Art & Soul

Back from Art & Soul, an arts retreat in Hampton, Virginia at which I spent four days painting, collaging, making books, and generally having a good time with art and artists. My favorites were full-day workshops in paint and collage, one each with Ann Baldwin and Traci Bautista (see pix of them in action, along with some inside pages from one of Traci’s journals). Ann’s and Traci’s approaches and styles are very different, but each class was a terrific learning experience. Ann, in particular, is an excellent teacher, and for someone like me, who has very little experience with painting and acrylics, her class was a revelation. Although each student emerged with two “completed” pieces at the end of the day, for me, the class was all about technique and advice and an opportunity to use both. I left the workshop eager to practice Ann’s process at home. I suppose that I’ve known it subsconsciously all along, but I love layers and texture. For me, texture in paint is the visual equivalent of touch, and it’s tremendously satisfying to create it.

As to Traci’s work, while her results (and process) are very spontaneous and playful, in fact she has degrees and solid experience in graphic design and typography (and high-tech marketing to boot). We painted some wild papers — including paper towels — to use for backgrounds and to tear up for collage, and I’ll want to use her techniques again too.

The book I made, in a class with Doris Arndt (see top pix), looks to have metal covers, but in fact, it’s book board covered with (silver) metallic duct tape (who knew there was such a thing?), and splashed with alcohol inks. It was the first time I’d used these, and I liked the effects. The stitch itself wasn’t difficult, but needle and thread have to go through each piece of copper tubing on the spine twice — one on the way up and once on the way down — and that was a little thorny. I’d like to make a second book with this type of spine, substituting some other material for the copper tubing.

In a setting such as this one, the instructors make all the difference, and I was fortunate to have three whose lessons I’ll take to heart and experiment with. Three out of four’s not bad. I’m less focused on the social aspect of these events, which I appreciate is very important to many of the participants (and puts me in the minority), which makes doing advance homework about the instructors all the more important.

Throughout the days, I kept focusing on Ann’s comment that she always does her worst work in workshops and just forged ahead. And I tried — with limited success, but at least I was consciously aware of this when I was doing it — to avoid the “comparison thing.” It wasn’t easy. There was some wonderful work being done, not just in my classes, but everywhere, and it was hard to go straight to my classroom when there was so much enticement on the way there.

So now I’ve gotten the “newbie” thing out of the way, and I expect I’ll go back, if not to this specific event, then to the ones on the west coast, or to the several other retreats that have cropped up in the past five years or so. These programs are, at their core, craft-oriented, and I’m convinced that the main reason for their rise is — isn’t it always these days? — baby boomers. BBs are finding themselves with more time to play: either they’re retired or their kids have gone off (to college or altogether) or both. The amount of money being spent on art supplies, in comparison to, say, 10 years ago, must be astronomical, if the cases being wheeled around the convention center were any indication. And the Internet has made it possible for aspiring crafters and artists in even the most remote locations to get their fix, not to mention that it’s opened up a whole world for those former full-time workers and former full-time moms who want to sell to them from the comfort of their homes.

Got back from Virginia– a 7 1/2-hour not unplesant drive — just in time to head off to the first of my three sessions on the Secret Belgian Binding at BookWorks. News at 11.

Ann Baldwin and Using Literature in Painting and Collage

I’ll be taking a class — Collaging with Words and Paint: Text and Texture — with artist Ann Baldwin at Art and Soul in May. Art and Soul is a week-long “art retreat” to which students (hobbyists, mostly) come to create, play and learn from a variety of artists. I’ve never been to anything like this, so chalk it up to another new experience. I thought it would help me explore forms, such as collage, and techniques, such as working exclusively with black-and-white media, that I might be able to use in my work with books.

But back to Ann. I was attracted by the subject of the class and by her background. She began painting seriously in 1991, following a career teaching literature. Her first collages were inspired by her love of theater. She layered images from old programs, incorporated excerpts from scripts, and used strips of fabric and wallpaper. She also used French literature, and the works of Marcel Proust in particular, as a jumping-off point for collage focusing on memory and time. Her Artist’s Statement (below) struck a note of recognition for me. We seem to share a love of literature, theater, books and reading, and want to make art that incorporates those passions. I’m very much looking forward to her class.

“In my mixed media abstract paintings I have set out to explore both the visual effects of text and its tendency to carry meaning whether intended or not. Although I often present words, letters, and symbols merely as shapes and patterns, so accustomed are we to interpreting these as narrative that it is sometimes impossible to see the forms alone. Color, too, gives added connotations to the words. Some pieces have been deliberately engineered to appear theatrical and, in fact, include pages from Shakespeare’s plays. sone have the glow or patina of old manuscripts, while nevertheless containing mre mechanical reproductions of calligraphy. As I paint, I also write annotations ‘in the margins,’ commenting on a particular text or simply expressing separate thoughts and ideas.

“As a teacher of literature, an avid reader and writer, books have shaped my identity and given direction to my ideas. Each novel I encounter affects the meaning of subsequent novels. Hand annotations in the margins of used books give a clue to the reactions of other readers before me, often very different from my own. In theatres in London, where I lived for most of my life, the words of well-known plays were constantly being reinterpreted from one production of a play to the next.

“I have adopted a method of painting with multiple transparent veils of paint through which collaged images or words appear and disappear, representing layers of memory and understanding. Lately I have been painting in encaustic (hot wax), a method which involves etching and incising. Often the process itself takes over from intention and I find myself erasing or covering messages which originaly I intended to use to communicate an idea more directly. Thoughts get buried as others surface. Almost like the act of reading itself.”