Leo Toye Returns...

I am flummoxed how to explain from scratch who Leo Toye is… being a part of me who's been mostly retired. Long ago… about 25 years...  he came along as my doppleganger when I joined a group of artists in Sedona, Arizona to revive an Open Studio venture. We decided to publish a newspaper each month & I wanted to become a "columnist" & since I, loving that image of an inky feather quill pen, had always wanted a nom d'plume... Leo Toye became my pen name.

It seems I have always practiced calligraphy, remembering many posters made for High School campaigns & events, not to mention all the placards & signs for the department store where I worked after classes. Early on I gave-up my cursive... picking up my father's version of writing with a curious mix of upper & lower-case, mostly block letters, gradually coming to love writing all in caps, long before that became digital screaming. But then... I've always been a bit of a screamer.

 

Leo Toye's name is a literal description of my visual logo… that lion on wheels. The format was graphically columnar, of course. The medium was ink, thus the title TUSCH... meaning ink, most specifically the "india ink" with which I had a rather deep relationship, using technical pens to write my journal in that permanence.

I had danced, work/playing, with graphic design those middle years [early 80's] in Sedona, creating logos & labels for other businesses, so when we conceived making a monthly tabloid as our publicity organ, which declared a quaint anodyne to the slick-cover-magazine-culture supporting / supported by the galleries, I was there with a black & white sensitivity useful to newsprint.

 This is a drawing I made for the front page of one OPEN STUDIO issue:

Leo surfaced on my mind's drawing table & evolved in small body of work of which I've always been proud. Leo could use words in a way which mixed studious years of evolution inside the many covers of my habit to journal with something attempting visual poetry. While I was angry he could be enigmatic… I did indeed like having a doppleganger to blame for my excesses!

Three of the columns:

We eventually became mired in the publishing & the group wore itself out. Leo mostly retired, yet "we" kept writing in my journal & doing the occasional bit of calligraphy or design. I still frequently refer, in many stories & much history, to Leo Toye when I'm playing with words & ink.

Now, after some long periods of neglecting my journal, in part due to having become computer literate, as they say... believing I would journal digitally. I did not, for numerous reasons, mostly because the computer seems to lack similar intimacy as pen-in-hand fosters deeply private thinking. The keyboard supposes capability of publishing, while the ink flows from my hands in very different mental processes involving more soul somehow...

I have recently returned to that inky process which I realize as being important, if not imperative. I can only allude to the many stories I would tell, but this is still just the introduction to Leo Toye, who  seemingly spontaneously resurrected himself when I volunteered to write a publicity piece for our upcoming Spring Vashon Island Artist Studio Tour. As I began making notes for an article in pencil I quickly found myself drawing the words as interactive shapes rather than sentences.

This is Leo Toye's art, a certain visual poetry... calligraphy making a composition of literate words & drawing dancing more lively than typeset on the page.

 The work begins in pencil on paper:

Then a tracing on drafting film, also in pencil:

The drawing is then traced in ink on film:

This stage was scanned into a program & finished digitally:

Notice that the lines about "grace" were replaced by digital "ink work":

Click the "read more" button if you would like to view the columns as larger images... 

A BEACH WALK, AFTER OPEN STUDIO...

 

The Spring Open Studio weekends were at least successful in sharing the bells' design range & educating the steady stream of visitors about some of their production processes. While the business continued to reflect our difficult economy, exacerbated by the resulting increases in cost due to the precious metals' market, the bells still seduce with delight & frequently plant seeds toward future sales. As always after these tours I feel well stroked in the appreciation for my work.


The garden attracts much attention as folk walk down through the several paths toward the studio's entrance, allowing me to sometimes joke from the door that this is a studio, not a garden, tour & that it is time for them to come inside to play with the bells! The Petasites is once again a star, with its huge leaves, which seem particularly verdant this year. We've had to actively cull them in past weeks from our several plantations. Stephen had potted up numerous roots to give away but we had to dig even more to meet the requests for starts. They really are spectacular & I used some to make an arrangement with branches of lilac blooms for the buffet...

One clump greets from the road... from where signs direct down the steps of the main path to the studio in the lower floor of the house...

Another path to the bells wends through the newer north garden. Forget-me-nots have become a welcome weed throughout our gardens. Now we will begin to pull it out to free space for the plants they surround, often now too closely...

Looking back up that way one can enjoy the blooms along the horizontal limbs of a viburnum..

 

A view from in front of the studio contains a rhododendron in bloom below the first buds of a potted hibiscus. The water of the tide, now up, is visible beyond the birdhouse. We'd earlier noticed a wren beginning to build a nest, but it seems all the traffic of guests discouraged that family... sigh... 

