More Leaves

9/14/06

As I warned in the beginning of this blog, order is not going to be a major priority and things might get a little random. In this segment for example we are going to go back to the fall of 2006. It was the weekend of September 13th and 14th. Cedar Grove had just been hit by a huge wind storm. The sound of chain saws cleaning up trees and branches could be heard everywhere. We hadn’t lost anything major in our yard but there was debris everywhere. I set out to make some paper to commemorate the event. Out of this endeavor several new techniques were born. As any artist knows, often you just go through the motions in hope that some happening or discovery will spark an idea. I had an instructor along the line who referred to them as happy accidents. This day brought a couple. It was the first time I pressed leaves into the surface of the paper to represent the leaves that were blown everywhere. I wanted to produce a paper piece that also illustrated the energy of the storm so I started whipping the wet paper with willow branches to give the surface a windblown effect. After working out some issues it became an effective way of texturing the surface and I have used it in other pieces since. After it was dry it still didn’t quite have the action I was looking for so I sprayed it with a special whirling technique, again developed for these two pieces. I then applied some molded leaves to the surface in a way to represent the blowing leaves. Until writing about my later leave pieces I had kind of forgotten about these and it was fun to revisit them.

9/13/06