Alone on the bamboo bridge
hunched over from the weight of her pack,
an old woman layered in rags
wails her story to the trees.
Behind the dense green curtain of bamboo
her audience listens:
fifty thousand stone Buddhas,
donors, and Bodhisattvas,
carved one thousand years ago.
For a moment I leave Dazu thinking
of the opera house back home.
This little moleskine book started out being a sketchbook to practice drawing my face. It ended up with bare feet on accordian folded legs. You can make the legs dance, a nice way to comment on Restless Leg Syndrome.
It was like Christmas; opening boxes - two Quattro Flourescent light sets, daylight balance light bulbs (35 watts each), reflector diffuser, and a portable translucent shooting table. After taking a class at Calumet http://www.calumetphoto.com/on how to photograph small things, I bought some equipment for my studio. I needed some lighting anyway. When my studio ceiling began to fall down (the chunks were an inch thick) I tore out the light fixtures. I have no lights in there – only a wall of windows – great natural light. So I needed the lights anyway . The table top desk is good because I can put it on the floor and shoot looking down at the object. Now I will have no excuse – better photographs of my Artists Books. I’m not counting these images though. I took these with my iphone, I couldn’t wait. I just wanted to set uo everything right away and try it out. The “book” is a collaborative book I made with my grand daughter. You can see I borrowed her swan which has become a permanent part of my Artist Book, ‘ The Queen’s Swans.’
‘The Queen’s Swans’ is made up of 20 accordian books containing original watercolor and graphite drawings of the swans on the river Thames near Windsor Castle and a plastic swan. The pieces are housed in a box with a bamboo cover.
This was the actual view from our apartment. I have a series of photographs taken at this time. This one was shot at 1/500 sec at f 5.5 ISO 400. We had a friend who was a pilot for these boats. He would tell us about his mornings out on the water before the San Francisco area woke up and started the activities of the day,
Friday morning the fog crept under the Golden Gate bridge and quietly moved along the water over to Coit Tower. Sts Peter and Paul Church in North Beach/ Telegraph Hill peaked through the frothy shape. Joe DiMaggio, who grew up in the neighborhood, returned to live there with his wife Marilyn Monroe during the 1950s.
January 27, 2012 1/160 sec at f/29 ISO 400 8:28 AM
This was the view we had from our apartment. We looked at a picture that was always changing. Besides making drawings and paintings for my Artists Book, I made photographs. This photograph was taken at 5:34 in the morning.1.3 sec at f/4.0 The focal length was 28mm ISO 200. I didn’t have a tripod so I set up my Canon EOS Digital rebel XTI on a pile of books on a table. Then, I put the camera on timer and experimented with different settings. A bit crazy, too, it was dark, I’m trying to see the dials with a flashlight – I have to remember where they are on the camera! I’m trying to be quiet so I don’t wake up my husband, then of course when I do try that, I usually crash something.There’s not a lot of time to fiddle around because the light changes rapidly.
I’m working on how to show bigger images on my WordPress site here but so far all I can say it click on the image to see it bigger. It makes a difference. If anyone has a suggestion on a better layout for my blog, I’d love to hear about it.
In Morocco, moushrabiyas or geometrical screens
keep Muslim women hidden from view.
These screens allow women to observe
their surroundings without themselves being seen.
This is an Artists’ Book
An Artists’ Book is a work of art. It is not just a vehicle to contain a story and communicate non-visual ideas.
Different media are used in a unique way to create a book-like object.
These books are puzzles.
They are undefined.
The viewer and the artist make up their own story using clues from the book-like structure.
Text, image and structure are equally important in an Artists’ Book.
In The Bay Bridge my cover and spine is the steel box. The pages can be taken out of the box and looked at indvidually.
For a few years we lived in an apartment looking right out at the Oakland- San Francisco Bay Bridge. In a drawer near the window I kept a supply of the same size ’pages’ for my Artists’ Book. I’d record what was going on outside my window. What happens is you have the same size paper for each drawing and painting so you start to think of different ways to fill that piece of paper. The book is chuck full now. Included in the steel box are stories about connections I have had with the bridge.
For many of my trips I have taken with me a Canson 8.5×11 sketch book. Made up of acid free paper with a durable black cover and binding, this sketchbook has about 200 pages of a good quality paper. My goal is always to try to fill up the book before I go home. After the trip I paint about the experience and then have an exhibit every few years.The Egypt paintings were shown at Robert Mondavi winery. The painting above is based upon a sketch I did of some birds that were drawn in 2450 BC. I found the images in the tomb of Teti.
For this body of work my paintings introduce large scale light boxes set within canvas structures. The light boxes highlight artwork inspired by sketches done during my trip to Egypt. Size: 54″ x 84″ wax and acrylic on canvas, sumi ink, watercolor on two layers of mulberry paper.
Fragments, Fadings and Feelings
Mills College Art Museum
When I was in China the abstract beauty of calligraphy intrigued me. I bought some children’s textbooks on how to write Chinese script. For centuries the children have learned how to write by copying characters within boxes in order to understand their structure and proportions.
I started to copy the lessons. Soon my strokes freed themselves from the grid. The “correct” version of the letters was replaced by the “wrong” solution. Using sumi ink, wax and acrylic paint on xuan paper I put down marks. The shapes and colors mixed and spread into new compositions and brushstrokes. The biomorphic forms of nature took over.
As I painted I thought of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River. The Three Gorges Dam transformed the river into a deep reservoir flooding farmland, cities, villages and archaeological sites. People were relocated to new structures of mass produced design, buildings with slick, cold, white tile.
Today’s mass production and permanency of materials is replacing an intuitive expression of life. These paintings are made of materials that are vulnerable to the effects of weathering and our touch. The sun will fade some of the brilliant colors into muddy earth tones. Fragile paper will tear. But the way xuan paper transmits light, the way people carried out their everyday life on the Yangtze. These memories will stay in my heart.
