Decoy Carving in Clayton, NY

Carving intrigues me, both because I love anything skillfully crafted by hand, whatever the medium -- and because carvers range from utilitarian to artistic. A number of them gathered for the 41st Annual Decoy & Wildlife Art Show in Clayton, NY this weekend. Since my husband is an outdoorsman, hunter and fisherman and I love wildlife paintings and carvings, we both had a great time.


Isn't this old carving bench a beauty? A pile of carved duck decoy bodies have piled up next to it; the carver was taking a well deserved lunch break.


Ingeniously, contemporary carvers carve over these sawdust vacuums. While wood chips and dust still accumulate, it certainly helps decrease them, which has to be healthier for a carver. As you can see from the image, this gentleman is mounting the heads onto the carved bodies.



We bought a wonderful hand painted collector's piece from Linda Ferguson in Woodville, NY. Linda does exquisite painting on these carvings.

A collector's estate auction drew us outside at 1 PM and although we both swore we would be very self-controlled, we ended up buying -- and spending!! -- more than we intended. I totally fell in love with a vintage framed Remington poster and went way over the amount I intended to bid for it. But we hung it up at our cottage and I still love it anyway -- maybe even more now that I've invested money in it!!

Another favorite stop for me when we go to Clayton is the Thousand Island Arts Center home of the Handweaving Museum, which has a collection of over 1,400 handwoven items. Currently on display there is a very nice juried exhibition, "Along the Rivers Edge," that runs through August 28. If you get to the area, stop in and see it.

Bob's sister and brother-in-law live in about a half hour outside of Clayton, so they met us Friday evening at the quaint Wellesley Hotel, built in 1903, on Wellesley Island (Thousand Island Park) for dinner.

We visited them on Saturday and got updated on the progress of the new home they're building (Jim is doing ALL the work himself!) on a solid rock ledge over the gorgeous St. Lawrence River. It will be a beauty when he finishes it.


Imagine having this view outside your window every day!

Reaching for the Off Switch

Experimentation continued both yesterday and today. Adding colors and layers to the work from Monday filled most of the day yesterday along with a few new beginnings, like the painted piece started above.

I went to bed tired last night but couldn't fall asleep, then woke up at 3 AM with new ideas pulling open my eyelids. If you've ever woken up in the middle of the night with ideas singing a hallelujiah chorus in your brain and the harder you try to go back to sleep, the louder they sing, you'll join me in wishing you could have a switch hardwired into your brain that you could flick on and off.

This piece has improved since Monday. The addition of the darker grays in the lower portion, the strong contrasts between values and hard and soft edges and the silk screened rows of vertical letters add a lot of interest and vitality. I'll try stitching on this surface next and see if that completes it successfully.


Today I worked first on bolder lines with a variety of applicators and paints that varied in viscosity. Some of the "aliveness" I'm desiring is starting to emerge in this sample. Larger lines with bigger tools may be the next step with this practice.

After a few of these pieces, I decided to work from a reference. I've got a series of photographs taken of the walls of an underpass near my studio. I love them. Here's one of the original images and my progress on fleshing out the interesting patterns of cracks and discolorations on the concrete walls. I am really having fun with this one and it's the closest to representational work I've done -- surprise, I like it!



This is a piece of dyed fabric left over from another project. The golden yellow seems to be a good ground for layering grays, blacks, rusts, tans and whites over.

The bottom area in progress, still wet but very pleasing to my eye-- will see it dry when I return on Monday and then continue.

Tomorrow we will head off for a weekend in the Thousand Islands, so my overloaded brain will get a break..until I return to this piece and can enjoy fleshing out more fissures, cracks and contrasts on its surface! This is another piece that I would like to paint on a LARGE scale.

Samples and Options

I decided to start this week by working on a group of studies for new works. Here are some of the steps you can take if you'd like to do the same.

Cut fabric into approximately 20"x 20" squares until you have a number of them in a pile. Mix a palette of colors. Have a rough idea in your mind of what you plan to work on. For me today it was to create some gestural handwriting compositions using various viscosities of paint and several different brushes and screen prints. Take a deep breath, grab a fabric and tape or pin it down and just start working.

