Wednesday, May 18, 2011

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...

Saturday, May 07, 2011

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!