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The Essence of Things: A Thank-You Note to Australia

Posted on by Sandy Webster

 

In one week I will be waking up in Australia. It will be the beginning of five week’s immersion into a land that, simply put, smiles back.

Since 1997 it has been a source of great joy to be asked back there to teach workshops. The students are so generous with each other and toward me. Very few of them over the years are in my classes to simply learn a technique. They seem more interested and receptive to another way of seeing, another way of doing.  We are all paused in mid flight of our own directions and converge to gather up new ideas. In that classroom for just a few days we are reorganizing our points of departure and starting again. I am so very grateful for all the new beginnings they have given me. Thank you, Australia.

I will return to working more on my printmaking as illustration for poetry and essays in the near future. This monotype of the essence of the Outback was an attempt to say “Australia” in very few strokes using a relief ink made from processed soils.

Two ghost gum monotype for blog
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Tiny White Line Printmaking

Posted on by Sandy Webster

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The last two days I have been working on some 2″ x 2″ white line wood blocks. This one is the tiny koi in his square pond. I am not sure that I could carve any details if the images became smaller. Two inches is about it because of the size of the cutting blade.

 

 

These will fit into my suitcase to demonstrate the technique while teaching a two day class at Baldessin Press about an hours drive north of Melbourne, VIC.

To complete a series of three I carved a robin and a fox. Now I just need to print several of each, sign them and maybe take some along with me.                    Here are the other two.

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My Mind is on Australia

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Shearers kitchen
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I am rather wrapped up in returning to Australia and find myself looking at images that have captured the feeling of down under. This is a small egg tempera painting I did when returning home from there a few years ago. I had spent time doing a workshop with Nalda Searles at a sheep shearers quarters out in mid Victoria, Allendale I think was the name of the town. This was from a photo I took of the kitchen stove. It was massive and when I stood in front of it and no one else was around I could feel the presence of those who gathered here before going out to work with the sheep.

I would have sketched the stove as well but every bit of my time there with Nalda I was intent on doing her assignments. For some it was a social gathering as well as workshop and I would find places to be alone and think about my work, this place, its history and how far I travel to have experiences like these. I still have the straw bits I pieced together with threads and cloth. But they seem out of place here in North Carolina. I might dig them out and do something with them or maybe just throw them out and be content with this painting, this memory.

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I am also revisiting sketchbooks from other times in Australia. This is a favorite page about Jude’s place near Hobart, Tasmania. I always loved how she told me where the airport was…..”just past the moon.” She has taken me in so many times that I know just where to find the lovely tea bowl to use for rinsing my watercolor brush.

 

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And this old sketchbook where I was trying to capture all the strange little things on the ground at a place near Katherine in the Northern Territory. The most beautiful green ant nest made of carefully placed dead leaves, all the same leaf too. I could not see how they held them in place.  Beautiful sculptures.  The view from inside must have been magic.

gumtree blossom watercolor
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And just a couple more watercolors from sketchbooks and memories.

waratah watercolor
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More Books for Australia

Posted on by Sandy Webster

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Here are some other small journals I am taking to Australia next month. I will be gone for five weeks doing a series of workshops over there. The covers are made from a quality card stock that has been printed on both sides using photographs I have taken in Australia over the years. Images must be lined up perfectly to get the two windows that are cut and aligned in just the right place to see a chosen framed image. The front cover is actually three concertina sections, then the spine for sewing on the text block and the back cover. It eats up the copier ink but I love the effect of peering into the cover. We could call it a “tunnel cover” book.

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