Blog

Sometimes I feel like the person depicted on this wonderful assemblage. It was given to me as a thank you gift from an older woman named Arlene who was in a mixed media class of mine at Arrowmont about fifteen years ago. She had a knack for just picking things up and sticking or tying them down. I keep this piece in plain sight in my studio as inspiration about what I should be doing as a maker…..just make. But more often than not I will have to think of the reason I am making something. I wish I could be more like Arlene…..just do it. Here she is in another one of my classes there at Arrowmont working on a box making class titled, “……Placement for Memory”. We were making containers like books and baskets to put our mementos into them as well as boxes. She did not want to make a box when she had “a perfectly good cookie tin” with her.

Arlene did some very serious work about her family gatherings as a child. She had an old table cloth that became the background for a large wall hanging with the china plates attached and something akin to place cards as I remember. There never was a question about how to do something with Arlene. Just do it. Just care enough to get on with it. Get it done and move on. No wonder this many years later, and now into the decade approaching her eighty years at the time we met, I feel inspired all over again by Arlene. Below is the seventh decade panel in the Textile Scrapbook I am slowly working on.

This one is like the sixth decade one only more travel to France and Italy and of course,  more Australia. Arlene would have loved this project and heaven knows she would have had the ephemera of memories to tie and stitch into place. There is lots more stitching to do on this one but it is nice to open the box I keep them all in and remember.

Aside from this work there is a batch of gelatin prints hanging on the wall in the studio this week. My friend came down to work in the studio and we made gelatin plates and then went about making the prints. I decided to keep mine to walnut ink and some black printmaking inks.

This larger image is one where I plaited pages that have been sanded to a velvet surface into another image with the inks dripping through overworked gelatin prints. Turned one way it the trees and upside down it is a path going into the woods. There is something about them that intrigues me for drawing into, turning into images for books or poetry. In the above images there is a set of three that cry out for wood block prints of crows worked into them. Many possibilities here.

Tomorrow three students come to the studio for a day of chemical rusting. I will be able to resupply my pages to add images with graphite. Next week I will draw and talk about another project going on.  There is nothing that I am doing that requires too much thinking nor too much time. I feel a bit like a BB in a box car as we used to say. Bouncing and ricocheting from one thing to another.

I have finished a second of the 8 x 10 watercolors on gessoed board. More collected dried things from the yard and studio. Someone in Australia asked me why I was always drawing or painting dead things. It is simple. They stay put for the length of time it takes to draw them. I get to really look at them. I get to hone what skill I have. I can touch them over and over while they stay the same. Their withering has already happened.

It feels good to be back at drawing. I miss it when I am doing more of the collage/assemblage/textile/stitch work….mixed media. That collection of words reminds me of something a character in my novella says when faced with having to frame mixed media work.

……..”And the results were pretty much the same. Layers of smudged papers that include pages from old books (with all but a few meaningful words exposed to reveal the artists intention), photos (old black and white ones collected at random from antique shops and flea markets), used tea bags and crumpled tissues, all of it dry brushed with gesso or in lieu of gesso, house paint would do. This recent interest in mixed media was followed quickly by workshops in encaustic so the entire piece could be covered in wax to look even more mysterious and meaningful.  …… Sue had to be careful not to frame them upside down or sideways.”

It makes me smile when I read what Sue thinks about the artworks brought into her framing shop. And it also reminds me to just get to doing something simple….draw.

Few pieces have given me the satisfaction of making something like drawings have. Here are some that were especially gratifying.

And always those little bits and pieces from travels.

I will get out another gessoed board today and find some things to draw. It is centering me now and I really need that. Then I will build it into a frame with a mat and hang it with the others. I don’t know what to do with them after that.

My art group meeting was yesterday and it bothered me that I was so content for now to just do this. No meaning, no desire to fix a burning issue into form or a need to say something beyond putting careful marks on board…..getting down what I am looking at. The feedback from the rest of them was good. I was inspired by one members new narrative work in dry point etching. He not only does the drawing well, but has a way of creating an atmosphere around the subject that pushes our imaginations further.

When I get all my old boards meant to be used for egg tempera completely covered in watercolors, I will return to the press with renewed enthusiasm. But for now this is where I am….here in the studio working quietly on drawing and finishing up my Scrapbook of Decades.

About ten days ago I decided to pull out several of these poorly gessoed boards, each about 8″ x 10″. I did them in a hurry quite a while back just to use up some newly mixed gesso made from rabbit skin glue and french chalk. I was thinking I could sand them to perfection later and then use them for the intended purpose of egg tempera painting. But in all honesty they were pitiful and look more like plaster boards or scraps of drywall with the paper peeled away.

I thought of a student in Australia who made the most lovely watercolor on a plaster board. It was an image of herself as a child and would fit into a memory alter that she was making in my workshop. I will post the image I have of it below with apologies for the blurriness.

Beautiful isn’t it? Anyway the first one I attempted was the busy strokes of silver point. I was just drawing out of my head…trees are always a place to start for me. Something about the woods. Then the magical door going to who knows where. Maybe secret places.

In sanding the gessoed board with 400 grit sand paper before I started making the drawing, there appeared a weak spot right in the center of the panel. And the more I drew over it the more it chipped away. Then I put it away, but only for a few days. The above beautiful image made me think about watercoloring on the next panel.

I gathered bits and pieces from the studio and laid them out on my work table.

Then with watercolors and caran d’ ache crayons I made this painting. It was so soothing to be back doing something botanical in feel. I wanted to frame it in an 11″ x 14″ frame and mounted in into a box shape covered in what I thought was a nice background paper.

It took a day to get this all put together and then I did not like it, not at all. So cut a mat of off white that just covers over those rough edges and it looks so much better. I will do more like this one. It was too satisfying not to. You know how it is, the careful bleeding of colors that is immediately soaked up by the dry plaster like finish. I could have been a fresco painter in an earlier life.

Then I looked at the silver point forest and thought why not? I covered it in watercolors, then a bit of caran d’ ache to smooth out the color. Of course the silver all washed away but I just kept on adding and wiping. What I ended up with after painting, rubbing, painting and finally sanding is this.

There is something about this. The hole in the middle of the panel went all the way down to the board with all the “rough” treatment and the water mediums just washing it out bigger and bigger. I like how it is next to the window of the magic door. But I especially like how it feels like faded memories. The things that come back to us in a vague undefinable way. Those things as we age that become less clear but there somewhere. I like the image of this better than the piece itself.

And now I will pick out another of those boards that were covered with cloth and rabbit skin glue and then copious coats of hand made gesso in such a sloppy fashion. The surface is so dry and thirsty that it sucks the paint from the brush before I have much time to think. For now that is a good thing.