Off the Wall!: New Small Sculptural Works

 

Jeanne Raffer Beck, “Dialogue”, 4” x 4” x 13”; wrapped wire, handmade pulp & paper, poplar base.

My first small, free-standing, sculptural wire and paper piece debuted in my studio a week ago. Most people see these forms as bonelike and ancient. I’m still debating price, which led to some surprising and enjoyable conversations about what people might pay for small works like these. The poplar base and slight rusting on the hanging forms and paper-wrapped wire holder all work together well. Two more single pieces are in progress, which you can see in the picture below.

in the meantime, I’ve been creating and stockpiling organic shapes for the multiples I’m creating now. If the finished piece is successful, I’ll enter it into Memorial Art Galllery’s biennial juried exhibition.

By the time I closed shop yesterday afternoon, the whole space looked a bit like an assembly line. Yesterday was also our building wide Second Saturday at Hungerford but with storm warnings and snow, traffic stayed light. Still, I enjoyed great conversations with the people who did visit and made the most of the quiet; couching sheets of abaca paper and applying them wet over the remaining 6” x 9”  wooden panels for my 24 pieces. As the paper dries and shrinks, it will totally adhere to the wood surface.

Many thanks to my good friend Christina Laurel for sending me the darker value chai tea bag papers – a great surprise that arrived in a little package in the mail this week. Friends help take the chill away in winter!  These will join my other carefully saved papers to be collaged on their surfaces when I return to my studio this week and start to compose and collage.

Exploration: Sculptural Forms

 

Three-dimensional forms are my current focus – O.K, more like a fixation.  I’m working on a new series to combine wire armatures and handmade paper – using either freshly couched, wet sheets  or dipping armatures into paper pulp. The high shrinkage of 4-hour beaten abaca pulp from Carriage House Papers  lends itself to this process. The results are incredibly durable, even though they look very fragile.

 

. Jeanne Beck, Layers, 6” x9”, wire and paper sculpture mounted on hardwood covered with handmade paper, tea bag papers, gesso. I’m researching sources for a thin drop-in frame for these. Any suggestions for sources? My husband hopes you will please share them to get him off the hook for more R&D assignments!

Freshly dipped wire forms, drying on a wooden rack in my studio. The drying process takes three to four days. The moisture rusts the ungalvanized wire I use. Some pieces may be dipped, partially dried and dipped again several times to accumulate layers.

 

My resident R&D department has been helping to design stands to provide another presentation option for these small works.

 

My vision for this series – much like my current fluttering pages pieces – is to work with repetition. I visualize rows and rows of them hanging together.

I’ll  work this week to complete 11 more pieces. That will allow me to see how they look as multiples. If successful, then I’ll create 24 in this first series to hang 6 across and 6 down. If not successful, then back to the drawing board. Ideally, working with multiples will allow galleries and collectors flexibility for purchasing and presentation. More ideas for combining and hanging these together are evolving.

Special thanks to two excellent workshop teachers, Mo Kelman and Melissa Jay Craig, for providing so much excellent information and assistance in starting down this trail. Melissa is teaching 3-D papermaking again at Women’s Studio Workshop this summer, if you are interested.

A Shiny Winter Tonic

 

Main Street Art Gallery, located in a picturesque two-story building in Clifton Springs, NY, decided to counteract winter’s chill by inviting an eclectic mix of artists (my absolute favorite type of show) to participate in Solid Gold, a celebration of glowing 2 and 3-D works featuring ceramics, sculpture, painting and mixed media. All works incorporate metallic paint or gold leaf on their surfaces.

The opening was great fun, one of the best ones I’ve been to, friendly and down to earth and the perfect tonic for a cold, dark January day. 

Main Street Art Gallery also invited me to contribute a post to their Inside the Artist Studio series and I hope you will click the link and take a look.

Confession. I haven’t blogged in over a year. I was questioning so many things about being an artist including what place art has in our culture. Then I realized my job is to be true to my own inner inspirations and share that with anyone who is interested. I can’t control or often understand what’s happening in the rest of the world but I can choose to live my own life each day connected to my spirit of adventure and creativity.

So creating – the research, experiments, failures, explorations and victories that all go into turning ideas into form – are where we’ll go this year on these pages. Comment, share, join in the dance – those who love creating are a tribe and I’m eager to meet more of mine.

Hot Tamales! The Muse Visits

Order of the day yesterday, more experimentation. Another cheapie synthetic scarf got sacrificed to the heat gun to create a strong finishing layer for this 12" x 12" piece, "Notations 9." A few touches of red and golden yellow accents completed it.

Then the day took a surprising turn. I decided to apply gold leaf to a canvas wrapped stretcher frame. You'll find this and other great finishing techniques in Jane Dunnewold's DVD, "Finish It" which you can buy from Art Cloth Studios. Just click the link.

Since finishing a frame this way was an "experiment," I grabbed an old 10" square frame that I had painted with black on the side and then for some unknown reason, an eye popping golden yellow on top.

I applied the gold leaf as per Jane's instructions. While it was drying, I decided to glue some rice paper down to the yellow area to keep it from showing through any textile I might apply over it. While working with the rice paper, I tried to lift it off the surface and reposition it and it began to rip in interesting ways. Intrigued by the ripped edges, I created some more. Rationale? They would disappear when I applied a textile over the surface, anyway, so I felt free to try anything.

Once the gold leaf and ripped rice papers dried, I brushed off the excess leaf and began working brown Setacolor paint in over the sides. As usual, my brush started to wander with a life of its own and reached the rice paper. Almost magically, the surface appeared to age. The golden yellow could be muted or allowed to glow through from beneath the rice paper.

Depth, dimension, visual interest, the appearance of age and deterioration -- lovely. I added a few more colors and some marbled foils for the blue green areas.



With the addition of a few distinct letterforms, this small work will be complete. The question that remains is, how do I want to add them? Painting, printing, collaging? More play and experimentation lie ahead.

It is my first piece totally outside the realm of textiles. Yes, I've seen mixed media works with rice paper, read books about these techniques and seen them in other people's work. I've wanted to try them (obviously, since I have three kinds of rice paper at my studio) but somehow couldn't give myself permission to take that step into another medium. Why? Who knows? When the time is right to take a new creative step, it seems to just happen. I back into discoveries -- or rear end them. Seldom do I hurtle forward in a vintage Corvette convertible at high speeds.

All I do know is that with five boxes of 12" x 12" frames sitting in my studio (5 x 6 = 30!), I'll be able to continue to experiment for quite a while!