Easter

All 10 of the most recent Sermon Notes were installed in the Worship Center of my church in time for Easter. In these photos you can get an idea of how they look in the room. There are 5 pieces hanging on each side with one, Victorious, featured at the side front above a small side stage, very well lit by spots below and above. This was the topic of the Easter sermon. 3 other pieces on each side were also lit by a "slit spot" but the technician wasn't able to light all of them at this time. The artwork added much needed color to an otherwise drab room.

Organized chaos

"Jo, do you dare show what your studio looks like after you finished your project?" she said. I took the last of the current series to the photographer/printer today, and after that phone call with my friend I decided to take a few photos to show you what my studio looks like. It's organized chaos. While I'm working I don't bother with keeping my space tidy but once the project is finished or every few weeks, whichever comes first, set my timer for an hour or two and dive in and work as fast as I can for that brief time, sorting, filing, putting things where they belong and making the space look orderly. It doesn't last. I know all about organizing and have many books on the subject. I could teach organizational skills for the studio. I just can't do it consistently... don't see the point.

I have work stations set up and they serve me well. There a long counter along one wall where I work on collages and everything is at hand. With drawers underneath and plenty of counter space its an efficient work area. There's a paper cutter at the end of the counter, a revolving utensil rack for pens/pencils, a knife rack on the wall for scissors, and its handy to the computer and printer. As I stand here working I can look down into the main space of my home.

To the left of this counter on a lower section of counter is where my computer and printer live, along with file drawers and drawers for stencils, alphabet stamps and pads. I can swivel my desk chair and work on a large table where I usually sit to add the text to my collages.

This space is on the second floor and I have lots of big windows that overlook our back garden and the distant mountains.

Here are a couple of views of my stamping setup. I made two book makers' sewing cradles to house my most-used alphabet stamps. It eases the awkwardness that often comes with handling the tiny stamps. People have asked if I do all the text with some kind of stamp. Yes, I do a lot of it with stamps, and no, it isn't difficult but it sure is time-consuming, doing this one at a time. When a section of my own hand lettering works I prefer to do it by hand; otherwise I hand stamp, or stencil the words. Some of the text can be computer generated but I prefer the hand work most of the time.

Then the last area that's important for this work is my big 4 x 8' work table. I had it made years ago by a cabinet maker when I was doing so much work with fabric. It has 4 huge drawers and big open sections where I keep supplies. Here I'm set up for painting. The colorful surface is a large sheet of hardboard on which I work. It has gathered layers and layers of paint from many months of painting with acrylics. Someday I'll probably use it as the background for a large painting, or cut it into several smaller pieces and then start over with another piece of board.

The multi-drawered chest under the window is an antique Butterick pattern cabinet but paint supplies have replaced the patterns which used to crowd the drawers. The top is protected by a sheet of plywood and provides another work surface... or flat storage. It's a good place to lay paintings to dry.

And now as my thanks to you for hanging in for this studio tour, here is the first and the last piece in this sermon notes series.

Forgiving

While uploading the most recent work to my flickr album I realized I hadn't shown you yet another in the series, Forgiven. I lost control, my friend. I just threw every color I knew at this piece which has been the most work intensive of the series as well as the most emotional. This refers to the forgiving nature of Jesus and his final sacrifice.

What fun I had with this one. An early art teacher said something like, "keep changing your color as you add it to your work", and another said "make each corner different". Remembering that advice I painted the background yellow and used a variety of reds in each corner to form a yellow cross.

Then I sat down with my stamps and colored papers that had been cut into squares and torn into skinny off-kilter rectangles and stamped my heart onto paper. Then I glued the papers that refered to Jesus's forgiving nature to the arms of the cross, and laid my own sins at the foot of the cross.

Gracious and Victorious

I admire artists who do commission work but I've never enjoyed doing commissions and usually refuse... but right now I find myself working on my own commission: to get all 9 of the current pieces in the sermon notes series done by the end of this week so that they can be printed, mounted and hung in my church by Easter. I've finished 8 and have the design ready in my head for the last one.

The big challenge is that the last two are done without my hearing my pastors sermon or having any notes and I'm hoping I get it right. All I have are the titles Obedient and Victorious, a lot of Bible knowledge and a good dictonary, and a bunch of help from God. Victorious" is already done and I am the one feeling a bit of victory. I did the background for this one for Gracious and when it was finished with it's glorious colors I just knew it was perfect for Victorious.



Then I tackled Gracious and went with greens because my son opined that gracious was a green word. This one is painted. I started by painting my 140# watercolor block with a couple of different yellows... acrylic. Then I worked back on top of the dry paint with several green layers but didn't let them dry before overlaying a large leaf stencil and removing color by scrubbing over the stencil with a damp paper towel, removing much of the greens and leaving a hint of yellow leaves. Because of its simplicity of design and topic it needed a quiet layer of words which I stamped out letter by letter.


