Because of its location (along the Art Coast) and high quality products, this shop should be a great outlet for my artwork. This gift shop targets high end consumers looking to decorate their homes and cottages - the perfect niche for me.

This shop is also associated with the Blue Coast Artists so draws from their great mailing list and will be on the annual October Fall Tour of Studios.

I prepared my binder, my Letter of Agreement, price sheet as well as had samples of my work set up for display in the studio. Jan perused and picked out two or three canvas to take on consignment and wants to come back again so that she may carefully look through the smaller price-point items I have for sale.

At Last, 1395 Blue Star Highway, Glen, MI 269-227-3859. Open Friday through Sunday, 11 to 5.

Everything is done electronically and my package included my artist statement, a curriculm vitea (I sent my resume’) and samples of on-line artwork. There is a $45.00 per month fee (or a $500.00 annual commitment) as well as a commitment to serve on a committee. I chose the curating a gallery show as this is the task that interests me the most. The first members show will open July 3.

This is a big commitment for me but how else can I get my work shown within the Chicago venue? My overall plan is to go into the city for the show hanging and also try to coordinate with a nature center or botanical garden; my best opportunity for a future solo show and sale.

The new Coolition Gallery is located at 2010 W. Pierce, Unit 101. Chicago, Il. 312-781-0040. 

When I first started to create art and sell it, I found myself wanting to hang on to my favorite pieces. It was an odd feeling because I had a gallery and has set the business up to sell. I was in the enviable position of someone wanting to purchase my art so why was I so resistent to parting with my artwork?

As I processed this question, I realized a part of me was afraid that I would not be able to make more art. I think I was also afraid that if I sold it all, I would have none left for myself to hang in my home.  I had to learn to let it go and trust that, like the tree that leafed again each spring, I too could easily continue to create more art.

Today, I have numerous pieces of my art hanging in my home as well as many sold to customers near and far. I have learned that my artmaking is like a natural, slowly bubbling spring - if treated properly, there is always more where that came from.

I just got word that the Till Midnight Gallery is closing due the current financial situation. And, I just made a special delivery there and swopped out new artwork less than 3 weeks ago!

It’s always a huge disappointment when another art gallery closes and this time its both the gallery and the restaurant. I have a lot of sympathy for both businesses - as I’ve been on both sides of that coin!

It’s time to recirculate that artwork yet again.

Today was a day spent on the road making art and brochure deleveries.

I drove first to Krasl Art Center www.krasl.org  to deliver a 12″ X 12″ square canvas titled, Great Lakes Treasures.” My contact there accepted the piece and placed it near my other 10″ X 24″ canvas picturing the St. Joseph lighthouse which all together with a wreath made a nice three piece wall collection.

Then I delivered brochures to The Box Factory for the Arts, and enjoyed the artwork as I toured.

Next I headed to Harbor Country www.harborcountry.com stopping at local tourist sights to leave brochures along the way. A lot of shops and restaurants are still closed prior to opening for the 2009 season but I covered what I could.

My final destination was delivery to Local Color Gallery in Lakeside. This is the third year I have sold through the Local Color Gallery and I seemed to have attracted the notice of an interior designer who has been making purchases of my canvases the past few years.

I took the signature piece, Gifts of the Dunes” (from the Gifts of the Dunes Series) to this gallery along with three pieces from the “Calligraphy & Paper” series and 12 note cards.

Local Color is busy gearing up for their season opener, “Art Attack” www.harborcountry.org/artattack that begins this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I am VERY happy to have my artwork be a part of this well publicized spring art walk.

I finally finished the final 6 piece of art work for this winters collection, “Gift of the Dunes.”

The collection includes;

1) Gift of the Dunes
2) Singing Sands
3) Calm Waters
4) Time & Tides
5) Shifting Winds
6) Water Migration I & II
7) Sand Solstice
Calm Before Storm
9) Great Lakes Treasure

Now my efforts turn to preparing inventories and getting artwork delivered to the galleries before the 2009 season beings.

My new work has returned from the photographer and has been uploaded on my website www.whiteoakstudioandgallery.aftosa.com Each of the 8 pieces is loaded at the beginning of the site and each has the words NEW in front of the artworks title.

Comments from the photographer’s wife, who is also the owner of Khenemu Gallery, www. khnemustudio.com, her favorite work is that the ”Gift of the Dunes” series. Since I find I sit so close to my own work that is hard to remain objective, I am grateful to receive her positive feedback.

My process of making handmade papers is mediatative, repetitive, methodical and ritualistic. The sheer act of doing this work brings me a calmness and piece (like my yoga practice) that I hope communicates the meditative nature of the completed piece.

In this new series, I am attempting to create even more visual and physical layers than before, while continuing to call attention to the beauty and fragility of the Earth and its natural resources. I have turned into a political activist in my home township, Lee Township, Michigan as I try to protect the land, the groundwater and the air quality.

