Sandy Webster, Artist

The Things I Used to Do – Figures

Posted on February 5, 2016February 5, 2016 by Sandy Webster

Vining Pair

I was posting on facebook the other day some earlier basketry pieces that crossed loom weaving with basket materials and I remembered these two figures. They were made of honeysuckle vines and then small patches of “clothing” were darned into some empty spaces. Attached at the hip they happily hand the vines to each other. Their faces were sculpted with clay.

Since I only took slides back when this work was being made I had to use my scanner to adapt the slides to digital images. Quite the process and they don’t transfer as well as this particular scanner had convinced me of on purchase. But you can get the idea. And the one big thing I learned is that these slides just need to be tossed out. I can’t believe how many talks I must have had to give to still have loaded carousels and slide cases filled to the brim.

Here are some more figures made from turned wood and pine barks. Of course there is the ubiquitous bead added here and there. Back in the 90s you weren’t making “art baskets” unless you added a bead or feather.

Wood Kimono 2

Wood Kimono

And some more figures done in the knotting technique.

When I was looking through these slides I noticed that almost everything I was doing was in mixed media. How else can you get those beads in there?? Gourds were lots of fun to work with.

And finally the series I worked on in undergraduate school. It a nod to the patriarchal system of old men attempting to teach the next generation of old men how to be capable of the responsibilities expected of them in carrying out their duties so to speak.

Patriarch for Music

Teaching Cooperation

Teaching Stamina

Detail of Stamina

Face of Music and students

Other Languages

Teaching Other Places

The Graduate

The men in my community donated the tools to be parts of each piece. Cloth was from old clothes or my sewing bag. All the old men “students” listened closely perched in their mountain laurel seats. I still have all of them but my favorites are cooperation and the graduate. He seems to be waiting for the next generation of old men to arrive from a stone egg. These led to more work about men, their body language, their way of belonging and keeping afloat in a world of feminism. Below are the men moving from one place to another via the turning of pages and ending up just where they were before and in the perceived proper order and relationship to each other. The last is a detail of men navigating their way through feminist philosophies in boats bound to sink and dragging testicular anchors of stone while firmly clothed in what they were taught about manhood.

Navigations lo res

Documenting -The Things I Used to Do – Nature Pictures

Posted on January 30, 2016January 31, 2016 by Sandy Webster

Nature sketches 1

I used to do lots of these small Nature inspired drawings/paintings. On some I would put their identification. Documenting. I love documenting. Once it was on the paper and I knew what it was, I was satisfied. Simple straight forward work. Nothing here to think about. Just look closely and let your hand to the work.

Wildflowers and dead birds. Some done from photographs, some from life. We actually kept the birds in the freezer if I could not draw them right away. I loved looking closely at all the parts and seeing if I could make the brush do the work. Some are done quite badly, and some not so bad. I saved them all with little idea of what to do with them. I turned to making a limited edition of calendars with some of them. These were printed on my computer and stitched together. Not many to sell and likely I just made enough to cover the cost of ink, paper and thread. Here is 2004.

This book below I made about the same time. I had seen a flag book somewhere and found it such a simple concept. The movement was magic. I thought I could do a series of children’s nature books using that format. I started with ABC’s in the Woods. Then I planned to move on to ABCs in the Sea, ABCs on the Farm. You get the idea. When I finished this one and showed it to someone, they said, “Did you know that Hedi Kyle made an alphabet book with her flag book design?” I did not. I did not even know that Ms Kyle originated the flag book design. I never exhibited the book anywhere and I was rather unenthusiastic about continuing with the series of books. I did make a few posters using my trusty Epson printer and sold a few, again barely covering the cost of ink and the over sized paper that was necessary.

But I found the original in with my sketches and will show it below. It was fun figuring out how to get the entire alphabet into that woods. “Q” was a rusted can with a leaf coming out at just the right angle, X,Y, and Z were patterns of plant life but the rest were all creatures in the woods.

ABCs in the Woods

ABCs in the Woods open

I think I will return to smaller works. Another piece returned yesterday from exhibition and now I have to do small repairs on it and find a place to store it. This might be my last year of doing any work that does not fit onto a page. I will seek out inventive ways to rid myself of the work coming back home.

