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Driveway Messages – Resolved – for now

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Remember that I did not like the work I had done the week before. It did not have the layeredness that I wanted. That idea of receiving messages while pursuing messages. So I took all the etched plates, inked them up and tried different fabrics and papers.

The tiny plates of asphalt patches went onto several types of cloth and paper. I liked the cotton ones made from rusted bits from here at home. There also was this sheer fabric in a pale blue and soft burnt sienna. I have had that cloth for years thinking it would make nice overlays in books. It was one of those lovely things you touch because it was rolled up and tied with a pretty ribbon and popped out of a barrel in a shop called Pettygrew or something like that. All very charming and successfully staged toward purchasing something….anything.

The etchings of tree shadows and my own shadow were printed on more odd bits of cloth and paper. On the right are the scraps of an Egyptian cotton that I made pajamas out of. On the left is just plain tracing paper. Center is more of that rusted cloth. I even found some cotton cloth that I demonstrated earth pigment coloring on using soils from here….actually the driveway…..so very appropriate.

And after they had all dried on the print line I took them down and began cutting them up and piecing them together to get the layers of mixed messages. And in the middle of putting bits and pieces together, especially the shadows of leaves, I remembered the samples of contact printing done in workshops as demonstrations of documenting place. These too were added into the piecing.

At first I tried hand stitching overlaps of the pieces with black thread. It looked way too “loving hand look.” So I had gone from the coldness of using just scanned images of etchings overlaying shadow photos to fabric with hand stitching. They were one hundred and eighty degrees from each other and neither one was looking like what I wanted to say.

But because it was a day for mending and the machine was sitting there waiting for something else to do, I started stitching the paper and cloth together like I was a piece quilter.

I ended up with four finished pieces that now have newly delivered frames. Here is one of them.

I like them. They are the messages of leaves, shadows and marks that I step over daily on my way to find other correspondences in my mailbox.

The challenge of working with a limited palette on such a variety of materials was good for me. Then how to finish the backs and mount them….more challenges.

It was surprising how quickly I went through most of the etched cloth that hung on the line just to get these four. I would like to do more work like this. But in a book form? I think that will have to be made of something else.

For now I have cleaned the studio and just plan on stitching into the dementia shawl. Funny how those same stitches look fine on the cloth shawl and perfectly lousy on these little pieced Driveway Messages.

Til next week.

A Waste of Time? – Rethinking – Stalling

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Okay an update from last week. I spend days trying to figure out how to get the shadows of leaves over other shadows. Thinking about the marks on the driveway. I made several transparency images in deep black to tape under the thin etching plates. Here they are keeping company with that deplorable pincushion that has escaped the company of like kind in the toilet paper drawer. But only to allow for daily jabs of frustration at his carelessness and stupidity. But I digress here, sorry.

And of course when I get a plan, I always assume it is going to work out just fine. So why bother to test out the theory with only one etched plate?

I make four the size of the image to be printed on the page. These I can use in different directions to look different. Then I make four small ones to use over text from a letter. These are tracings from asphalt patching marks that look very much like writing. And the good part is that I decide to use my Dremel tool to carve and scrape into the thin plates. There are going to be no clear lines, just shadowy blurs, which I thought at the time was a good thing.

They have to be taped onto the press bed because they are slipping and miss being directly over the photo image on the paper being passed through with them.

This is messy and very blurry and not always well lined up. But several sheets later I manage to get something that made me question why bother.

If I want the black image over the grey image, why not just do it all on the computer? It would line up easier. It would all be so much simpler. But it just misses that layering of messages that seems most important to what this book is about. And I think I would like to physically layer the marks on the page with stitching and/or cloth. What I have so far seems too cold, too letter press, too distant from the hand, the touch. So next might just be using those plates on cloth to fragment and stitch. Hand stitch the text….maybe.

So I am letting ideas percolate while I go back to other things. The plates are still laying there, handy and reminding me to find a perfect fabric. Also reminding me to just do a test page first and not assume just because it is a good thought, it is going to be a good product. Seems that is a hard lesson for some of us.

So I went back to the Specimen Journal pages.

This last image got me to thinking about the journaler’s tools. Here he is using the tweezers and magnifying glass. So the next several pages are all tools.

Besides all of this, I am watching the approach of Irma, trying to read a book called The 36 Hour Day about living with dementia, finishing off the latest Louise Penny Inspector Gamache novel, thinking about the pile of mending, getting involved in Australian students projects for next March, scheduling short times away from home, and wondering if I have lost the art of focusing.

Next week I am sure something more will get done and hopefully it will be done right. For now I will concentrate on just taking it a day at a time and make something even if it is only dinner and some cookies.

Til next week.

Trying to Decide the Marks to Make

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I am back in the studio thinking about this limited edition book about the messages from the driveway. The images have been selected, adjusted and sized. Etching plates have been cut to the same size. I was thinking etchings in black line over selected parts of these shadowy images. But what kind of marks to make the etchings? What do the marks mean? Are they extrapolations of marks already there in shadow form?

