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Thinking Australia

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Australia Memories
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This week is when I will make the final arrangements for my trip back to Australia in February 2016. It is on my mind and so are all the friends that I hope to see there. That country has been extremely rich for inspiration in my studio and at my writing desk since 1997. All through the house are artworks and mementos from down under. The above collection of works is near the foyer and within view of several Australian Aboriginal paintings.

The framed piece I made when a group of us went on a trip to Lake Mungo in 2008. I picked up the piece of cardboard from where we stopped to slide down a red hill on large hunks of the stuff. It became my canvas for recording an exceptional time with three friends I would later meet for repeat adventures. Funny how just one piece of scrap can hold the entire experience. The other pieces from top to bottom are a basket made by an Aboriginal student that I bought when taken to experience the Coorong area. Below a gift to remind me how much tea bags are used in the textile world of Australia and a fine embroidery work by an amazing stitcher from there.

This week I am preparing to take a two day class here in my studio on making a box/book with leather. There will be an inlay in the cover for something from Australia and the leather I am hoping to use will be the last of my kangaroo hide.

Below are some egg tempera paintings I made of small bits and pieces of Australia.  They hang side by side in my studio and like the things above have the ability to take me back there over and over. The backgrounds for each small painting is actually a view of the land below as a very good friend took me out into the outback on his small, very small airplane. That was probably the most wonderful experience ever of being in that country. Flying low and landing where the explorers Burke and Wills perished, then off to the opal mines of White Cliffs, the famous pub in Birdsville where the horse races are held and then into Broken Hill for an unexpected Poets in Pubs night. We never missed a pub stop along the way. Beautiful.

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There is actually another group of four small egg temperas in this grouping. I just don’t seem to have an image with all of them together.

Every time I go there I make and take a sketchbook to work with. Below is one of my favorites from 2003.

Australia sketchbook ' class=
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I think when I return from this next trip to Australia I am going to write down all the experiences I have had there. And then when I am very, very old my children can read it to me. I will turn the pages very slowly as I handle all those sketchbooks and listen to stories that I might not remember quite so well by then. I will also be sipping an Australian red if not a Tooheys Old.

The trip this time will start in Hobart, a little Melbourne, a lot of St. Andrews, a little Melbourne, Halls Gap in the Grampians and back home in time to catch the dogwood in bloom and start writing.

This Week in the Studio

Posted on by Sandy Webster

River Lethe
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It is 9:20 am on Saturday morning. The rain is continuing to come down. The fall festival here in town has been canceled. So I took pictures of what has kept me occupied this week in the studio. Years from now I suppose I can add these to “The Things I Used to Do”. But for now here it is….my week in review.

The upper image is a piece I am doing in hopes of entering it in a juried exhibit. It is going to be titled something like “Along the River Lethe”. The river named Lethe is one of the four rivers that flowed into the Styx river in Greek mythology….all of them heading to Hades. And each of them having names that translate into Hate, Fire, Woe, Wailing and Lethe for forgetfulness and concealment. Those are the brief translations.

Because I am getting older and have always worked with the idea of concealed and revealed, the River Lethe seemed like a good place to spend some time. So I built a boat with its passengers concealed under water with only fragments of memory surrounding them, fragments floating by on the currents of threads….tenuous threads of memory. And I am thinking that the boat will get to its destination (River Styx) and forget that was the place to be and start back….back and forth on the River Lethe losing recollections.

I have made tiny bamboo ladders for the souls to enter the boat and store their bits of clothing bundles on the way down to the passenger level. The text words have been picked out of an old romance novel. Actually the best text when fragments are needed is a romance novel. There are so many prepositions and past tense verbs that when isolated carry endless meanings. I have used this book titled Moss Rose and written by Taylor Day or Day Taylor (isn’t that a great romance novel writers name?) for so many years when I just wanted text for my artist books. The Proust Pulley, Lost Volumes I,II, III, jewelry and collage work have all benefited from how Ms Taylor (Day) put her words together.

There is much more to go on the it and I am thinking the river itself will be part of the piece. Why not?

Also this week I have begun to pack for a three day masters workshop weekend at Arrowmont. This one is taught by Stoney Lamar and Dan Essig. One is a wood turner, the other a book sculptor. It is all about surface texturing. I am taking all the things I would like to try to add texture to. Likely they will be expecting wood turners with their bowls and book artists with their wooden covers. I am more interested in how their techniques might be applied to my own materials of choice so it should be a good class and a wonderful opportunity to be back on the campus of Arrowmont. It has to have been at least six years since I taught there. Here are my bits and pieces to take so far.

materials for textures class
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Milk paint will be a good part of the class and I learned much about this medium from Dolph Smith when doing the book below in his class when we were both teaching in Australia back in ’03. Back then we used very thin veneer and cut out our designs. I was trying to create an image of old Mercer Scroggs window in his workshop shed. The front of the book has the window and then on the back is the negative space of the hammer with some nails. This was fun to do and ended up being coptic bound with blank pages.

mercer book
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mercer book back
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During the week I spent two days helping my friend and student, Patti, finish and frame her two white line print textile pieces. She is the one student so far that I know who took the idea of making multiples of her prints and then stitching them together to create a “quilt”. All of her carvings are 2″ square and printed by hand with enough border to allow for the breathing space as well as the overlap needed for stitching. I only have this image of her Springtime birds. The companion piece is Autumn and is all acorns and oak leaves.  We framed them in natural pine deep frames measuring 18″ x 24″.

