Handmade paper and words

In September I'm invited to take part in a group show on the theme of Wordplay, involving handmade paper and words and that general concept. Which made me go check on what I already have in my studio which fits the bill.

I selected a few pieces, which I want to show you here, and maybe some of these will make it into the show, depending on how they fit. They all involve handmade paper, often my own, or mulberry, and drawing and printmaking, taking words off the internet, an early foray into that as raw material, with the permission of the friend whose journal entries these are, though I broke the words and generally corroded the firmness of the font, to convey my own notions. One is reverse painted on the framing glass, as well as being a mixed media piece.



Mixed media piece, 20 x 16, with my handmade paper collaged, line drawings, the little gold insert a reference to Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, sneaky little art joke there




Handmade mulberry paper piece, with my own artist made paper underneath, mushroom printed. 20 x 16




Painting created from paper pulp used as paint material, with wire drawing, landscape of moon and hills, 30 x 16




Collage of leaf destroyed by gipsy moth, with handmade paper, wire drawing, 8 x 10




Collaborative work with text created by Kristie Helms, and artwork, monotype, stamping and reverse images on paper. Kbean, I have not forgotten that if we ever sell this piece, you get half the proceeds!!




Torn and cut collage of mulberry and handmade paper and charcoal drawing, 20 x 16




Double drawing, handmade paper, charcoal, ink drawings, from series based on the journal headings of Joyce H., with her generous permission




Drawing and painting with handmade paper on cardboard, using gesso as paint material 20 x 16




Small piece, artist made abaca paper, with wire drawing and amber bead, white painting reverse on inside of framing glass, using gesso as paint material, 8 x 10

New Weaving

Paper work, stamped paper strips woven with postage stamps, for an upcoming group show on the theme of Words. It made this a while back, had to let it rest, dry, generally take shape, and today I framed it. I decided that it needed to be under glass, for stability, but I'm not always much into imprisoning artwork under glass!

Untitled fiber art piece for show

This is newly finished, and it's knitting with crochet added to it. The top part is Field of Wheat, very traditional stitch pattern, and I followed it with double crochet, which I hugely increased, then decreased, to create the drapes you see. I falls naturally into a three dimensional shape. No title for this yet, but it reminds me strangely of primitive figures!

Size about 30 x 12 inches. The point of hanging pieces like this for a while before storing them clean for the show is to let them breathe for a while and adopt their preferred dimensions and drape. A dress or not a dress? that too will emerge in a few days. I must get this piece's opinion on that.

Fiber Art 2012 show entry

My work for the solo exhibit I'm putting on at the Libe gallery, by invitation of the curator, to happen next year (!) is moving along a lot faster than I had expected, but that's fine. As usual, the art tells me where it wants to go and what it wants to do, and I'm often just an innocent bystander.

After the Unseen Presence made her presence felt, I realized that there was a dress in most of my woven and knitted wallhangings, which I hadn't realized until that white one turned into a dress before my eyes.

But they remind me of dances, too, so for the moment, the tentative title of this piece, approximately 30 inches by 18, can't measure, it's on another floor, finished this afternoon, is Charleston! complete with the exclamation point.




This contains my handspun yarn, some donated handspun, some unspun wool top (from Cape May, yay), some paper twisted to make yarn, ribbons, cotton thread, sequins, wired ribbon and who knows what else. There are embroidery stitches in here, too, an adaptation of drawn threadwork, with ribbons woven through. Click to enlarge.

As usual, the reds changed in the pic, but there's a wide range of that family of color in this piece. Cameras don't like red!

Many many references in this piece! which blogistas are invited to scope out for themselves. Anyway, you are the first to see this complete work, and I am deep into plans for the next....

The Unseen Presence

Behind every artist there's an Unseen Presence. Mine got very literal, got dressed up in lacy white dress, snappy felt bag and knitted slippers and followed us on vacation. Couldn't shake her.



Her first appearance, down at Cape May Point in a gazebo.




Lounging on the balcony then



On the boardwalk, and showing her hotel room, right above her head there.




Home, resting her feet, before vanishing.



We may see her again, perhaps, her choice.

