Romancing the Rustic

In part, my love for the craft of basketry is rooted in my affinity for all things rustic. I experience an emotional connection with times gone by.  Can one longingly reminisce for past periods of time  never actually experienced? Well I certainly do and have done most of my life, likely based on perceptions gained from novels and history books, movies and television, or stories told by elders. My dad was born in 1912 and grew up in rural Idaho where he rode his horse to a one-room school, and swam in a “swimmin’ hole.”  I loved hearing about this and though I now know the reality of his childhood was poverty and pain, as a child I wished I’d been there. As do many young girls, I pestered my parents for a horse, and they finally acquiesced. Below left  is a photo of me in 1964 (age 15), having ridden my 18 year-old mare to high school one Saturday. I’ve never lost my love for  horses although I don’t have the opportunity to ride much anymore—here I am in 1994 (age 45) at a dude ranch in Colorado (below right)..

So, I’ve digressed from the topic at hand-- how my love for basketry relates somehow to my attraction to things rustic. For a couple of years I have volunteered to demonstrate basket making with other basket weavers on Ladies’ Day  at San Diego’s Old Town State Park.  Dressed in 19^th century garb we showed the tourists how baskets were (and are) made and used by our ancestors. Other costumed volunteers demonstrated wool spinning and loom weaving, candle  and soap making and other “frontier” crafts practiced by our great-grandmothers and beyond.  I demonstrated constructing a simple ribbed basket that might be used for gathering eggs like the basket below.

This little ribbed basket was made from a kit about 20 years ago of  plain, milled cane. I followed this with what I call my Death Valley Basket. My family (sister and her husband, nephew and his wife) and I spent a Thanksgiving holiday camping in this unusual place. We brought a smoked turkey and all the trimmings and had our Fall feast nestled near ancient water-warn canyons, badlands and sand dunes. I brought some grape vine, a bit of reed and collected date palm inflorescence in Death Valley’s Furnace Creek area oasis and managed to use what I learned from the kit to fashion the rather gnarly version pictured here. Death Valley Basket lives at my sister’s.

Hooked on basket weaving

So, back to basket weaving… Pat MacGillis of Del Mar (See Feb 23 post) hooked on me weaving rims / embellishing ceramic bases with pine needles and raffia. My effort (below left) is rather plain but I’ve kept it all these years. Everyone I knew received them as gifts.  I was not very brave or innovative, but we all have to start somewhere.

A little more imagination and work went into weaving with pine needles and raffia around the rim of a cut and drilled coconut shell (below right), and still more in the coiled pine needle basket with  pine cone lid.  Coconut shells are really HARD, but I love the look of the  fibrous, external texture of the shell. I'm hanging on to this piece because it is likely the only one I'll ever do, and I'm not particularly fond of coconut as a food.

 

 

By contrast, the pine needle basket still has the wonderful fragrance of the forest floor where I collected the pine needles. I gave one to my aunt when she was in a nursing home. It reminded us of her cabin  in the San Jacinto Mountain town of Idyllwild, CA where she lived for several years and where as I child, my siblings and  I spent many happy, school vacations.

Searching for my art/craft "voice…"

Drawing was a favorite pastime when I was a child. Somehow this (left, and below w/ detail) is the only childhood sketch that has survived. As an older kid I did more with crayons, and when it was decided I could not draw, graduated to  paint-by-numbers. In my teens and college years I switched to fiber, trying needlepoint, crochet and crewel.  My college roommate, fine-artist Lissa Ainley used to say  that while she was “artsy,”  I was more “craftsy.”   What little  artistic aspirations I had as a child soon died out  for lack of nourishment and only more recently has it begun its rebirth after many false starts dabbling in various crafts in my late 20’s and 30’s including stained glass, stone carving, and painting.  I enjoyed the stained glass but it was expensive and messy (shards/splinters of glass all over the apartment), never got accustomed  to breathing lead fumes, was constantly cutting myself and I never became very skilled technically, although I did produce a few nice, although rough pieces, and it kept me off the streets, as they say. Below is my first stained glass piece.

Stone carving for me was a fiasco—the activity was slow, demanded more  patience than I could muster at the time, I found it impossible to visualize  (if you want to carve a bear, just cut away everything that doesn’t look like a bear), and I found it physically difficult to use the heavy tools. The number of blows I dealt with hammer and chisel can be counted on my fingers and toes—I did not take to this and have nothing to show for it. As for the painting—well duh—I can’t draw! My one and only completed acrylic on masonite was a nightmare—a sort of forest green and sea foam thunder storm (you had to have been there, I trashed it years ago). The stone carving and painting attempts were inspired by artist Vijali Hamilton who has a different way of seeing than most of us. This  large carving/painting in a sandstone cliff in the Malibu Mountains was created in the late 1970’s by Vijali.   

Spirit Within Matter  by Vijali

It is exciting for me to see how it turned out as I only saw it in it’s earliest stages back then—under Vijali’s guidance, some of the tentative first “whacks” with hammer and chisel were done by me. As I recall, the piece is very large—maybe about 4 to 4.5 feet across and 3.5 feet high.  Vijali  has created an amazing series of similarly themed works in all sizes, from small hand-sized stones to enormous carvings in outcroppings of rock overlooking oceans, deserts and jungle landscapes all over the world, many painted, as is the Malibu work, with gradations of blue creating a giant eye or window illusion through the solid “matter” of the stone to reveal the “spirit”  it contains. (My apologies to Vigili for this half-assed description of her incredible art. Go to her website if you want to understand more about her work    www.worldwheel.org