Folk Art Mary

Handmade House in the Woods, Trees and Greens

I didn't say it in my earlier post, but I felt a bit anxious after looking at the piece with it's first coat of paint. The trees did not stand out the way I hoped they would.

Here the greens have been added, not just in the trees but in the grass and gardens around the house. I'm feeling more confidence. The house is still untackled, I'm still working out in my head how to paint the house. Now I've moved from feeling nervous about how the trees will turn out to feeling nervous about how the house will work out.

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Handmade House in the Woods, First Coat of Paint

The Handmade House in the Woods picture has a first coat of paint on everything other than the outer frame and the house.

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Hand Made House in the Woods Commission, Trees Complete

This is the last picture I took of this commissioned work before beginning to paint. In it the house and the bottom part of the carving are still incomplete. I love how the white pine trees (behind the house) turned out. They're all wavy and uneven the way white pine trees are. Ironically this picture is carved on white pine boards, my preferred carving wood.

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Handmade House in the Woods, Commission Half Carved

This is a picture of the commissioned work half carved. Here I've worked from the to down, doing the more deeply carved wooden areas first, leaving the house with all its details until the end.

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Winter is the Time I do Commissions

As we head into November, I've got winter on my mind. Winter can be a cozy time in my studio, when I finish up all the carved but still unpainted art work made during the summer months at the Ithaca Farmers' Market. It's also a time when I take orders for commissioned special order items.

This time last year, I made a sketch for a commission that, five months later, had turned into a finished picture of a customer's wonderful hand made, mostly owner built, house dwarfed by white pine trees and clouds, complete with family and pets.

Here is the beginning sketch.

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Guest Artist - Jeff Roland

Jeff Roland is a wonderful French self taught neo outsider artist whose work just grabs me. As usual I came to know about his work through Facebook. Below are two pictures Jeff has painted that I particularly like. He talks about them in his own words.

Knight Order of the Holy Cheese (oil on paper, 2011) is 65 x 50 cm. "It was live painted during my exhibition residence in the house in which lived François Rabelais in the 16th century. It is a hommage to places of high spiritual value and mysticism, mixed with the influence of the books of Rabelais, who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which there is an Abbey called the Theleme Abbey. This painting is a caricature of strict order. The command of the members of Theleme is 'Do what you will'."

 

Pythagoras and the Golden Mean (oil on wood, 2009), 50 x 50 cm. "This is a very geometrical painting mainly based on triangle compositions, except for the character in the center.  Pythagoras, with crossed references to triangles and lines, is explaining to disciples the goal of scientific studies in his school. The "very hard to find ' Golden Mean is an expression of the tempered personality that best fits Pythagoras' theory. As they are looking for it in an abstract manner, we see the real dodo like golden mean right in front of us, unhidden, visible, as are many truths that we spend time on trying to discover."

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Wood Delivery - All Tucked in.

You'd never guess it without me having told you, but behind this hinged door in the skirting under my front porch, there's a whole supply of white pine boards aging and drying. The wood delivery I've shown in this blog series came in the spring of 2010. I'm writing this blog entry in the fall of 2011. I've noticed that I'm getting low on the white pine boards in my shop, so I am about to take wood out from under my porch to be planed, jointed and moved to my studio. This way I will have a good winter's supply of carving boards on hand for 2012.

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Wood Delivery - No more Room Under the Porch

The wood is all off the truck, stacked and stickered, under my porch. Chock full, no room for more. Now all I have to do is sit back for a year and wait for these white pine boards to dry.

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Wood Delivery - Last Boards off the Truck

Here's the last board being unloaded from the truck.  As I'm getting older my hands like lighter work, so I'm getting help with heavier tasks. The boards I get are green and newly milled, so they may weigh three times more right off the truck compared to when they have been air dried.

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Wood Delivery - Storing it Under my Porch

This is a picture of the storage space under my front porch where I store my white pine boards as they dry. As you can see, I have space for more wood.

The smaller boards that go from left to right are called "stickers" and their job is to space the boards so there is air flow. Generally I air dry boards one year for every inch of board thickness.

 
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Wood Delivery of White Pine Boards

Going into the winter, I realise I'm getting low on my supply of white pine boards. Here are some pictures of a wood delivery I got about a year ago. First I go to a rough cut saw mill and pick out my boards. This is a laborious job that I don't always look forward to, as it involves sorting wood from one stickered stack of wood to another. Once I've picked out what I want, next I have the boards delivered. Here's a picture of the loaded delivery truck when it arrived at my house with the wooden planks. Since my carving work is so time consuming, I may only go through about 8 to 10 boards per year. So this may be a two years' stock of wood.

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Guest Artist - Annie Hayes

Here's what Annie Hayes has to say about her work. "I make handmade hooked rugs of hand-dyed and as-is wools on linen using my personal designs. My work has been featured in The New York Times, Old-House Interiors, Early Homes among other magazines." I met Annie at the Bedminster Land Conservancy show that we both did a few weeks back. I like the quote she has on the homepage of her website: "If it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none" (Ben Shahn). It's hard to define Annie's work, craftsperson? artist?. Who cares, she's just plain good.

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Crows and Mr Clean - Painting DONE!

At first I thought I would paint all the birds as crows, but when when I put brush to wood it really looked much better with the smaller birds being white. I really like how the yellows and greens in this one turned out. You can see that this is a smaller piece because of the size of my signature (relative to the size of the caring) on the right. The signature is always the same size because I use a signature stamp for my initials. This carving is made all from one piece of wood, final size to outside of frame is 9.5" tall x 11.5" wide, cost $475.00.

 
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