She's not exactly yarn bombing, since she leaves after the picture, not exactly an installation, since she's in place only minutes, not exactly an exhibit, since she exists only in pictures.

She's just our UP.

Nautilus Field and Fen Journal is home!

Readers who follow both this blog and Field and Fen, I'm posting the wonderful results of the Nautilus round robin journal which we originated in Field and Fen.

It's gone far beyond a simple journal idea, and now belongs in this art blog. This marvelous artwork started with my creating a cover and putting in some blank Arches paper for playtime purposes, then it went to several locations in Canada, including Toronto, Cannington, Calgary, to the midwest, to the Bay Area, to Vancouver, to Alaska, and then to New Zealand, and finally back home with me again in New Jersey.

On its global travels, it picked up drawings, poems, painting, musings, photographs, collages, mementoes, multi colors and ideas, and finally got here, hand delivered at my door by my friendly mailman who didn't want it left in the box in the rain, and it had, ohoh, a bag of pineapple lumps, a wonderful Kiwi candy courtesy of Marrianne. Well, I needed the energy to take the pix, after all.

Incidentally, contributors included a MaryAnn, a Marian and a Marrianne. Just thought you'd like to know. As well as a Hali, a Heather, an Irene, an Eepy and oh I hope I didn't omit anyone. People who enjoyed it, couldn't quite make an entry and passed it on, you are part of this too! they also serve who only stand and read..

Anyway, enough chat. Remember you can click to enlarge. Here's the pix:

Front cover and helpful Kiwi candy



Here's Minimiss' page plus a letter card she wrote to explain the significance of her page





MaryAnn's front page reads in both directions



and the back is a marvel of drawing



Irene (dogonart) made a two sided piece, too:





Heather's part was a freestanding folded written piece, which works like writing and like visual art





Hali gave us a painting and a poem, both wonderful



Eepy's preamble Face and her Letter from the Beach need a few frames:














Notice you get to see both sides of the postcards, too

Annie sent a wonderful photograph



And here's the back cover



Aren't we great? just bask a while. We done good.

Weaving and Knitted WIPS

Among many other artworks, books, purses, felted UFOs, in progress around here, there are a couple of serious pieces going on, one being the saori weaving in many fibers, from paper to roving, about one third complete




the other WIP, or Work in Progress, is a white knitted cotton wallhanging, about halfway there, created spontaneously, saori style, as I go, using a heavy cotton thread




These items will probably find a place in the exhibit I'm working on, for June of 2012, if I live that long. Well, I always seem to, so why not.

The reason to switch back and forth is that my hands do better when I don't wear them out in a single series of movements. Weaving is more demanding, so it's a bit slower. But this is okay, since it does give time to think and study it as it goes and make decisions more deliberately, always a big departure from my usual headlong approach.

Another Young Artist

It occurred to me, since there's a Schwitters exhibit of collages at the Art Museum here in Princeton, which I have yet to get in to see, that these early works of another artist working in a similar vein would be good to see right now.























These collages were created, just for the sake of them, out of any available images and paper, with great skill and a massive sense of irony, by a young man in his late teens many years ago. They came to me when he was clearing up old stuff in a move, and I asked permission to show them way back. Finally I have a venue in which I can do that.

This is pure art in the sense that it was done just to suit his own need to express, at the time, and was uninfluenced by outside pressures of any kind. In one sense, he invented this form, since he was discovering it for himself.

The pieces are small, and the component parts, his drawings, paintings, comics, poems, are tiny -- sheets 8.5 x 11 are the base of all of them, so some of the drawings are minute. Endless material in there to look at and study and puzzle over.

The artist is my son, Andrew M. Adams, who has all kinds of talents, music composing, computers, photography, you name it. One of them is how he makes his living, and the others are his avocations, all self taught, and followed for the satisfaction of them.

Working with a young artist

A friend in the neighborhood, Tarang J., is working toward a major girl scout award, and asked me to advise on the art side of it. She has developed workshops on a series of art forms, origami, fiberart, mandalas and sand art, all using forms from nature and materials either recycled or acquired in the most friendly way to the earth. It's an approach to environmental art, which she hopes to share with younger kids, and adults, too, who could use a reminder to be kind to the earth.