A small note here on the piece returned. I did it because it seemed like a good idea. The theme of the juried show was very interesting for me and I wanted to interpret it visually. There were several pieces entered and many did not make the cut. Mine did. The exhibit was up for one month. It cost me $50 to have it shipped both ways. The work had to be for sale and their take was going to be 40%, mine 60%. For some odd reason (maybe I had hoped it would sell) I priced the work at $400. Their take would have been $160, mine after shipping cost deducted would have been $190. The piece took two days to make when I add the hours up. I am keeping all this in mind as I return to the studio to mend the work returned and put together what might be the last of the kind of work that has so little return other than the shear pleasure of making. Let’s hope striking that match will be just as satisfying.

Back in the Studio and Wondering What in the World?!

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Sandy Webster

fish in snow

There is a bit of snow on the ground. I am in and out of the studio. Working on ideas that take me to Lee’s shop to borrow his time and tools. Cutting through books, using his torch, using my new burning tool, using watercolors from Australian soils. In the middle of several days just getting “to it”, I wonder just what is it I am doing. Is all this work saying what I want it to say? Am I wasting precious time on these things?

And then I pass by the wine bottle fish hung over the holidays outside my studio window. The light catches on them and their wires have all rusted and still hold the fish as they swim in the cool winter winds. Then I think to myself that when I thought of doing this thing (hanging every fish wine bottle I could find under a porch with wire and rocks that were once a very long snake in the yard) I thought it might have been a dumb idea. But it is not. It amuses me. I like that my daughter and a friend helped with all that twisting of wires and hanging them just so.

fish in winter

The problem is that a person needs to have someone to ask. Someone who just might have a handle on how you think and can rein you in when you go too far. Someone who will say without equivocation that maybe you should rethink that idea and maybe even something like, “For god’s sake, clean up this studio. It’s all looking a bit muddled in here.”

I had someone like that once and then not. Years later I wrote the following poem about that loss. You read while I go pick up the studio and pretend she is still here looking over my shoulder.

Lost

It happens slowly – seldom just one instance

often a comment, a look, a difference of opinion.

Then a chill will seep in and work its way around

making a hollow that slowly fills with wariness, distrust.

And then its gone – the friendship, the companion,

the one person that you depended on to answer

“What do you think – what do you really think?”

S. Webster

Back to The Things I Used to Do – The Artist Book/Box

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Sandy Webster

An Artist Book Box

Sixteen years ago after finishing graduate school I made this box with a book on what it was like being an artist. This is the text found with images of work I had done. Work that took all my concentration and quite a bit of my time.

The ideas for my art come from an enormous need to fix feelings into a visual form.

It is never clear from the outset what that form will be.

The feelings that provoke the work usually have to do with human connections and interactions.

Sometime it is release enough to simply express myself in a journal entry.

But here I can only pour out thought for myself.

And unread or unsaid, it remains somehow unrealized.

I might as well have just kept it inside.

But to take the feeling through the studio and…..

select together what it will take to give it form,

I discover myself all over again…

on a journey through the familiar…

toward the unknown.

It is here that I can engage all my senses..

into the creation of some thing that takes form…

for all those feelings..

and lets me look hard at what it is that seems…..

so incredibly important.

And then later..

gives me the chance…

to see if it connects…

through the familiar…

of someone else.

An Artist Book Box open

The box has an area near the spine that is filled with small bits and pieces that I found inspiring and necessary to include as objects with the book. There are mica windows that are a bit rose-colored over the object and title of the book printed on cloth. (Cloth was important to so much of my work then).

Under the book is a hidden compartment of letters from others about how my art affected them and what they saw in it at the time.

An Artist Book Box hidden compartment

And the inside title page of a book bound with skewers and made of papers that were stained with the wood chips from the scraps left by the men in work shops of my area. The men who inspired so much of my work back then and continue to make me smile at our memories.

An Artist Book title page

What I wanted to do with this book that was made as a gift to my children when I am no longer here, was an attempt to explain the preoccupation I had with my art, the time spent with the making of it, and the time neglected in other areas of my life. It seemed important that I do this, try to explain myself in some way.

The images throughout the pages are of my artworks photographed and altered to fit the look of something not quite clear but very present. Then several of them were sketched over with pen and ink to emphasize the layers and complexities of my mind and hands and feelings about what I was trying to say with each piece. Looking at these pages now, sixteen years later, I find them fascinating and more evocative now than then. I really love this book/box. But what I love most is that I did it in the first place, that these things mattered so much to me that they be housed some way in a shrine of sorts. Here are some more of the pages. I think later today I will just sit with this book and feel the pages along with the memories of what inspired each image.

An Artist Book mid page