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Alone in the Studio

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Sadie is looking for the students we had in the studio last week. All she could find was the local turkey family. It is just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday and the leaves are leaving rather quickly.

I am busy in the studio working on pieces for the exhibit next April when I return from Australia. Here is one of the work tables with all the pieces (actually just about half) needed to make decisions on placement, arrangement and commitment. I am combining papers, prints, cloth and bits of Nature onto boards.

I like lining up lines that relate to the overall “landscape” of the piece.

And I am just showing the detail shots of some of the four finished pieces.

Some like the one above include a wood engraving I did a few years back on a paper purchased in China.

Some are a bit narrative using several cropped wood block relief prints about my yard and fish pond.

Here is one that I thought was finished but decided to add just a bit of an etching done in Australia.

These details are feeding into plans for extra small and more intimate pieces.

While in Japan we would walk very early in the mornings, often in the mist. I carved a wood engraving of the small stacked rice stems in the fields along the road just the other side of small bamboo fences. The “outtakes” of these prints are coming in handy now for the new work.

This afternoon I will take all the built spacers that have to fit in between the glass and the collage and cover them with black paper before the tedious job of fitting them into the frame.  I should just buy black foam core material for this, but hate to waste the scraps of museum board so cut and layer up the thicknesses I need. If I paid for professional framing, the cost would be so much more and I rather like the challenge of doing it.

Last night we went over to a neighbors for a bit of refreshment. This is what greeted us in the front yard.

Isn’t that lit tree sweet? It just sits there in the woods as a reminder that more than Thanksgiving is coming. I am not all that ready for any of it. The year went too fast. And I was reminded last night by another neighbor that I used to be more social with taking turns hosting gatherings of neighbors and their friends. Then, he reminded me, I declared that I no longer wanted to do it, so take me off the list. It did not take very long before it was more strangers than friends that gathered around the table….but even some of the “friends” I realized I did not care to spend an evening with, much less feed them.

Once you become part of a community there are expectations of performance.  And I am simply too much beyond having the willingness to participate. It was a lovely evening with good food and very good company. Lots of catching up with some of the neighbors I do enjoy and we could come home not feeling we had to host the next one. I think there can be rewards for being just a touch ornery. Age with a sense of limited time can do that to a person.

Now I should be thinking about the menu for Thanksgiving….something to feed nine people I very much look forward to feeding and spending time with. I can already hear the conversations of art and politics…..opinions on both are easy to share over good food and wine.

Hopefully some of them will compose a letter for the Trump bowl made by one of the students last week to be mailed to the White House soon.

*And if any of you want to contribute to the bowl, I will send you the address to have your letter added.

And just for fun here is some of the art that showed up at Art Group last Sunday. I am proud to contribute dryer lint to my fellow artist so he can add to the mystique of these pieces. The one in the foreground is a “Fake News Detector.”

We could not get it to work in my house….too much National Public Radio.

Til the holiday next week is over.

Sharing Studio Space with Students

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Perfect view from the studio doors this past week. Wonderful work being done just this side of the view.

I met two fellow students in a paper making class this summer and offered them an opportunity to come to the studio and work for a week on the things that mattered to them. They stayed in the apartment and arrived daily at 8:30 am, went back for an hour lunch break and then back to the work in the studio. All three of us learned so much about not only what matters to each of us but how can we express it through processes and materials.

One of them brought the most astoundingly beautifully marked papers. For me it was overwhelming on how it would be possible to know where to start with such a selection. She is recognized for teaching mark making which is not exactly calligraphy but shares a suredness in the way of handling a tool in such a way as to literally “flow” over a surface to make the most appealing marks.

Here are some of the materials and compositions in progress.

She ended up giving me the grey piece in the upper left of this image as I saw so much in it, so much of what seemed to matter to her in observations of Nature simply came alive in this bit of a sketch for her. I am pleased to have it hanging in the studio for inspiration. And here are more of her materials.

I taught her how to spin clothing patterns and thai kozo into threads to add to her work which is all about “excavation”  and seeing what is in front of her steps and what lies below the surface. Her sense of design and careful manipulation of pieces until it is “just right” has been a good influence on my hurried pace in the studio. I will look to her gift of the small piece hanging in the studio to keep me focused on slowing down a bit.

