GirlMeetsArt » Penland School of Crafts

Boxes, books and other paper arts

Chris Raymond — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:28:57 +0000

Despite spending many summers at art colonies or crafts schools in remote wooded locations, I never got much inspiration from nature in doing my art. All the green just did not do much for me. Then one summer I signed up for a bookmaking class at Penland, taught by Julie Leonard, a book artist with the University of Iowa.I decided to tackle a complex construction project, designing a box inspired by one sent out by a stock photo company. The box used heavy black card stock imprinted with a primitive icon pattern, and a phrase hand-written in gold pen: “We feel a great rush of wind, as though all the locked doors and windows within have been thrown open and body and spirit can fully breathe again.” [The phrase is from Michael Ventura’s article in Psychology Today about love blossoming among the elderly.] Given the reference to nature, and to a sense of opening up to unseen or locked up emotions, I decided to somehow incorporate content that might not be visible to the casual onlooker.

I wandered the grounds, heavy tracing paper in hand, and took charcoal rubbings of many of the surfaces on the grounds of the school, including “environmental art” pieces created by students in previous summers. Inside the box, red fabric and a pull tab housed the rubbings.

Broken hearts

Chris Raymond — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:38:50 +0000

The maternal side of my family has bad heart genes.

My mother and nearly all of her seven siblings suffered from premature cardiovascular disease and highly elevated cholesterol levels. My sister died of a heart attack at age 42.

This legacy has influenced me in a lot of ways. I strictly avoided taking up smoking. I regularly monitor my heart disease risk markers. And, sometimes, I fight a sense of impending doom.

One summer at the Penland School, I used the printmaking workshop to explore the idea of “broken hearts” in the medical sense. Here are some of the series.

Tapping into your life

Chris Raymond — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:49:14 +0000

In the early 1980s, while living in Chicago and making my living as a medical writer, I found myself looking for a different way to spend my vacation time. A coworker told me about Oxbow, a summer art colony run by the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had my doubts.

I’d traced comics as a child to make decorations for our windows, but that was the extent of my “artistic” experience. But I decided to take the plunge, despite the wave of second-guessing that swamped me as I stepped onto a yellow school bus with a group of teenagers to make the trek to Oxbow.

That week changed my life. Suddenly, I saw everything around me with new eyes.

During the years since, I have taken a workshop of one sort or another (the book and paper arts, printmaking, and jewelry making, just to name a few) just about every summer, at Oxbow and then at the Penland School of Crafts.

What I’ve learned from all this are two things:
1. Focus on the process, rather than the results. Pick a subject for the workshop so that you can focus on learning the medium, rather than agonizing over the content. Otherwise, I would be paralyzed by the inner voice of the editor, telling me that nothing I do would be any good.
2. Tap into your life history to make your work immeasurably more engaging. The breakthrough came the summer at Penland when I drew on my feelings of damage (I was facing knee surgery), and loss (my older sister’s sudden death) to create a sculpture that was not “pretty” but pretty powerful.

I had escaped the strictures of making beautiful things to making meaningful things.