Hand – Work

I don’t have a Halloween story for you today, but I can tell you about boiled books, which I have been mentioning the last two weeks. The process is somewhat like a witches brew. My local mixed media art group made these about two years ago.

We used watercolor paper, which we folded up into a packet, putting an assortment of leaves in between the pages. We clamped them together and put them in a large pan of water, to which we added a small amount of “Rit” fabric dye in whatever color we had, or wanted to try. They had to be weighted down with a rock because the paper wanted to float at the top.

As I recall, we brought the water to a boil, then turned the heat down to medium, and cooked them for several hours. We let them cool in the water. The next day we opened the packet, discarded the leaves, and set them aside to dry. The paper can be a bit fragile when it has been saturated with water for several hours.

We brought them to our meeting and looked at each others “books”, discussing which colors and leaves worked the best. I took mine home, added them to my stash of papers to use for something, and sort of forgot about them, but I see them when I’m looking for something else.

I decided to use them in a project for an online class two weeks ago because I wanted a dark shape that did not show a particular object. I used a page that was the outside of a package, and the impression of the clips I used can be seen, particularly in the collage I’m showing this week.

My original idea was to put something in between the two scraps with the clamps showing. I didn’t have anything in mind for the space. The rust + gold scrap was marking my place in a magazine I was reading, and when I took it out instead of throwing it away, I stuck it in the center space just to see how the color would look, because of that little line of rust on the clip.

Then, I went looking for a thin piece of something black, and found this wonderful ribbon in my sewing room that has two thin gold threads running through it. In order to get some of that rust color in another area of the piece, I used some oil pastels in the top left corner, before I added lace across the top. I also added a bit more paper on the bottom right, and a little white paint here and there.

I frequently have trouble finding a title for the art I make. This one was easy. I’ve been hearing the word “divided” all month, maybe all summer. Having different likes, dislikes, and opinions should not devolve into hatred. We are members of one nation with millions of ideas, feelings, and concerns.

On September thirteenth, my yard-man informed me that there was some kind of animal under a plant along my front walkway. I went out to look at it and told him it was an opossum. I don’t think he had ever seen one up close. He thought it might be sick or dead because it wasn’t moving. At the time I was busy with my son who was installing an overhead light in the kitchen.

Late in the day when I remembered the animal, I checked where he had been, and of course, he was gone. Opossums are known for playing dead. Later in the month, I had two occasions when I was in the side yard and thought I smelled dog poop but couldn’t locate any.

A few days after a hard rain during the first week of October, I was picking up sticks and branches under my big sycamore tree. I spotted a stick on the brick step of the rarely-used side door. It is not unusual for have sticks slide down the roof above and land here. As I bent down to retrieve it, I saw some kind of mess on the edge of the step and on down into the dirt under a mock orange bush. This area had been clean the last time I looked at it.

Before I actually picked up the stick, I realized that it wasn’t really a stick. What was it? Looking closer I thought I saw a bone. By this time, my brain had assessed the scene and flashed opossum, as I noticed fur, teeth, whiskers, more bones, and the tail on the bricks.  Ah! This was the source of the odor I had noticed a week or so before.

This was not my first encounter with opossums. In my memoir, I recount an episode where a mother opossum had her babies in our garage. I am pretty sure that an opossum has been eating oranges from my tree for years, and last spring, cleaning up, I found excrement from a large animal in a well hidden area, and suspected it might be from an opossum.

Last week, as I was looking for collage elements, I saw what looked to me like two beady eyes above a long nose and what might be ears above the eyes, in a boiled book page. Apparently, cleaning up the remains of fur, bones, and tail has lodged in my brain.

And so, I found myself at 11:30 pm on Saturday night trying to make a decent looking piece of work. I had decided I should put in some dark areas first, and then decide how and where to add light areas. I added some dark paint around the torn image.

I also added a strip of lace for light and texture on the left side, but then everything appeared to be going vertical and it needed a horizontal line. I used paint to extend the color of the boiled book to the other side of the lace. I tried adding rubber stamp images to soften the paint lines.

It looked okay as I turned out the lights and went to bed. Getting into bed, I concluded that I don’t like using paint with collage to try and make it work.

Sunday morning in the daylight, the dark color around the opossum image was much too blue. I liked the mottled section on the right side, and decided I wanted some of that effect on the left side. I was able to find a remaining scrap that I had torn off days ago.

Mixing paint to darken the blue area took some work to get it dark enough without going to black. I also needed to match as closely as possible the color of the boiled book piece, so that it appeared to be going behind the lace, and provide the continued horizontal lines.

This collage was made on tag board which did not work with matt medium and dried with ripples in the top part. I mounted the collage on corrugated cardboard using Yes paste. It was weighted overnight to dry, but the ripples have remained, although they don’t show in this photo.

So, one of this series I’m making for the online class is finished, and I’m satisfied with it. Before I tackle the other two collages, (the beginnings I showed in last week’s blog), I’m going outside in the sun and dig up more weeds in my yard.

While making breakfast on Sunday, my mind was busy pulling up ideas about what images I wanted to use in a series of three collages I’m making as part of an online course. I started with some background papers of colored tissue paper and neutral scraps.

Since this was a class project, I couldn’t tell what the instructor was planning from what she had shown at that point. Maybe I could use some pictures of birds or flowers was my first thought.

That thought got me thinking about my yard and all the unwelcome volunteers (plants) I’m in the process of digging up on the side yard. (Yes, I’m still weeding—after all, that is my “word for the year”.) I have hundreds of tiny three inch privet trees, palm trees, Pyracantha bushes, woody bushes I don’t know the names of, run-a-way ajuga, and of course patches of Bermuda grass in the regular grass under my large tree.

Next, my mind reflected on how quickly summer left and fall took over, even though the days are still warm. It is suddenly dark before 7:00 p.m. The house is cold at night. I need to shift gears so that I’m out in the yard in early afternoon instead of between five and seven.

And, I want to shift my thinking to more of what I want to do creatively instead of reviewing what has already happened. I find this incredibly difficult. It is so much easier to rehearse what went wrong, what I said, or what someone didn’t do, than to make mental space for what I could be doing now.

I understand why established artists and writers go to retreat places with meals provided for a few weeks or a month to concentrate on their work. I understand why artists, who can afford it, have a studio separate from their living place.

When I’m not reviewing the past, I frequently get involved in small projects. Sunday evening as I was preparing dinner, I needed brown sugar for a sauce. I have plenty of brown sugar but I couldn’t measure it because it was hard as a rock. I removed what I didn’t need from its package into a jar, went outside to the apple tree, picked a small apple, and placed a piece of it in the jar to soften the sugar.

A second small project was to soften hand soap scraps, collected over several years, so I can make round bars which I use for cleaning my brushes after painting or mixed media. Detours like these get things done that nag at me when I encounter them, but add up to chunks of time spent while creative projects wait to be completed.

Sometime Sunday evening, I recalled a suggestion I read last week in a library book which suggested looking at your own previous work when you need a new idea, and maybe that will trigger something. I also had the thought that I didn’t necessarily need to use an actual image of something for the class projects; I could use a color or texture for a focal point. I looked through some papers my art group did a few years ago and found some boiled books with colors that I liked which might go with what I already had.

In the process of this course, I’m using different adhesives, different paper, and a different way of thinking about images from the last class I worked through. I find that I’m not learning new techniques so much as comparing and evaluating the materials and processes and deciding which I prefer and what works best for me.

Instead of a finished project, this is what the three collages looked like at the beginning of this week. The dark shapes are scraps of a boiled book page.

Obviously, I have a lot more work to do on them. Stay tuned.