She learned in my studio last week how to make yarn mosaics, weaving spiderwebs without a loom, and using those plastic can connectors beloved of this artist, as looms to create knotted and looped artworks. One of the best students I ever worked with, she has golden hands.



And she keeps on coming up with more ideas, I love this! today she started a God's eye using yarn from my stash -- one of the deals I struck with her was to avoid buying as far as possible, and I supplied a ton of materials from the studio, gouache, paper, yarn, strings, paper plates, all kinds of fun stuff to haul away and supply to her students when her classes get under way.

All this will be chronicled on Facebook and other places, and I can only say what fun it is to be corralled into this adventure!

Old monotype and new work in draft form

I was reminded of monotype making, a wonderful artform, the other day, when I was talking with Donna S, the star at the library gallery, who, a very good artist in her own right, also runs the gallery and its doings, including herding the artists, not unlike herding cats....

I was invited to share what I could about ideas for her teaching papermaking in her summer program this year, to the multitudes, so I went in for a meeting with her. Anyway we were talking about art and varying sizes of same, and she recounted how she'd done a huge handmade paper piece, long ago, as a project, and been unable to get it home from school, since it wouldn't fit in her little car. Somebody got lucky, I guess, if they happened to see it at the dumpster.

I have the opposite situation, usually, always driving a small car, and typically making rather small artworks. Years ago, I was given a corporate show, and arrived on the day they wanted the doings handed over, with 50 count them, artworks,framed, in my little Horizon hatchback. They were taken aback as I unpacked it like a clown car, and one of the officials asked "If you had a bigger vehicle, would you make bigger art?" and I explained that it was the other way around...

Anyway, those small works were monotypes of all kinds, and in the course of faffing around, I mean experimenting in design, with a piece I hope to send to the libe gallery for part of their summer show this year, I found a monotype from a series I did ages ago. So I framed it and it will finally be on our walls, instead of the walls of the various places it's traveled to on exhibit. I'll have to dig further into my archives (that mass of stuff under the worktable in the studio) and see if there are any other ones worth showing you.



I think this mono, done on black Arches cover, must have been around the time of my black gesso period -- it fits the motif pretty well. I used to do a lot of work with metal pens, drawing copper lines that resembled wire until you realized it was an optical illusion.

And while I'm on this hobbyhorse, I'd like to remind us all that the word for this work is monotype, not monoprint. A monoprint is a print of which the artist chooses to make one, but could in fact make more, because it's a different technique from putting down the inks directly on the plate with no other items involved. Thank you.

Incidentally, you know the Degas pastels that we usually assume are pastel paintings? most of those are monotypes, which he created then finished in pastel. The reason a monotype is so magical is that you're seeing the image from the inside. You put down the image on your plate, then pull off a single copy (sometimes you can get a second, a ghost, but not always). So what you see is the inside of the work. You can't paint that directly, but printmaking is such a different experience. He was a great draftsman and monotype maker, too.

And the other piece is a rough draft of a draft of an idea, the faffing-around piece I mentioned earlier, and doing it taught me about ten things not to do, but gave me a much better set of ideas anyway, so it's all good.




When the finished piece emerges, I can confidently say it will look nothing like this. But then I always claim that if you can plan and execute a piece of art, it's not art, it's shop! I have spoken.

New knitting and crochet artworks

Aside from the felting mania, and the proposed tapestry and other fiberworks show, in progress, I have been committing knitting and crochet again. This is what I do when I'm thinking about bigger works.

Anyway, here are the slippers, shown on







and off human feet (my own not very glamorous ones, but nobody else would stand still)



showing the nice comfortable garter stitch sole and the shaping of the top. This fits a woman's 8.5 or 9 US, and is available to the lucky commenter in here, so take your chance now! maybe you are a PINOAP -- see below.

This is a crochet scarf/shawl



using a lot of different warm fuzzy yarns, which was executed in my favorite ds stitch, and presented to someone who needed a present, in my life known as a PINOAP. Person In Need of a Present.

If the slippers will fit your dainty (!) foot, and you feel like a PINOAP,comment in here and I'll make a pick.