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The Things I Used to Do – Baskets

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Dancers Basket
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I used to make baskets and occasionally try placing patterns in them, patterns of my own choosing. This one was inspired by the beautiful Native American Baskets with coiled, intricate designs. My original thought was to have three evenly spaced dancers, but rushing right along (the coiling technique is like that….just one more round and I’ll stop and look) I pulled out the maroon colored raffia too early and was hence committed to do something else. So there ended up being one dancer and two shield like shapes.  I was better at working out the turquoise bits near the rim. This is one of my favorite coiled pieces made in the early 80s.

Dancers Basket profile
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I started making baskets back in the mid 70s taking classes with Grace Kabel in Michigan. Several of her students went on to teach workshops. I must admit that I never really liked the prescribed products that were such a popular way of learning basketry techniques. I much preferred just handling the materials and seeing if they would fit some idea I had for a shape or purpose. Below is my first rib constructed basket made from some vine I collected in the yard. I was so excited to have done it back in 1978 that I couldn’t wait to show Grace. She was her usual kind and generous self and said something like, “That’s nice, Sandy.” But I could tell she was not quite so sure about its functionality, which back then was the sole purpose of baskets. At the time my fellow students were more concerned with making the seven muffin, not eight, not six, but seven muffin basket where one would fit perfectly amid a surrounding of six equally spaced muffins.

The first rib construction basket forty years old next year
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I liked working with these naturally found materials and working them in with the processed rattan reed we were being taught with. Somehow it made the work different and “different” was important to me. In the 80s I was teaching the more adventuresome how to make hats. Here are the two I still have, covered with dust on the uppermost shelves in the living room.

living room shelves angle
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Two Hats
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There are more things I used to do on these shelves and some are containers and or baskets and or sculptures, all made with found materials and parts that are more finished in appearance. I will save them til next time. It is fun to look at my own history in art and crafts this way and strange how I seem reluctant to let some of them go.

 

Talking About the Work

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Mending Earth Book
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I was asked by a book arts instructor to bring some of my work that related to the idea of containment in books and boxes and talk to her students about it.  This morning I took a full case of assorted pieces that sort of related to the topic and tried to keep myself to the allotted forty-five minutes. It was hard to do because each piece has its story and way of being manipulated and viewed individually. Like this piece above about the fragility of our land…Prayers for the Earth. Collagraphed long pages with added objects and hand stitching. There were several questions about the imagery and objects and format. Sometimes you simply have to say, “I picked what I thought was appropriate and put it together…and I really love how it looks.” What else is there to say.

I talked about this one. The shear joy of flipping it open in sequence, reading the text and peering into the mica covered windows at small curiosities.

Cubric of Curios No 3 closed   Cubric of Curios No 3 Personal collections

And this one. A scroll book in a box that maps out a daily walk and measures twelve feet in length. Each stitch in the hand sewn line being the equivalent of ten steps. It is housed in a box marked by the soils and objects picked up along the way and full of small watercolors of what I saw along the walk.

Take a Walk with Me box scroll rocks
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Take a Walk with Me end to beginning open
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I showed them sketchbooks and we talked about calligraphy. They asked what I thought about calligraphy and I was honest. I don’t much care for the practiced craft of calligraphy. The text becomes too much about how it was put on the page and not what the message is. I told them that whenever I see calligraphy done as it usually is, I feel I have received an invitation to a wedding that I really do not want to go to. It is a personal reaction to all that labor of making letters. And I further said that when I do see the craftsman of calligraphy attempting to make it “artful”, it seems forced. There are few that can move the marks of calligraphy past its own intention of looking lovely. And while I was at it, I added that I thought that too many calligraphers use other peoples writings and it would be good if they could simply come up a few of their own original words and not rely on those of others to make their work interesting.

folios
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I didn’t show them this piece from a series called “Folios”. It is my own not so great writing on the left, fragments from journals. And on the right a visual interpretation of some of the message. And of course colored with natural pigments. I suppose for me the work I am looking at just needs to be interesting more than it needs to be correctly and laboriously done.