The other student came prepared to make a container to send our present and pathetic president a message, in fact several messages. We chose my pilates bowl to use as a container form after thinking her already blown up balloons were simply not adequate for the message she wanted to send to the white house.

She wrote her own messages on the papers used to make the form. And it was no easy task removing the bowl from the ball.

Lots of shellac on the inside helped keep the form sturdy. I added the first message to the bowl.

This student is looking to get the bowl filled with letters to the president and mailed by the end of the year or at the very latest January 21st marking his first year in office. If you would like to contribute simply contact me and I will send her name and address so you can send it on to her. For me personally, it felt plenty good to put my two cents in.

While waiting for layers of papers to dry on the bowl, she also learned how to do collographs that will go into long concertina books about her and two companions’ travels along the Camino Trail in Spain. I am quite sure she will be getting a small press and continue printing images. Here are the ones for the books she plans. I really liked her use of simple symbolic forms to represent the Camino.

I am so glad that I made the offer to these two. The five days were filled with passions about work, emotions that were hard to keep in check and a generosity that enhanced the week for all of us. Their enthusiasm for talking about art in general and theirs in particular was nothing short of enriching for myself and my husband as well when it came to wine time and trips out for pizza.

Tomorrow is the monthly Art Group meeting and I will talk about how good this week was and how they wanted my sheets on how to form an art group and questions to ask yourself about being an artist. And I do have to say that another good thing, very good thing, about the week is that a short stop by the grocery store on our way to the pizza brewery I found the latest 19 Crimes wine stopped up with my second 19th crime cork. I love that it was aged for just 30 days in rum barrels…no more, no less.

We served it to friends who know their reds and were leaving to return home to Canada. It passed inspection.  Just a small gathering of very good friends to say good bye to them over good food, wine and spirits.

I also wanted my Canadian friend to see the results of his lesson on using my earth pigments to make an oil paint to surface design papers. This would be a very early marbling technique and was quite addictive for me using up the last of his bath of a more traditional solution and solvent.

And then my adaptation here in my own studio using corn starch, mineral spirits and feathers to flip the colors around on the surface.

So now I have more materials, more inspiration, more new friends who hopefully will return to make us all think and laugh. I know where to keep the friends and the inspiration but stuffing more papers in drawers to use later is not such a good idea when I am looking to downsize here in the studio. But it is a technique I can teach in Collaboration with Nature classes.

It is down to just Lee and I now. One has returned to Asheville, two back to Charlotte and the friends from Canada will return tomorrow, right about the time I am showing the Art Group what good company I kept this week.

Til next week when hopefully I make something with all this inspiration.

New Works from Old Ideas

Posted on by Sandy Webster

This assemblage is in a 16″ x 20″ frame and has hung in the guest rooms of our homes since shortly after we moved here. I probably put it together in 1994 or 1995 after walking the property and finding this irresistible piece of bark with tracking marks on the inner side. I wondered if it could be a language and perhaps a message for something.

It is a pitiful photo as I just took it through the glass from several feet away. But I remember thinking that the message could have been for moths. Maybe they were to get in formation and go somewhere together. I stitched fancy stitches as paths with my sewing machine using gold thread and twined together grasses and sticks with fine brass wire. All of it was mounted on a heavy tapa cloth paper sheet and attached to a larger lokta paper on board.

I loved this piece and I think I still do. The moths came from a printed tissue paper used for wrapping gifts. I bought a couple sheets of it because I really liked the colors and soft details of the moths. I carefully cut out one of each, and then some, to position around the bark message. Then I added the other bits because it seemed like a good idea.

It is more than twenty years later and I am still drawn to things in the natural world. While working yesterday on new pieces for an exhibition next spring I remembered this piece and thought of the similarities. Here is a photo of one of the new pieces…..and it actually is in the same size frame.

Even the palette is similar. In this “new” work I am using actual bits and pieces from Nature that have been altered in some way, contact prints from gathered plants and etchings or wood engravings of other gathered plants done on my press in the studio. I like fitting the things together, arranging them on a fixed size surface. The ones I have completed so far remind me of pieced quilts. The sewing machine has been used in the attaching of one piece to another.

The first two of these are heavily influenced by the Australian Travel piece from a few weeks ago. It takes so much cutting and piecing that even the bits cut off might be just the right thing for the next one, or the one after that.

