A Beautiful Day in Nyack, NY

We enjoyed gorgeous weather at the Nyack Street Fair on Sunday, May 20. Here are some shots of our booth. Look for us at our next venue: The Montvale Street Fair on June 3!

Nyack Street Fair

If you are in the area - look for our booth at the Nyack Street Fair on Sunday, May 20th!

New Work!

Check out our new work on our website!

An Invitation to Dream

A message from Tom:

Old houses are filled with stories. Can you hear the workers? The saws and hammers echoing off the hillsides on a spring or summer day long ago? Can you smell the plaster and fresh paint?  Walls that once provided shelter from the elements now witness nature's return. Who lived there, what did they do? The remnants of runners on those narrow, steep stairs have stories of husband and wife slowly ascending after a hard day, of children scrambling up into warm beds on chilly winter evenings, and stepping down anxiously on their first day of school. I see a rich tapestry of humanity woven back into our past and continuing far into the future. Go ahead, dream!

Weaving Workshop

A message from Buff:

Last weekend I took a two-day Shaker weaving workshop sponsored by my weaving/spinning group, Woodland Weavers' and Spinners' Guild.  Many people are familiar with the beautiful, simple furniture that the Shakers produced, but perhaps not as familiar with their weaving.  We were weaving samples of cloth that would be used for clothing or dishtowels, out of cotton or linen. 





Buff, Jean, Pam (left to right)

Dixie (left) and Bev



There were seven of us, and each participant was assigned a different "draft" to set up on our own loom, which would produce a particular pattern.  During the two days, we each worked on everybody's looms; so at the end of the day on Sunday, we each had a sample of all seven designs.  Many of the original Shaker fabrics were white-on-white, creating a subtle pattern and texture in the finished product.  We also tried combining white and off-white, and using brighter colors for a change of pace.

The workshop was led by Margriet Carrico, who was an excellent teacher; she was friendly and low-key and encouraged us to experiment.

Margriet



Weaving is a wonderful art form.  It is almost a meditative experience (at least until you break a thread!).  We are a friendly teaching/learning guild and welcome anyone who has any interest, even if you've never touched a loom or a spinning wheel.  We meet at the Damascus Town Hall in Damascus, PA, generally on the third Saturday of the month.  Take a look at our website, and feel free to visit or contact us!







Samples

 





Patterns

A message from Nada Clyne:

I've been going through a fallow period.  

It's a kind of hibernation with no

interest in creating anything at all - 

a time to simply be and do what is 

before me without initiating new ideas and projects. I work on tasks I ordinarily shirk, completing a framing job, putting together an inventory, cleaning my studio.  And when I'm not doing, I sit and look out the window, go for walks, be quiet and at ease with myself.     

It used to be that I feared these times or felt guilty that I didn't embrace the artist's work ethic.  After all, don't books say that we should show up and do something in the studio every day? But I've discovered the artistic process doesn't work that way, not for me at least. Now I embrace these times of simply being and absorbing, knowing that one day soon, I'll be at the behest of the creative energy, working and working to manifest the impulses and ideas that come so thick and fast I can hardly keep up with them.  And I love those times too! 

Over time and (and with much struggle!) I have come to honor the patterns. These energetic ebbs and flows that impel me to create have a life of their own.  If I stay attuned to their rhythms, I can fully enjoy both riding the creative wave and floating in the shallows that engender new work.  It's a way of being fully in my own life as it is. It requires trust and not defining my worth by my output or by my role as an artist. It's embracing myself as I am moment to moment.

  

These words came to me this morning just as I woke up:

….I wrap the world around me

     like a blanket

     and snuggle into my life

     as it is

Where My Feet Are...

Some thoughts from Tom

Technology influences art.  What you create and how you create it are unique to your individual skills and imagination.  But your creative process is in part defined by your choice of medium and its technical limitations.  I think this is true in all media, and I feel it very strongly in my chosen form, photography.                                                                                    

When I first became interested in photography, it was a chemical process. In black and white photography, sensitized film is exposed to light, causing a subtle change in silver salts that are chemically treated to form microscopic particles of metallic silver, black to the eye and varying in quantity  according to how much light struck the film.  The more light, the larger the concentration of black particles.  Areas where less light struck produced fewer black particles. This produces a negative image on transparent film that is projected onto paper by basically the same process to produce the final positive image.  Things have changed dramatically with the coming of computers and digital cameras.  Photography is now a digital process, where light is electronically recorded.  The information is stored in binary code, manipulated and output for view on paper or monitor.  Matthew Brady would have recognized my darkroom and 35mm SLR as a miniaturized, refined version of the photographic equipment he hauled around with horse and wagon during the Civil War.  But digital?  Wow!

 Both forms record a three dimensional scene, a frozen slice of time and space, and translate it into a permanent, two dimensional image.  But the capture, manipulation and output of the final image is much faster and simpler than before.  Technology has taken a process that was once the domain of specialized craftspeople, simplified it and expanded it far beyond its original form. When I used film, the limitations of a finite quantity of film and the time-consuming process of developing and printing images forced me to think carefully before shooting.  Should I take several pictures of a particular subject, or save film for something that might present itself just around the corner? Whatever decision I made, I wouldn’t know the outcome until hours or days later, when the film was developed.  And when shooting black-and-white, colors reproduce as shades of gray, so form and light were much more important than color.  I learned to “see” in black and white. 

Digital photography offers me freedom from the old chemical process.  I can confirm proper exposure with a glance at a histogram, and view my finished image immediately.  And the number of photos I can take is limited only by the size of my memory card.   Digital photography has simplified a process I gave up, in part, for lack of time and space. I embrace these new changes and step gladly into the future with one foot, but at the same time, I feel my other foot stuck in the past.  I no longer need to pass up shooting a waterscape because a beer bottle floats in the foreground.  It is easily removed on the computer.  But while I have endless tools and opportunities to alter images, I find myself only making changes that I would have done with film.  I adjust image exposure, correct perspective, and remove small imperfections that detract from the overall composition.  Beyond basic adjustment, change comes slowly for me.  Why?  I think it’s a mix of both fear and comfort.  Fear of the unknown, of mastering a new technology that alters a routine and thought process anchored in lessons from the past.  And comfort.  I’ve never created an HDR image or stitched images digitally into a panorama.  I would like to, but something holds me back.  Creating compositions within a 1x1.5 frame proportion and capturing only what I see are self-imposed restrictions, much like a poet writing in the rigidly defined forms of sonnet or haiku.  I use self imposed limits for both the challenge and comfort. Challenge for me has been a conformity with the past rather than an open embrace of the future.  But change is on the horizon.   Recently I’ve been experimenting with the “clarity” adjustment in Photoshop, altering and softening image midtones.  The result is a softer, almost watercolor-like quality that works differently with different images.  The effect can be very subtle or very pronounced.  And it’s a refreshing change from crisp, sharp images that I routinely produce.