Several prints on paper have been made while I draw in ink over them to see what looks right. So far…nothing. I don’t want to give up on the idea. There would be only an edition of ten books to make, but anything over one requires more planning.

I played on the computer more with the images…adjusting the contrast and darkness. The shadowy grey seems to be the best so far. But marking the etching plates is a hang up. How dense should they be? Should they be half on the image, half off? Should they be placed so as to read as text? And why does any of this matter?

It just plain matters to me. I want all the marks and image to be cohesive and address the content of messages from the driveway as I traverse it back and forth to retrieve messages from my mailbox. Just drawing something or writing about it is not right. I can draw and I can write but I want the images to speak for me.

So I looked through work to see how I make marks, what ones come naturally that seem autobiographical in some way. I found lots of marks and lots of ways to make them. So here are some.

Stitching into embossed and torn marks, then adding other objects.

Plaiting into an image.

Maybe just draw something found along the way to and from the mailbox. Just an etching that looks like an ink drawing of something just laying there. It could be sticks like the drawing above has or rocks, or…..whatever.

I would need to keep the marks simple like these done on fine paper, painted and sandwiched between two pieces of silk organza with varnishes and shellac. I wouldn’t do the messy part. I am just looking for marks.

Maybe stitching needs to be added to the print.

I seem to do it in lots of two dimensional work. There is something about this layering that seems a possibility for the messages from the driveway.

 

There is more of that here on another layered painting where I reuse a canvas by simply selecting the parts of the old I want to show through and then painting again…a different theme altogether. Here is the original of that piece.

And those time marking – tally marks – that I am still using. Maybe those should be in the messages from the driveway.

Or maybe a crow. They are always the messenger. We have loads of them here.

Like I said if this was not a small edition, but edition none the less, I could be more free with the layering, stitching, adding in bits.

Now I am thinking that chine colle might be just what I need. It would give the extra to the shadow image, the etching and the texture that for some reason, I think I am after. It certainly would add to the layered idea of hidden messages.

Anyway I need to stop. I need to think and maybe I need to quit looking at other works. Maybe I just need to experiment and not worry about wasting time and materials trying to make something look right.

If I get any further with this I will post it.

The Things We Live With – Part III

Posted on by Sandy Webster

This is the last of the What We Live With series. Above is the living room wall of open shelves by the stairwell.  Very little changes here. But some close ups of some of the things.

Bird cage with a palm woven bird from Bali. The cage came from Common Ground in Asheville. Always a good place to find things that need to come home.

Below the cage is only a part of the oil can collection.

Bamboo pieces from Japan and an Indonesian healing gourd figure.

Baskets from a friend in Australia, an assemblage from a man who ran a restaurant in an old stone church in Tasmania, a voodoo basket from Africa, and a clay bottle a student made at Arrowmont.

A boat I made about memory recollections, three lovely baskets by an Australian artist and a piece of wood with metal weaving and beads made by me in the early nineties in a class on metal patinas. You can pick it up and shake it because copper things are behind the woven mesh that closes over a hollow in the wood. It feels good in the hand.

Coming into the open room of kitchen, dining and living room hangs these two small pieces. A lovely photograph Phil Diehn took of some of my oil cans and a fun piece of folk art from the show in Atlanta. It is simply masking tape over sticks…then painted. An irresistible cow on my side of the fence.

In the den are egg tempera paintings I made about the loss of farming/farmers in western North Carolina and just part of a wall filled with New Zealand flax baskets that I make every time I go to Australia.

Behind the door in the guest bathroom hangs a very large woodblock print by Gwen Diehn and a small nest of mine. It was my first wood engraving.

Also in that same bathroom hang among other things, a large print by Walter Anderson bought on a trip to New Orleans, a long scrolled journal painting that Helen Sanderson of Australia gave me from her trip to Antarctica.  And three hand printed illustrations that were from a children’s book on Jamaica made by Philip Kuznicki, who rented a house from us at one time. There are many more prints in this small room but these I could photograph without getting too much reflection.

In our bathroom hang the Inner Navigations Series minus one that sold. They are around my corner tub with a Nantucket basket I made in the eighties.

Over my dresser hangs several smaller pieces. More egg temperas I did of my water garden and an oil can. Plus a collage piece by Philip Kuznicki.

Another egg tempera painting on board that I did depicting a story told through three generations of men.

The beginning of a series I painted of man’s encroachment on the earth hangs with those egg temperas to one side.

Pictures of our cat, Spooky, no longer with us on another side. Photographed by Phil Diehn.

And long gone Sara on a small wall.

The last thing I gaze at before dropping off to sleep is the last of the encroachment series. Man now has it all…

So that is the finish of the things we live with. No need to open kitchen drawers or cupboards. No need to photograph books on shelves. These are things that have stories. These are the things that remind me I went some place, I did something, and it mattered.

As for the dementia shawl, I am filling it with stitches.

Art Group meets here in a couple of days. Hopefully I will be getting back to printmaking.

Til next week.