I don’t think I ever stopped doing this…fitting bits together. Here is one of the HomeWorks done for John C Cambpell Craft Shop a few years ago.

And these were influenced by the Curiosity Cabinet series.

And all of these had old collographs I did in undergraduate school as background “wall papers”. There is only one left that I keep with the Expedition of Elsewhere: the Evidence as part of my artist statement. And that whole exhibition was based on discoveries in the natural world.

And more recently these that sold through the Craft Shop as well after being framed in shadow boxes and “landscaped”.

Back in the eighties at Arrowmont a friend and I thought we should try exchanging materials. She used colored plastic covered telephone wires and I used lots of gathered plant materials. We did not last an hour before trading back. Each of us totally incapable of working with such foreign materials. Once in our hands the other’s material was seen as limiting our access to whatever we wanted to say. It didn’t work. I ended up twining a small basket in bright colors with buttons of all things on the ends of the spokes. I made her work with her materials. She just soaked my sticks and grasses, got offended by the smell and feel of them and gave them back.

I am not sure we can escape from what our hands want to touch.

Anywhere that is where I am now. I am going off to lunch, then back to these little fellows that should benefit Planned Parenthood in a time of angry, ignorant men making choices for women’s rights.

 

Using the XCut XPress With New Bed and Botanicals

Posted on by Sandy Webster

While in Asheville I purchased a cutting board at a kitchen shop for $11.99. It measured 13″ by 19 3/4″ and I had Lee cut it down to 8 1/2″ by 18″ because there was a cut out handle near one end. I had already cut a mylar piece for keeping the surface easy to clean and although it was 8 1/2″ by 20″, it was easy to chop off the two inches. I use my board shear to cut the mylar but tape both sides where the cut will be so as not to shatter the plastic.

Next I took the still damp leaves from doing contact prints on the scarves and placed them into the press between various sheets of papers. Here is the first using Stonehenge printmaking papers.

I like the softness of this and plan to use them as they are in pieces for new work like the Australian Travel panel I finished week before last. Here is a reminder of that piece. New works for the exhibit at River Gallery in Chattanooga next April will be similar to it and the small Messages from the Driveway series.

After trying the leaves on printmaking papers, I decided to just use copy or office papers that are about 24 lb.

I am taking advantage of the new longer length bed we made. I must say the bed is not as thick as the one that came with the XCut XPress but only by 1/8 inch or so, and it was easy to pack in the difference and increase the pressure.

I will use these softer prints to try some of my dry point etchings over. Especially since I have so many etchings of Eucalyptus trees, leaves, and pods.

The embossings are nice and not so easy to see in these images. But they invited me to try another tack with them.

Drawing in with pencil, after trying and failing to get silver point to adhere to the surface. If I gesso the surface before imprinting leaves, silver point would have worked. Next time. So I softly used a graphite pencil to emphasize the natural leaf marks. And, of course, water colored the leaf. This was fun and they will be used as well in the new works with prints on cloth and other dry point images.

My final play for the day yesterday was using my iron water on the papers and then placing leaves and blooms in between. Rolling through twice was not such a good idea as the smaller leaf created its own shadow. But these I will stitch into and disguise that….I think.

What I learned is that it is messy bringing those wet smelly leaves into the studio. Trying to sort out the ones that were flat and trying to not get too much dampness on the papers was a challenge. I have already stained my new longer cut felts. I will cut new ones from felt that I bought to make those despicable little pin cushions in the likeness of a despicable little fingered man….but that is another story.

Today I will do some more drawing and printing into and over the papers I amassed yesterday. And I will get out my local and Australian earth pigments to do some coloring into the botanical contact prints.  I must say the hard part is picking out which side of the printed papers to use. The easy answer is to turn them into a book so both sides of the paper can be seen….but isn’t everybody doing that already with their contact prints?

More stitching and coloring is the try for today….next week maybe some gessoed papers to do silver point on after printing.

Til then I am cleaning out all those dead leaves and giving them a toss. There happens to be bunches of fresh ones in the foyer waiting til I want to work with Eucalyptus again. And then there are all those ones that I used my burning tool on that will find their way into this new work. Remember these?

And my new frames came yesterday so I can cut the museum board the right size to start planning on the layouts. I just have this next week to play before I have private students taking over my thinking (which is a good thing) and my studio the following week.

So I had better get to it.