Pattis white line birds
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Finally this week included reworking a painting that makes little sense out of context. In a novel I am writing….very slowly….there is an artist who paints in a particular sequence using particular imagery and very specific techniques. And since Lydia was so thorough in her commentary about her work, I decided to see if I could paint the “picture” she is working on in the novel.

She paints in large 4′ x 4′ canvases and I only had a 3′ x 3′ one. First she creates a mood with a background around a hazy figure that just appears there on the canvas. Then she has a dialogue with that figure to reason out what is mattering to that person or her. That then is described in a detailed painting placed somewhere on the body. I liked her idea enough to give it a go. The first one is glopping on almost every color of acrylic I have with a palette knife and dragging it down top to bottom. I kept covering it with more until I got it in an earth tone I could live with or more to the point Lydia could live with. It hung that way for better than a month in the studio and this week I changed the background to something softer, using the electric sander to dig down deeper and then add lighter paints and sand some more. I was likely influenced by the posting of those large sanded kimono paintings in an earlier blog.

Lydias painting started
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Lydias painting revised
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One last, very last I promise, thing. I cleaned and waxed the last of the small foundry molds for the In Search of Lost Time series.

foundry parts
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It’s the rain and procrastination that has made this blog entry so long. but it only took one hour to complete.

I will do better next time.

The Things I Used to Do – More Kimonos

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Night Passions Kimono
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It was about seven years ago that I wanted to do a series of six kimono-shaped graphite drawings. Each one would be titled “Night” something. This was the one I titled, “Night Passion”.  They were framed in black frames with black lined grey mats and I exhibited them twice that I can remember.

“Night Visions” is the one below and when somebody I met in a class I taught in New Zealand said she identified with it, I put it in the mail. Better to do that I think. I just rolled it up, put it in a tube and sent it off.

Night Vision Kimono
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The next one is another one I did not alter or give away. It is titled, “Night Tides”. Each of them was fun to draw and they made for an interesting showing all together.

Night Tides Kimono
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I liked the adventureness of “Night Tides”. Hokusai’s The Wave, Robinson Crusoe tracks, sharks waiting for the boat to tip its occupants and the small boat drifting away from the shore leaving whoever it brought there abandoned. Then there is that big clipper ship crashing on the waves. Funny how a person can get totally caught up in an idea and just keep going until there is no space left and then they have no choice but to start another one.

“Night Fall” was rain with various leaves falling…bit predictable and my least favorite (now altered into folios for a book). “Night Latch” was a commentary on how safe we feel in gated communities surrounded by those like us…all safely locked in to keep the wild ones at a distance. I sold that one. “Night Watch” was a whole bunch of different owls crammed into the kimono shaped night sky. Later I over-colored it with earth pigments for a show.

When I finished drawing these works I photographed them for a record and then scanned those images to alter slightly and re-size them for illustrating a book I called Kimono Nights. An obi like belt is the binding as well as the closure. I loved stitching into the images with a bright red thread. Here it is below.

kimono nights cover
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kimono nights owl page
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kimono nights open
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kimono nights spine
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There is something about the kimono shape. It is more than a rectangle or square and always carries the references of man and adornment. I think it would be a grand idea to have a kimono shaped tent – a place to sit in the only chair placed inside and look up to see stars made of holes and all sorts of things going on inside the canvas as well as outside. I won’t make one. Then I would have to find a way to get rid of it. But I might draw one. I might sculpt one just big enough for one to poke their head inside. I might.

The Things I Used to Do – An Environmental Tale

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Elements Kimono 3
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These are large wooden panels of plywood on wood supports. They are heavy and framed using custom sized floating frames. Some were exhibited at the university where I received my BFA. I remember the press commentary about works in the show had as follows: “Sandy Webster certainly has a different way of using watercolors.” That was about it. My idea of course went beyond using my paints differently than anyone else.

I wanted to show how man encroaches slowly onto Nature and eventually completely takes over. So in this first panel (each of the main four are 28″ x 38″) I have painted the kimono that represents man in an innocent position of simply hung on a line in the breeze. The crow and the fish in the sea carry on about their lives.

Elements kimono #2
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Man is a bit more threatening here and moves forward in disguise.

Elements kimono #1
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Things are beginning to come removed from their proper place.

Elements kimono 4
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The crow has departed, and man has caught all of the ocean. The sun is getting duller.

Elements full wall elements kimono
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And finally, all that the world had to offer is now worn in the clothing of man. This piece took three wooden panels to make up the kimono with the center piece being 24″ x 60″. Bit dramatic, don’t you think?

What I did like about this work was my idea at the time and the “unusual” use of watercolors. I would rub them on with a rag, let them dry and then use my electric sander to sand some of them away. Use more paint, some graphite and sand again. The use of gold leaf was what gave them some rich areas and influenced the framer on what floating frames to use.

Two of the pieces sold out of a gallery because the buyer could not decide which one to take so took them both. The large kimono and last part of the series I gave to a friend for her home where it fits perfectly and the other two (large crow body and kimono holding the sea) hang in our bedroom. I still like them.

And I still wonder what makes some ideas so important that we are willing to go to so much trouble to see it through. What I received in sales covered the cost of the framing so it certainly is not the possibility of making money from the work. I look through my studio and wonder why I am doing the work I am now.

I think that in a perfect artist’s world there is a special landfill where all this work can keep company with others – all products of artists that simply could not help themselves. Those of us who must see what that dreamed up idea in our heads will look like sitting in front of us, completely realized.