We've planted more Petasites in two wine barrels below the Prow deck to enjoy their water-lily-mimicking leaves while looking down to the water of Puget Sound...

No, this isn't any flower usual to our garden. It is one last view of Petasites... the stem of one of the leaves in that arrangement which had wilted. When I removed it I was struck by how it had splayed into a bizarre looking soggy sculpture...

I always need several days to recuperate from the output of energy necessary to clean & prepare for two weekends of continuously intense personal interaction with several hundred curious visitors. "Show Time" seems both rewarding &... grueling.

So today Stephen & I took a beach walk to enjoy the lowest tide of the year at noon. It is an opportunity to view Soundcliff from a rare distance usually covered by the water of the Sound.

For several seasons we have looked out at a large tree which has stayed put out from the beach... rare for resisting so long being lifted & moved by even high storm tides. Usually not much, even of this size stays in place. We have observed collections of starfish in its roots before & expected them this time, but that mass seemed abandoned today.

 

The creatures were taking shelter under its trunk instead...

There were many of these wonderfully colorful & curious animals in better view all along the beach...

 

  

This variety is slimmer & more subtle in color. I'm now curious to discover more about them...

Yet another variety called Sea Stars were there as well, with many more tentacles...

 

There was a richness of the nests or egg cases of Moon Snails, which are fascinating for looking like  thin clay pots, delicately thrown on some water logged potter's wheel! 

Stephen discovered this nest of eggs, but we do not have any idea whose... they look almost tempting as caviar!

A ship came looming around the point as we were ready to climb home... 

Today I seemed to have the right eyes for finding the curious phallic rocks on the beach which I'm collecting to finish the construct in a bed planted with simpervirum alongside & between the foundation & the steps up to Stephen's writing cottage...

While I still have a pile of projects procrastinating in the studio, this is only one of the matching list of projects in the garden during this week forecast to continue sunny, if cooler than I wish...

BIRDS, BUSES, BELLS & BEES...

This is an article I wrote which was published last week in one of our newspapers, the Loop...

BIRDS, BUSES, BELLS & BEES
... all on the Open Studio Tour...

By: Gordon R. Barnett

I've long appreciated the reliable history of the Vashon Artist Studio Tours... always the first two full weekends of both December and May. I have come to set my studio's seasonal clock by that schedule. Its logic is simple and useful for me whose bells often become gifts for either the winter holidays or Mother's Day. That schedule is one of the reasons I have participated for so many years, but I wondered how some other artists on the tour felt about those rhythms... and why they become regulars.

I think most artists on the tour would agree that the process of inviting folk into the work spaces we more usually occupy in solitude becomes an important teach / learning experience. We obviously want to share,  promote... and sell... our work. We thus teach through our craft and technique... AND we look forward to learning in turn from everyone accepting our invitation. Whether or not you’re a purchasing patron, your feedback helps complete the cycle of communication which art is about.

To explore the back lanes of our Island in the bloom of spring is an opportunity in itself. Then, to be invited to explore behind the fences and gates, into the newly aired and tidied-up working spaces of such a wide variety of creative Islanders allows you to co-create the excursion in your own flavor. It is doubtful you’ll be able to cover it all.

One way to start might be to find a "neighborhood" of studios, like ours here on Dilworth Point with three artists sharing paintings, jewelry,  garden sculpture and small wearable bells. The driveway to Steve Zartman's metal working studio is indeed next door to Kristen Reitz-Green's small carefully handmade pentagonal studio full with large paintings.

Steve was surprised one year to see a large bus, chartered for the excursion by a group from the city, moving up the single lane drive without first checking to see if there was room to turn that rig around! Somehow they managed, and while he appreciated the business from such a crowd, I suspect there was some cost to his landscaping! He is, like many of us, a gardener. His garden sculpture is designed to enhance such living spaces, while his jewelry works on a more intimate scale.

Before moving to the Island five years ago, Kristen was a professional musician, playing and teaching the french horn. Now she's made a huge leap into boldly painting oils on canvases -- ranging from the small studies, which become her bread-and-butter sales, to richly colored large images of food [...think 4-foot bowls of Fruit Loops or a huge glistening close-up of a succulent sandwich!] That she began her first study of painting with Pam Ingalls is obvious, yet that she has moved [with even more obvious individuation] gracefully into her own style in just a few years is impressive. She raises chickens & paints them alongside sensitive studies of children. One year when she had an excessive gaggle of roosters she gave several away to studio visitors... unpredictable opportunities abound on this tour!