This land is a spiritual responsibility.  Are we up to the challenge?

I’ve been recovering from knee surgery and can’t get into the studio to work. So instead I am watching the PBS TV series titled, Art in the 21st Century. This four season series offers over 4 hours of artistic inspiration per DVD, 4 seasons, or 64 hours of filming overall. This gives me a way to stay involved in the art world while not being mobile.(This would also be a great series for anyone experiencing “artists block.”)

This series focuses exclusively on contemporary art in the US. with selected artists revealing their inspiration and methods behind their work. Through interviews with the artists, the film shows them at work and gives us an opportunity to peek into their lives of creation and exhibition.

Each DVD is broken into themes and a particular artist is chosen whose artwork fits that theme. I am as attracted and interestied inthe themes as I am the artists’ work. I enjoy the themes because I title my artwork, create work in series and give names to exhibitions and I find it interesting how the directors broke the artist body of work down into themes.

Two examples…

SERIES ONE:     SERIES FOUR:
Place                      Romance
Identity                   Protest
Spirituality              Ecology
Consumption          Paradox

This series has introduced me to many new and lesser known artists whose work and style of working I am not familiar with. This sereis has opened my mind to new ways of seeing, observing, working and thinking.

I was most impressed with the interview of photographer Sally Mann, best known for her large scale, black and white photographs of her young children and more recently of landscapes of death and decay.  I knew her work from my days as a photojournalist and landscape photographer. We share a deep relationship with the land and use the land and its natural beauty as a theme in our work.

Today I delivered eight new canvases of my handmade paper artwork to my Fennville photographer, Rob Soltysiak. This work is being photographed for my website as well as a new on-line site that is in the works. This represents my entire fall and winter output.

Artist friends who know that I have photographed people and landscapes for almost 40 years often ask me if I take photographs of artwork? I always tell them no - this is a highly specialized practice requiring special equipment and lighting. (And quite a large financial investment as well.)

When you are searching for a “photography partner” of your artwork be sure to look for a photographer who has;

1) The proper equipment for the task at hand. (It takes special lenses, lighting and a set up with a variety of  backdrops to photograph artwork.)
2) An understanding of the specific lighting needed to show off your work to its fullest capacity (This type of photography needs at least 2 bounce lights and a backdrop.)
3) An understanding of what editors and publications, and photo judges and juries, expect in backdrop colors, lighting and final image quality. (You artwork will also be judged (and accepted or denied) on the quality of the photography as well as your artwork.)
4) A willingness to prepare your final images in the formet you need for the specific way you will be using them. Will your images be used on a website or will they be used in publication and for art juries?

Plan to spend around $400.00 to $600.00 for every 10 or so pieces photographed.

“What will you live for? What you look like to others or what you feel like to your yourself? Appearances or experiences?” Tama Kieves: This Time I Dance

Garden-Grown Paper

Ann goes for “green” papermaking with Michigan artist.

By Ann Kaiser
Editor

“Making paper is really kitchen chemistry,” says my hostess, artist Donna Allgaier-Lamberti. She has simmered a big canning kettle full of daylily stems, and we’re beating them to a pulp.

With a vengeance, I pound the mushy brown pieces with a meat tenderizing mallet to break down the fibers. Smelly brown liquid spews all over the table—and me! From her gardens and wooded acreage in Pullman, Michigan, Donna gathers iris, hosta, ferns, rhubarb, sunflowers and such to add texture and character to her beautiful handmade papers.

I’m learning her “recipe” for turning flowers and foliage into textured sheets that reflect her love of nature…

8 a.m.» Donna’s studio is an outbuilding on the 5-acre spread she and husband Gene bought in 2000. An amateur blacksmith, he does ironwork in a barn on the property.

Walls in the studio display Donna’s signature pieces—collages of her handmade papers layered on stretched canvases. Some feature leaves, ferns or twigs. Others are printed with scenic photos she takes.

I admire these along with her stock of sheets in various hues. They’re used to make custom invitations, paper bookmarks, boxes, vases and bowls.

Explains Donna, “I was looking for handmade paper to transfer my photographic images and couldn’t find what I wanted. So a few years ago, I tried making some of my own, using an age-old technique.”

Start in the Garden

8:30 a.m.» We’ll get back to the studio “pulp pit” later. But first, we head outdoors with straw baskets and an old coaster wagon to find ingredients. “Spirit,” the Allgaier-Lambertis’ loyal chocolate retriever, bounds at our heels as we gather rich orange mums, bright little black-eyed

Susans and other perennials. Butterflies flit through sprawling beds defined by stones the couple hauled from beaches and farm fields.

“The first step in my papermaking process is gathering plant material in late summer and fall, when the plants start drying down,” Donna says. “I spread the plants to air-dry outdoors, then sort and cut them into smaller pieces to process the fiber.