Yes, it takes a lot of time to do the work but I so enjoy this quiet time for meditation and prayer and I don't mind the work at all. However, I got so caught up in the lettering for the following piece that I didn't realize that my posture was so bad and gave myself a painful neck ache.








And here is Victorious, the Easter centerpiece.

I have one more to do, Obedient, and I'm excited about the composition I've come up with. It hasn't come together yet but I've been playing with papers and colors. I want the dominant color to be purple with splashes of all the other colors I've used, but when I dipped into my compost I couldn't find enough variety of purple paper, nor could I find the right color of purple paint or ink. However, I had an aging stash of Procion Mx dyes that I once used to dye fabric.

Fabric dyes lose their potency after a couple of years, producing less intense colors, but I had nothing to lose except time. So I pulled out the purple, magenta, and a blue and started playing. I stirred the powder into a small amount of water and poured that onto cartridge paper (standard copy paper) and spread it with a brush and squirted it with a spray bottle of water. Great color! As I continued to play I added a bit of magenta for a different hue, then added blue to more purple for a more blue-violet hue. The colors stayed intense when the papers dried, although I'm wondering whether the colors will run when I apply glue. It can't be much different than watercolor, and I'm not concerned about lightfastness.

After the papers dried I ironed them all, hoping that this was sufficient to heat set the color on the paper as on fabric. I know several watercolor artists who paint with dyes with no discernable problems. Tomorrow I'll tackle the papers and do some experimenting with water and glue and see what I have.

At the beach

Dedication is making art even when you're at the beach on a rare sunny week in the dead of winter. I took a small box of compost papers and the bare necessities for making collages... my glue pot, scissors, a stencil a stamp pad and a single set of alphabet stamps... just enough toys to play with but not so much that it felt like work. We were in a condo perched high above the Pacific in Depoe Bay, Oregon where the water is wild and the rocky coast is dangerous, and where sandy beaches are few and far between. We did find a lovely little state park at Fogerty Creek where one parks on the east side of Hwy. 101 and walks west, under the highway and alongside the creek and finally out onto the sand... quite large grains of sand that looks like tiny rocks.


An excursion to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport was a highlight and I went nuts photographing the underwater sea life. I love jelly fish and got some good photos but had more fun in the transparent tunnel where one can walk through the water and experience fish swimming all around. I wasn't successful in photographing leopard shark but I'll remember their patterns for future use in a painting.




















One of the first things I did after we checked into our condo was to take all my papers out of the box and choose the colors that might best serve me for the one piece I wanted to do; I put the rest back into the box for another time. Once I was set up I knew I would dabble now and then and get some work done during our down times. Here's a photo of my dear husband who good-naturedly found a tiny space on the table where he could eat breakfast.
We did some beach walking, lots of driving and sightseeing, ate most meals out (I don't cook on vacation if I can get away with it.), read a lot, and stared at the sea, mesmerized by the rhythm of the waves and enthralled by the sounds of the waves and sea spray. It was LOUD there on the edge of the continent, and so peaceful. At the shore I often feel the a sense of the ocean down deep in my core, calming me, filling me with a quiet joy.

I nibbled at making my art, working first thing in the morning one day, all afternoon another day, and now and again until yesterday it was finished. The art part is simple... 3 main pieces of paper, 2 painted ones and one solid color, but it took quite awhile to settle on the composition and those 3 pieces. I have had the experience of just tossing down some papers and have it work without much effort but that usually doesn't happen, nor did it this week. So here's the result.... Optimistic.

it didn't come easy

Writing for this blog isn’t coming easy for me this week… I’ve composed several paragraphs but nothing is worth publishing so I won’t bother with the writing and simply show you this week’s best work. We’re going to the beach for a few days…listening to the surf pound the rocks will be just what the doctor ordered. I go to the ocean to heal, to rest, to get refreshed by God’s marvelous creation.

What motivates you to work?

What motivates you to work? I’ve come to know that I need deadlines; left to myself I can fritter away a day along with the best of the procrastinators even though I have the best intentions in the world. Look at this week. I usually start on my sermon note piece by Monday afternoon but what with this bad cold, a new baby, and all sorts of other challenges I didn’t really start until Wednesday. I listened to the sermon on CD and took lots of notes, made some lists, and drew a page full of compositions but I didn’t start with the art until Friday. Let me tell you… my Saturday deadline was looming over my head because these pieces take lots of time! I had no wiggle room.

Then I couldn’t find the right shade of blue paper, so I got out my acrylic and inks and stained a bunch of rice paper. When I tested my pen and my stamp pad ink I found that the ink bled on the paper. Now in near panic mode I emailed my calligrapher friend Alesia who knows all about ink and paper, asking how one seals soft papers.