Because I love and collect eggs, even making some myself, I'm pleased that the calendar this year makes for a late Easter so that Emily Pruiksma's Ukranian decorated eggs will be quite in season! We share the use of wax in our work, although the hard wax I use to make the models for my lost-wax cast bells is of quite a different nature from the bee's wax used to make the hand dipped & often sculpted candles made by Emily and her husband Shane at Fiddle Home Studio. Additionally the technique of decorating blown egg shells involves wax to develop the complex traditionally geometric patterns of a culture celebrating the spring holiday even more than the winter.

Emily's studio is a quintessential Island experiment & experience... bringing the cycle of living and working with nature closer to completion. They keep bees, using the wax produced to add with other, sometimes also local, sources of their organic raw material. Bees are a currently newsworthy important part of our ecology, so the cows which pose on this farm for the cameras of studio visitors & the window looking from the yurt into the chicken coop, dubbed the "chicken TV" to occupy younger visitors all necessarily depend on the cross-pollination of species, including artists!

Tidy Studio...

Last mid-week I had to make myself stop working at the metals bench & begin the process of cleaning the studio in preparation for this weekend's Vashon Island Artist's Holiday Open Studio Tour. This is actually one of my favorite parts of the preparation... after the messy chores are completed!

I love having my workspace tidy & clean & organized spare following the months of ignoring the dust residual from just casual sweeping-up during projects like building the new displays & the grimy grit of even the smaller amount of polishing the studio has seen, since most of the polishing was done this season by the foundry.

The place cleans up really well & I did a more intense job of it this time, so the glow it took on came from that deeper attention. While I have never been one of those who has a precise place for every little thing & have everything in that place, I certainly have had to develop some patterns of careful organization to keep all my parts usefully at hand while still out of sight. Each of these reorganizations adds to my studio's fabric & system. Even so, I often see the joke that I seem never to be able to easily find things afterwards for all that effort!

Waxing my old wood furniture is a joy. Many of these pieces have been part of my working spaces for decades. I'm pleased to have collected them early on & they have served me so well, traveling with me in my various peregrinations. I have other, less interesting surfaces as well, of course, painted wood & Formica... in addition to the abundance of concrete as floor & walls. All benefit from the attentions of brush, broom & rag... becoming good therapy even as the process abrades & dries ones hands. I chuckle remembering the old dish soap ads about cracked skin & broken nails I saw in my youth.

I'm ready now, Mr De Mille, for the close-up of my thumb's painful pad still deep cracking open three days later...

Over many years of experience inviting folk into my workspace for Open Studio I have learned to practice not just cleaning surface but also paring down to the most spare story I can. It becomes a fine game to remove all but the essential parts most necessary to show how I work . Of course I usually work with my tools in clumps & piles only I can sort out, but that clutter would only hinder the 2 minute version I must be able to concisely tell about how the lost wax casting process works while I have a dozen folk playing in this narrow space.

So I get to embellish the newly opened surfaces more freely then, fresh with new opportunity to evolve my story much more clearly. I groom trails, with examples as I can, to draw various kinds of attentions along... samples of work in various stages, exemplary collections of tools, illustrations or objects I'm researching & those I'm simply enjoying for texture or color or form. This becomes showtime...





I've been claiming new space from the area closest the entrance to the studio which no longer is needed to store the garden tools, which have their own sheds now. I finally got rid of the unused water softener, so now there is clear space for a new workstation I've been planning & will explain another time. I loaned my polishing box to the foundry for this production season, so I cleared that workbench of the drill press, other motors & the vice to expose a surface useful to serve the drinks & nibbles, away from the crowded center of the studio, as has traditionally been the layout.

I had to scrub the wall & I covered the outlets with a backdrop of craft paper, bringing the wooden puzzles brought from Venice some years ago down from their home in the dining room window sill. They brought a very subtle holiday mood befitting the occasion. I don't go in for much traditional color or tinsel these days, although I might add some gold stars for next weekend...

Unfortunately, because both days we had wet, cold weather, there was no crowd sufficient to test that theory of arrangement so well as I might wish. I am pleased with way the table evolved, hoping for many reasons that next weekend will see a fair party develop at that end of the studio.



This, then, is my visual celebration of the studio at its most presentable...








Still it rains...

The Second Open Studio Weekend...

Another Monday morning posting does not mean I will be regular in such timing, but is instead a result simply of having worked again all weekend. While I have long loved a pattern of writing journal in bed with morning coffee, this blog version of that has no easy rhythm yet...