Once you've made a number of samples that respond to one another and to your original idea or intention, take some time to pause and reflect. This first piece was a true warm up, I just grabbed a brush and began to put marks on the surface, then responded to them with varying brush strokes and colors.

Once I completed four or five samples, I dried them with a hair dryer and put them up on my design wall, then photographed them and loaded them on my computer. Looking at them as images on a computer screen really gives me a different perspective on them. Details that didn't seem prominant when I looked at them on the design wall become very apparent when I look at the image; the reverse is true also. Areas I think will be very dominant may not always come forward in the photograph.

This piece was painted with diluted paint on dampened cotton. When the fabric was still wet, I added the black letters using thicker paint and a thin tipped applicator bottle. The letters hold their basic shapes but some of the paint migrates and creates interesting halos. Some areas of this piece work better than others. I like the migration of the thicker paint applied to the wet surface. The partially erased line of letterforms at the bottom is another idea that works for me.

Here's a detail so you can see the halos better.

This piece began with repeated screen prints of a design I had made into a silk screen on Saturday from vertical rows of invented cursive writing. Today I printed one of these screens on the cloth, let it dry and then added the gestural handwriting. The vertical stripes of language seem to help anchor these letterforms. Then I experimented with the thin red lines over the gray calligraphic marks on this and several other similar pieces.

On another sample, in contrast to the more defined shapes in the first composition, I decided to create a more subtly painted surface and leave some less defined areas to develop with stitching -- either machine or hand.

Once I hung this, I wondered how a third and final layer of calligraphic writing might work on this piece. The bamboo brush with its bristly, frayed ends might make marks that are an interesting contrast to these.

Here's a sample of what such a mark would look like. A FEW thick, feathery strokes are what I'll try adding to the piece above this one. It may not work at all, but since these are all samples, the whole point is to execute each idea to SEE it.

Settling In

Yesterday was day three back in my studio. I did a lot of experimentation and thinking that boiled down to leaving with a longer list of to-dos than I had when I arrived. First I decided to apply gold leaf over the rest of the rectangular gessoed frame that I didn't use when I cropped and put "Lists", the new piece -- see the previous post -- on a square frame instead.

If it's oriented vertically, it has the feel of an ancient bronze artifact.

When it's oriented horizontally, it almost looks like an open book! Either way, it offers a lot of possibilities.

This piece is one of those happy accidents. The original gold metallic leaf I applied was from Dick Blick. When it ran out I bought a different brand from Michaels -- and the different brands have a slight variation in the gold color.

My plan for this one -- if the Muse smiles on me -- is to do another layer of glaze, this time copper rather than black, then layer on some gessoed, painted papers and some tinted rice papers. I hope to exaggerate the "cracks" that some of the black ground that shows through the metallic leaf suggest and then complete it with hand painted Etruscan-style letter forms. So it's a variation of my Australian piece but using totally different materials.

Speaking of that Australian piece -- check here to refresh your memory of what that piece looks like -- part of my day was spent reviewing my image files of the development of that work. Seeing the images brought back the details of the techniques I used to develop that -- all the more reason to document the development of your work, folks.

Today a new length of silk goes on the print table and work on the first layer will begin, building on the style and imagery of that piece.

In planning for new pieces in this same vein, I'm seriously considering making silkscreens for 26 large and 26 small drawn and painted Etruscan letters with thermofax stencils. That would take time and a LOT of materials, but also would give me a way to easily lay down letters with dye, resist or discharge paste without direct painting every letter. One offers spontaneity and is more gestural and the other method offers predictability and more control. I'm guessing a combination of techniques will be most interesting, since I work with a variety of improvisational screen printing methods as well. I'll make several screens today and try them out before I get myself up to my eyeballs in designing and taping screens so I can evaluate just how useful they will be.

New Piece!

Lists, 20" x 20", 2009, by Jeanne Raffer Beck. Monoprinted, screen printed and painted silk with copper foiling and applied synthetic sheer mounted on stretcher bar wrapped canvas, $900.