You see, when paper is hand made, like the rice paper I used, it may not have been sized to prevent ink from seeping into the fibers like blotter paper. This was the case with my paper. An online source gave a recipe for cooking gelatin, alum, and water which is boiled and painted onto the paper to seal the surface. I did that. I then made the artwork and then I followed Alesia’s suggestion to paint the paper with 1:1 acrylic matte medium and water. It worked. No bleeding ink.

I’ve put in quite a few really pleasant hours today doing the rubber stamping and stenciling on this piece. It’s my favorite part of this work… it’s a quiet time, and meditative, prayer-like, and I find myself memorizing the lines, asking myself and God all sorts of questions. I get into a rhythm, listen to a bit of music, time flies, and it almost seems like the world pauses to stretch my time to fit the amount of work I have to do. Now it’s finished and I am thinking about the next composition and the next deadline.

Spirals on Green and a new baby

This has been one of those weeks with very little to show for all the time I’ve spent here in my studio. I’ve done lots of painting, even more thinking and postulating, making starts that go nowhere and wondering why it just isn’t working for me right now. Part of it is that I’m battling a cold, and part has to do with waiting for an overdue grandson who arrived today, only a few days late. This is my daughter’s fourth and he’s really a pistol. Surely those long thin fingers will make beautiful marks in this world. After spending today at the hospital, I’m spent, but nowhere near as tired as my lovely daughter. I want to tell the world how proud I am of her and her dear husband… so I’ll tell you and you can tell the world for me.

I did finish another work in my Sermon Notes series… this one is called Servant. It came easier than the one last week, perhaps because I’ve finally made a color plan of sorts for the series. I started with bright colors 3 weeks ago… yellow orange and a blue green, added spring green and blue to the mix the next week, and now this one has mostly blues and very little of the yellow orange. My plan is to continue inching around the color wheel, dropping a color and adding a new one to each piece. All of them will be a vertical format, and all are 9” X 12”. It’s difficult to come up with the basic compositions for these pieces but I just start sketching formats and something eventually clicks. Some are better than others but it really doesn’t matter because these are personal journal entries and not meant for display, though that may happen some day.

One of the papers I used in week 2 was from an envelope lining, spring green printed with black spirals. I ran out of that paper, so while sitting in a meeting last weekend I drew dozens and

dozens of spirals on a piece of bright green handmade paper and used that paper in my work this week. It will appear again. I’ve used spirals in my work for a dozen years. To me the spiral represents life passages. It’s a natural form seen everywhere in the created world we live in and reminds me of the spirit of God within me.

Do-Overs

Making art is always a struggle for me. Most of the time it just doesn't come easy, no matter how good an idea or plan I have. Take this week... I've gone upstairs to my studio every day but have been diverted from paint or collage many times. Now that I'm blogging I find myself spending more time reading other blogs than I used to... so lots of good studio time was used reading. I started a painting which quickly degenerated into an amateurish rendition of a vase of quite ugly flowers. Where did THAT come from? So I ran back to my journal and tried to sort it all out in my mind. I prefer to work in the abstract... not pure non-representational abstract, but abstraction taken from the created world, and yet I return to realism when I don't intend to. Another day I sat down to do another of my sermon notes and what came out was a barn! And not an abstracted barn but a BARN, brown with a red roof! That didn't work at all even though I kept struggling to give it life. I finally gave up and started over.

Early in the week I assembled 3 groups of papers in colorways that pleased me, with the intention to use each group as a separate collage. I chose a group of colors, found a thumbnail composition drawing , and set to work building a collage to be used for a sermon note. It went together in minutes... no struggle this time. Of course then comes the cutting, glueing, drying time, and then adding text.

The completed collage looked so nice that I was afraid to add the text using rubber stamps and handwriting. There was already some photocopied verse on colored papers that was part of the collage, but it felt a bit scary as I was poised, inked stamp in hand, ready to put the first black mark on the work. Yikes. But it worked out just fine... clear and definitely with a hand-done look. Then I needed to test several pens on similar papers to be sure that I chose ink that wouldn't bleed and line width that was right for the piece. It all came together, though not without mistake. It's done; this one is finished, and I am satisfied with my work for the week.

Compost

Perhaps you'd like to see what my Compost piles look like, the ones in the studio, not the big one in the garden. The first photo shows the contents of one of 3 large plastic Compost-to-go boxes, 10" x 14" x 4" boxes with a hinged lid.

The second photo is looking down into one of the large drawers in my work table. You'll notice that there aren't a lot of magazine pages or ephemera in my boxes other than those that somehow relate directly to my life.

Although I once worked with appropriated images torn from whatever books or magazines I came upon I didn't find that to be very satisfying for my more serious work, and I felt that the resulting work could have been done by anyone. So I started preparing my own collage papers and using my own photographs as well as those of family and friends. I do love using ephemera in my travel journals; these bits and pieces of papers collected on location add so much about the place I'm visiting as I work in my journal.