Winter Sun

Capturing the seasons in my work

Winter Sun

This week felt like spring. It was warm enough yesterday that while walking home from picking up my son at school we were able to shuck our jackets.

I love the return of spring air. It is like my sense of smell gets switched back on. Wet grass. Wetter mud. The warm smell of sunshine in the air. A little hint of diesel from the bus stop up the street. It's like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the door opens and suddenly everything is in color. It was a bittersweet moment though because it is still only February.

I've been trying to capture more of that sense of seasonality in my work. That taste of warmer weather has me jonesing for green leaves and the smell of rain, setting cyanotypes out to expose, their printing frames warming in the sun. I think I was looking for a sense of the seasons when I started doing my annual indigo dyeing every spring. The same with my October residency.

February can feel devoid of seasonal cues, but that's not true. February is about light. The days start getting longer. It's around this time of year that the sun is up late enough that it sets while I'm making dinner. I can see it just out my kitchen window while I'm cooking. It skims along the bottoms of the clouds and catches the tips of the maple tree branches in my backyard as it goes.

I've been seeing this show up in my work with these wet molded vessels. For so long I’ve been looking at my work straight on. A wallet in my hand. Art up on a wall. These new shapes though are made to be viewed at an angle. That's how I catch myself looking at them. With the light cutting across them creating shadows.

Molding them also creates this gradation in color as the leather bends around the curve of whatever I've molded them into. I think this works really well with my hand dyeing technique.

I have pages of sketches in my notebook of trays and bowls right now. I don't know how I'll find the time to try out everything I've got down. I'm trying to sneak in one or two every day around the rest of the work I'm doing in my studio. I hoping to have enough to launch a small collection of them in March.

In the meantime I'm wrapping up a couple more bags this week. Over the weekend I'm bringing another batch of cyanotypes up to the printer's for reproduction. I'm hoping to finally get a few of them up on the website later this month as well.