I am working on the game box that I started at Arrowmont the weekend before last. The cubes are to be rolled by each player. Also each player has a round box with a spinning wooden arrow in the lid and a fold out game board. There is the spinning device that looks like an egg that gives a consequence. There is the little man who must be arranged into yoga positions on his platform and there are ten cards of different positions. Below is the first mock up for the game board itself. I am going to love coloring it in and decorating the cards.

The box is now painted and waxed with the dividers glued in place. It is so much fun making these things fit and giving them a special place to housed. It is going to be a game of Finding Inner Peace. Numbers need to be added to the cubes…..some place off-center would be good. And of course I need to make the little things that will be moved along the path.

Below are some other boxes with fitted bits and pieces that I have done.

The Gardener’s Box now in the Arrowmont Permanent Collection. I even saw this last week when I was there. It was in a glass case near the painting studio.

The Small Edition Box made for BookWorks a few years ago and below the box that all these pieces fit into. That was really fun putting together.

And one of the boxes inspired by a postcard from an art museum. It was an image of a Chinese Puzzle Box. I needed to see if I could do it and then made two. This Chinese themed one and another Japanese one.

On another note, this past week after meeting a young woman at Arrowmont and hearing she is in need of books for her art department, I am now seeing some empty spaces in my studio shelves. She has received at least one third of what I had in basketry, book and paper arts and whatever other book I was more than willing to give away.

It is time to put things where they are needed and stop thinking that place is here.  More on that later. More on a lot of things later.

 

 

In the early 90s I had collected quite a few pieces from Africa. Mostly they were textiles and baskets that I would buy from my favorite importers who I would see at conferences. It was also at the time that apartheid was coming to a close in South Africa and the Turnley brothers had published a book of their amazing photographs of the transition of living conditions for those steeped in those political conditions. I bought the book simply because once picked up, it was impossible to put down. I used the faces of two couples from the book. It gave me an opportunity to really study the faces, the expressions that reflected the harshness of their situations. And especially their closeness in hard times. These two works were never exhibited as I remember, but I could never quite part with them either. I still love looking into their faces and the bits and pieces from my studio that I chose to represent their individual surroundings. I have always felt the use of the images and African culture was an appropriation of something not my own. Although I can be amazed that I actually got the likenesses so well with painting on tapa cloth, they still were not photos that I took and the photo imagery is what makes them work.

Later during the war of the former Yugoslavia I would cross this line again, and for four years of that war collect the newspaper images that I simply could not throw away. And after a year of collecting them and the letters I wrote to a journalist and the president, I covered coats made from old blankets with them. Four years of coats that showed in images how the war changed not only its victims but how it was reported. I still have those coats and the child’s casket that holds all those photos and letters and the remains of flowers that I picked for those women who endured so much. I have no idea how to get rid of them all, but I will, some day.

But back to the influences of the tribal. I made this small tapestry of a young woman in a doorway wearing what she sees in her landscape. At the time I was weaving baskets on the loom using a warp of threads and filling in every shed change with fibers only used to make baskets. This small tapestry had a lovely time out this past year on exhibit called “The Art of the Cloth.” The image below it is a chair I made in 1994 with Don Brundrick. It is mountain laurel and all the coverings are African mud cloth.

 

And one more image of gourd baskets made with knotting techniques and a collection of beads from Africa. One long gourd was cut in two pieces. the knotted cap with beads and bronze pieces closes the top and is filled with clay beads from there. The long neck of the gourd has brass coins and beads that give a muffled jingle sound when it is tipped back and forth. The cut end of it is also knotted closed. These along with the fertile female figure with a clay head and coiled head dress for a closure still sit together on a chest in the foyer with African baskets and the two couples portraits close by.

 

I don’t do work like this anymore. But I still love the feel, the smell, the look and the sound of these pieces. They share space with other gourd pieces, a Masai yogurt pouch with a hide cover and unbelievably strong odor inside and an incised gourd from the Smithsonian Museum. So much of this work has the mark and identity of the hands that made them.