Clockwise from top: They pound slow-cooked daylily stems to break down the fibers. To make a sheet of paper, Ann dips a mold into a vat of pulp that includes fiber from at least four different plants. It comes up covered with fiber. Ann flops the mold over onto a screen, where the sheets dry.

9 a.m.» Donna enlists my help for the next step. We drain and rinse a kettle of daylily stems she’d cooked in water with soda ash—a sodium salt of carbonic acid that begins to break down the fibers. We continue the process by vigorously beating the stems with a mallet for about 10 minutes.

“As you see,” Donna says, “this is messy, time-consuming and best done outside. If I want a vat full of hosta pulp, for example, I have to collect, dry and process several large boxes full. While my equipment is out and at hand, I process fibers for 2 weeks at a stretch. I might use the plant leaf, the stem, the bark or the flower—either fresh or dried. It all depends on what I want my final sheet to look like.”

For some fibers, hand-beating like this is enough. For others, Donna uses an electric beater made especially for papermakers. Then she refrigerates or freezes processed fibers to use later.

Pulp Prep

10 a.m.» In the pulp pit, we roll up our sleeves. I tear up cotton linter that’s been soaked in water—it feels like wet baby diapers—and process it with water in a kitchen blender for several minutes until it looks like suspended lint. Donna buys this base fiber on large rolls. We add about 1 gallon of plant materials to a washtub vat containing about 5 gallons of water.

In another vat, we stir up pulp with a base of abaca, a fiber made from banana leaves. It gives the paper a translucency and slightly creamy color, I learn. The blender whirs again and again as I pulverize soggy brownish processed iris leaves, daylily stems, flax and seaweed for the vats.

“By adding different fibers in varying amounts, I can produce a variety of whites, earth tones and colors for my papers,” says Donna. “I like to have four or more plants in each sheet of paper for beauty and variety. I usually experiment, mixing in a little of this and a little of that—it’s a lot like cooking. But when I’m making more than one batch of paper for a special order like wedding invitations, I must keep track of what I put in so it has the same look.”

Fresh flower petals, leaves and other elements are used as colorful inclusions in Donna’s papers. We pluck petals from fresh mums we’d cut earlier and snip raffia into tiny irregular pieces that I stir into the pulp—it’s the consistency of thin applesauce.

Pulling Sheets

10:30 a.m.» Finally, we’re ready to couch (pronounced “kooch”) sheets by pulling a mold through the pulp. The mold is a wooden frame with fine polyester screen stretched over to capture the fibers.

“Lower it slowly, down and up again through the pulp in one continuous motion,” directs Donna, who teaches papermaking classes each summer.

Swoosh! I submerge the frame, pull it through the milky mixture and hope for the best. My mold comes up only partly covered with an uneven layer of fibers. But with a little practice, I get the hang of it. I’m excited when Donna says, “Good! Give it one more quick dip to fill the corners and you’re set.”

Pretty golden or brown fibers show up in the ivory sheet. Mum petals and bits of raffia are interesting accents! It’s amazing that the fibers hold together to form a sheet. Donna says it’s due to ionization, part of the “kitchen chemistry.”

I flop the mold over on a 3- by 5-foot drying screen to drain. “Stir the vat to distribute the pulp before you pull another sheet,” Donna says.

Wet Vac Duty

Some sheets take shape as a large decorative bowl.

When the drying screen is covered with about 10 dripping sheets, Donna turns on a shop vac. “Run the nozzle under the sheets on the drying screen to suck out water,” she coaches. Awkwardly, I turn the vacuum nozzle upside down to squeegee water from below.

“Now, press one finger on one edge of the mold and gently lift the opposite side, leaving the sheet of paper on the drying screen.” The paper’s irregular deckle edge is part of its charm.

11:30 a.m.» We carry the screen full of fresh sheets outside to air-dry overnight. By tomorrow, the paper will peel off easily, as do already dried sheets that we remove from another screen. Now, the fairly thick, highly textured paper is ready for Donna to use for her photos or creative collages.

2 p.m.» We keep at it after lunch, making a batch of darker paper that will contrast nicely with the ivory sheets that we made earlier.

3 p.m.» As we wrap up, I ask Donna if she would create a collage for me, using some of the paper I made today.

A week or so later, she sent pictures of two canvases, and asked which piece I might want.

Both were lovely—I couldn’t decide! So I bought them both to hang in my office. They’re a wonderful remembrance of this workday and the many hours of labor and love that Donna’s handmade paper reflects!

Editor’s Note: Visit Donna’s Web site by visiting our links page.

If you’d like to put me to work, send an invitation with details to Ann@countrywomanmagazine.com or write to Ann Kaiser, Country Woman, 5400 S. 60th St., Greendale WI 53129.

Photography By Tom Taverna