Arrive early and stay late --now there's a recipe for a productive studio day! Yesterday flew by, from warm up exercises with gestural writing and testing different brushes and paint consistencies to taking a work that I wasn't quite sure how to complete and suddenly knowing exactly what to do with it -- and being willing to lose the piece if the idea didn't work out. Happily it did!

The day brought an unexpected e-mail from Ken Smith in Australia, one of my all time favorite teachers, who is also a gifted artist. He sent a link about artist GW Bot in a blog post by Sue Lawty (another extraordinary Australian artist) called "Glyphs and Lower Molongo Valley",
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1395_lawty/wordpress/?p=113
whose work with language imagery is inspired by natural forms in the Australian landscape. Another inspiration and resource as I delve deeper into this body of work.

Reaching Cruising "Attitude"

After being away from my work for so long, I decided to return to my studio today without any goals or agendas and just be open to any activity at all to get my motor running again. It seemed wise to let creative momentum begin to build gradually without putting any pressure on myself. Once there for a few minutes, I seemed to be more drawn to completing some pieces already in progress than embarking on new work.

This piece is one that I set aside a few months back. At that time I was unsure how to -- and whether to -- complete it. Today I felt strongly that I wanted to add a layer of gray-blue to the surface and strengthen the value and color contrasts on the piece. The Dy-Na-Flo paints work well for layering; they have the same concentration of pigment as thicker paints, but are thin and more liquid.


I'm still debating whether it's really working. One option might be to cut it down in size like I have in the image above so the major element is more dominant. I like the addition of the blue, but it's already such an active piece that I may have taken it too far. It reminds me of watery reflections.

I always am happy when I am painting, whether on cloth or canvas. I love the movement of painting, how I can vary the movements of the brush and change the marks.

As I worked and puttered with several different pieces, I suddenly realized how relaxed and unpressured I felt about whether any of them eventually work out or not. This active but totally relaxed attitude felt smooth and easy. May I stay in this pleasant "cruising attitude"!

From Big New Car to Small New Brushes

First and foremost, a great relief -- after two and a half days of many dealers, test drives, models and prices, I chose a Toyota Highlander. It will take us on our future travel adventures in total comfort. Unlike my previous 2000 Nissan Maxima, which I pledged to drive for 10 years or 200,000 miles, I made no such pledge this time! This is a big vehicle for me and after a few years if I want to go small and sporty, I'm making that clear right up front to the big-is-better vehicle lover in our house.

Meanwhile, even though I'm leaving again tomorrow for the holiday weekend, I just had to spend some time at my studio today, even if only for the afternoon, to test out these amazing new brushes. I purchased them at the Surface Design Association conference. The vendor, Ying Zhou, is a potter from Philadelphia-- she makes each brush by hand. Before purchasing, I was able to try out the brushes with water on a special plate that shows the marks each makes. Each brush has its own character and a slightly different feel to it, even though some may be similar sizes.

This bamboo brush intrigues me. The end of the piece of bamboo has been split so the actual fibers of the bamboo form a brush -- much like chewing the ends of a stick to create a crude brush and with a light hand, the marks of the individual fiber are apparent on the paper.

This is the largest and most expensive brush that I purchased; it has a full head that makes broad strokes but has that wonderful long tip for ending or beginning lines with a narrow flourish.

The overwhelming need to explore making marks with these new brushes came into focus particularly so today because I happened onto a marvelous blog this morning called "tackad," written by artist Dean Aldrich in Horseheads, NY. Dean's post on "Carved Calligraphy" includes a You Tube video of Elliott Puckett's new exhibition at Paul Kasmin gallery in NYC. Of course I love the flowing lines and movement the artist creates, as well as how she literally carves the lines into the gessoed board. Wonderful work.

Dean's blog is a veritable gold mine of text, mark and abstract calligraphy references -- and I am eager to revisit it after the 4th of July weekend with family, where once again I will have no internet or cell phone service. Our little cottage is a great place to go unplug; but I've already had enough unplugging for a while, so will be happy to see the light of my computer screen once again on Sunday.