While I continue to fuss inside this format I can report that the second weekend of the Vashon Open Studio Tour matched the first in activity at GRB Bells. We make a bit of a party around this Island institution with a table of goodies. Morning sweeets segue into afternoon savories, thanks to Stephen's attentions. Wafting scent of cinnamon, cloves & ginger from a pot of hot spiced cider greets visitors before I am able to articulate my own verbal welcome. The tinkling bells' song from those hundreds of silver beings on the displays quickly brings folk along deeper into the celebration which we offer for those making the trek out to our home on the edge which we call Soundcliff, being both a description & a prayer.

The studio is one of many tucked away in corners of the Island not usually so publicly accessible. We suggest walking the short distance in on our narrow road since the situation for parking is a bit limited. It isn't much more of a hike than walking from the parking garage at any mall, but even on dull wet days we can offer expanding water views through the alders as one approaches our garden. If the day is clear, as they mostly were for this tour, our panorama might tease with fog or clouds before opening a peek toward more fulsome sunbreak vista including Tahoma [Mt. Ranier], inside the weather over Puget Sound.

The bells are a palpable expression of the joy usually more jingoed about in this season than JINGLED... they make their own music & dance a genuine jig! While working so closely with them all year, first in their silent waxy states, before the visually dull rough-casts begin to hint at resonance, I must hold faith in my intuition. I must use my imagination to find hints under their dirty surfaces at mid-polish toward a more finished complexion. All that before their vabious parts get strung, hung, wire-wrapped, & clappered together finally in forms which give them voice.

They truly ring intensely for me during that latter process, yet there is another sound I want...

I am most fully rewarded when their rhythm is rung by other hands, thus eliciting in addition the sounds of a rare delight as visitors discover their own relationship with this ancient archetype. My curious work is vindicated in a complex duet of tinkling sounds... human entrancement with something metallic.

Silly silver bells. Little toys. Ding-a-ling jewelry... miniature bits, perhaps, of poetic profundity in the physics of cast metal? Something alchemical happens... I feel this peculiar joy whenever a bell rings.

I take yet another sort of reward during these Open Studio days in the tidy ambiance of my freshly scrubbed studio. The sound system is quieted from its usual duty of masking the whine of flex-shaft & polishing motors. The recently installed track lighting showing off the results of all the previously less pristine processes for the bells displayed on wall panels, ready to sound off at the least touch... & a flow of visitors responding inside this magical space.

I hear the question frequently whether I ever get tired of the sound of the bells. No! That is a big part of my pay-package.

I have stopped fighting what could be made as a case for my own idiocy in a world gone similarly mad in quite other directions. If this niche I've spent nearly 25 years exploring is wasting my time, then so be it. Indulgence in joy becomes its own exponential reward.

If I were still struggling to share that joy it might be different, but each year I have become convinced again by the way they continue to find appreciative audience. They are it...

JOY!

During that period some years ago, when they were being produced & marketed by others outside my studio, it was easier to listen to the down sides of more standard business notions which suggest this line of 200 designs is too much of too little. The economies of scale are delicate. I'm mostly happy that I'm a little man. A little sensitive guy. A little foolish & a little silly if I must be... which probably helps if one wants to do a business in bells. But, while I make little silver bells, I make a big bewildering range of them!

GRB Bells writes an ever surprising business on this small island. I am always amazed how many bells find homes here. Vashon might be similar, to this big bell tribe. All those choices allow lots of the essential variety for personal independence to celebrate, as befits living harmoniously on an island.

I could estimate numbers that we have already belled some 10% of our population, yet still we sold more bells at this event than ever before!

This year has continued to see the off-Island business growing as well, from the web site GRBBELLS.COM & in the several shops across the country who also help sell GRB Bells. Nancy Shaw & Company in Mystic, Connecticut, features the bells as ancillary to her selection of antique & estate jewelry, all year 'round, but with a special promotion during these holidays. Isadora in Sedona, Arizona, & Emily Benoist Ruffins Design in Taos, New Mexico, both have long been active purveyors for the line in the southwest. The latest venue to join our network is Fremont Jewelry Design here in Seattle.

Now this rare day of writing must shut itself down to accommodate a trip into the city. Life in the studio might wish for a well deserved break after accomplishing so much of preparation toward the fulfillment of other seasonal celebrations, but, this artist is married to other whirlwinds... we have appointments & parties, plus an exhibit to attend!


I love the other-reverence for this season from one of the list serves I receive:

"There are only three more shopping days before Beethoven's Birthday!"