Lost Volumes I II III
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And I showed them this. A series of three box/books using the text in fragments from an old romance novel to make out a sentence that the viewer can read by following the large marble clunk its way through the maze, bumping off walls toward the finish reading words in a sentence bemoaning “loss”.

Proust Pulley
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And finally I told them about this one. The Proust Pulley. The cut out text, likely from the same romance novel continually flows like Proust’s words themselves. One wonders whether his sentences will ever end. Pasted along the tensioned ribbon it says the following, “I suffer the worst withdrawal that might follow a result of repetition my daydreams have achieved that few small triumphs have tarnished from the trap of self-fulfilling fantasy.”

It doesn’t make much sense but it has the same “woefulness” of the maze books about loss.

I took between fifteen and twenty books with me and left about twice that many home that related to their studies this week about containment. I enjoyed meeting the students and was most appreciative of their interest in my work. But best of all was telling the stories behind each piece and remembering why it was so important for me to make a book about it.

 

Last Word on the Eucalyptus Leaves Wood Block Printing

Posted on by Sandy Webster

gumnut final block
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This is the final image. I looked at the one I printed with more colored leaves and kept going back to the first one I carved and printed. It had less leaves but more importantly it had the simple gum nuts. I tried lightening up the gum nuts that I had carved white spaces into and then only embossing the new leaves (note print on left). Then I just said to myself that maybe some of the leaves were just too cartoonish for lack of a better word. I turned the board over and in no time had a new block carved with corrections but still using my original drawing as a guide. Now I have the print on the right. Note that I decreased the embossing lines around the subject matter and the framing area.

gumnut start to finish
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So now you can see the differences in the original print from the older carving and the transitions to the latest image. And because I liked the way it looked I decided to see if I could scan it into the computer and get the feel of the print by making several adjustments so that I could turn it into a card. Here it is.

gumnut board with card
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And liking how this looked I got out the Australian Land Fish print I carved and printed in Australia last spring using watercolors made from the soils there and came up with another card after scanning one of the prints I brought home.

fish card
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Second Day of Carving and Printing: Was It a Good Idea?

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Eucalyptus 2 and 3
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These are the things I learned today in reworking the board. First of all waking up in the night with a fully formed image in your head does not necessarily mean it will happen. Second, pure white paper is better than warm white which in Stonehenge is too yellow. And thirdly take the time to get the correct tool for the job in your hand first.

For some reason I thought there needed to be more leaves in the almost too much of a white background. So in image number two I added several and used another watercolor to fill them in, Victoria Green and a softer red for the stems, Emily Gap Northern Territory Orange instead of Red. So there are two different greenish greys for the leaves.

I printed the image using a warm white by Stonehenge and found it too yellow. And I thought I needed a another leaf off on the left side background so it did not look like it was dripping from the middle of the page. AND I also thought the gum nuts needed to have more white on them but not totally, so I carved out some of the brown areas. They are okay but I really think I like the plain old gum nuts of the first image better. But like I said in the previous blog, you can’t add back in the wood.

Eucalyptus all of them
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So here is the third one redone with only the Victoria Green used for the leaves along with the softer red of Emily Gap Northern Territory Orange, and the extra leaf all done on a crisp white paper. This time I enlarged the groove around the outside of the image and embossed it with the correct tool….a teaspoon I borrowed somewhere in Australia and did not return. Notice in the second yellowish image that I tore the embossing of the outline because I used the same tool I used for embossing the leaves, etc of the image.

Eucalyptus first white line print
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I just wanted to add this picture of the very first white line print I carved in a class offered by Mary Walker in Highlands, NC about five or six years ago. It was done on the pine board with knots that she handed out for us to use. This is the photograph I took to  class to extract an image of Eucalyptus leaves and gum nuts.

If nothing else I have made improvements in wood selection, carving and painting, but wonder if the simpler images are much better for this technique.