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October 2013
Utah's Art Magazine: Published by Artists of Utah
Page 6    

Process Points: Box-making
Thinking Inside and Outside the Box
Former accountant Bonnie Scott turns her attention from the books to boxes

“This job is not for anyone who is short on patience or ability to focus,” says Bonnie Scott. “I’m working harder now than I did before I retired!” Since December of 2012, Scott, a retired accountant, has been designing and creating boxes of varying shapes and styles using book-binding materials, Japanese art papers, and marbled papers she has created herself.  “I wanted to make use of the materials I already had from various classes I had taken in the past,” she says.

Scott ‘s artistic bent developed at an early age,  but in high school when she told her father she was going to take an art class, he said ”Fine, and you can take a physics class also.” That didn’t interest her at all, so she didn’t get to take that art class.

In adulthood, she was able to take a few classes in book-binding, letterpress, papermaking and marbling. Although she loved these pursuits, she knew there was a decision to be made going forward if she wanted to make a living. Art-making was side-lined.

After Scott retired, a close artist friend brought her some beautiful papers and said, “I want you to make boxes with this.” Scott had an ‘aha moment’ realizing this was exactly the kind of art she wanted to make, and now she had the time to do it. Before long she had created seven boxes with that paper, and her friend, who had wanted them for gifts, kept them all and displays them at her house.

As Scott pursued her new artistic venture, she found there was very little information available about box-making. She knew of only two books that briefly covered the subject., and some tutorials on the web. “So it was touch and go, learn as you go,” she says. Scott credits Madelyn Garrett (former curator of rare books at the Marriott Library) with encouraging her in the classes at the University of Utah’s Book Arts department, describing her teaching as brilliant, patient and generous. With that background, Scott felt brave enough to start. 

When she got an opportunity to display her work publicly for an event at Art Access in April, she went full bore and made some thirty boxes in about two months. “I worked very hard to get that done,” she says, “but I never disliked it.”

Her process begins with turning on the television. “I need noise for distraction. I couldn’t spend the 6 or 7 hours of work each day without that.” Then she spends a little time just looking at her collection of book cloths and beautiful art papers to help her decide what she wants for the lining of the box, the cover of the box, and what kind of lid and pull. “There’s something so joyful about it, it kicks me into gear,” she says about this initial process. “Sometimes I make mistakes, but generally I have a good eye for what works with what. I try to visualize the finished piece and make adjustments as I go along. I know when something is not going to work, and if that happens I just put it aside. I can find something else to do with it later on.”

Deciding what shape of box comes next, followed by cutting the book-board. Precision is important here. Accuracy needs to be at most within a 32nd of an inch (she laughingly says that repeating geometry class would have been more useful than the physics class her father wanted her to take). Once cut, the pieces are laid out  and she begins to connect them with the archival glue her former teacher recommends. When dry, a process that can take from two hours to overnight, the boards can be sanded. “I have to wear a mask while sanding, and am delighted to have a Dremel tool now so that during  hot summer days I only have to wear the mask for a couple of minutes, rather than hours of doing it by hand.”

During the drying process Scott cuts out the book cloth and paper, again with strict attention to accuracy, marking the underside for proper alignment on the box. The papers she prefers to use are Japanese, both because of their beauty and the fact that they are archival.

Creating the lid is the most challenging part for her. It needs to support a pull, and lift-off lids need to be flanged so that they fit snugly and don’t slide off. Then there’s the hinging, if she goes in that direction, whether a straightforward along-one-edge type or the more complicated hinges needed for a clam-shell box.

The cost of materials needed for box-making can be hefty. One sheet of paper-thin cork costs $29. Availability is also an issue. The archival glue Scott uses is made in New York, and cannot be shipped during the winter months because freezing breaks the molecules and renders the glue unusable. Scott has made her own lid pulls as well as utilized such diverse objects as old jewelry to polished stones to unusual artifacts friends have given her. Silver Star Hardware has become her favorite commercial source for pulls.

Private events at friends’ homes have been very successful for Scott, so that now most of her work-time is spent fulfilling commissions. “I haven’t done any marketing – I just sit here and make boxes,” she says. “I could put them on Etsy or make them available to the Art Access gift shop. That would help me figure out what sells in what price range. “ She does have a following on Pinterest but sales aren’t part of its set-up.  Her plans are to develop beyond the two or three styles of boxes she has designed to date. “ I’d like to create something a little more ‘novel’ and I’m currently playing around with paper that I marbled in the old days.” Whatever she creates and however she markets it, you can be sure she’ll do it ‘full bore’ as she calls it.



Artists of Utah News
Professional Artists Workshops
Artists of Utah partners with the Salt Lake Arts Council to provide workshops for visual artists

The overwhelming response to the professional development workshop we held as part of our 35x35 exhibition in April encouraged Artists of Utah to partner with the Salt Lake City Arts Council to provide a continuing series of workshops for artists. The first, held in September, focused on writing skills for artists, including drafting bios, artists statements and exhibition proposal. An open enrollment discussion session was followed by hands-on workshops.

On November 16th, we will be holding the second workshop in this series, concentrating on applying for exhibitions. For more information visit the Professional Development Workshop page on the Salt Lake Arts Counci's website.

Professional Development Workshop at the Art Barn, September 2013


Hints & Tips: Plein Air Painting
No Soft Artists Allowed
Getting the most out of a plein air workshop and artist retreat at the Centennial Valley Arts Celebration

During the Centennial Valley Arts Celebration, an event co-sponsored by 15 Bytes, a number of Utah artists braved an early winter storm to explore southern Montana's Centennial Valley.|2| The Arts Celebration occurs the last weekend of September at the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Education Center (EHEC),|3| which during the summer months holds a number of University of Utah classes and workshops for its students. At the end of the season artists of all sorts are invited to descend on the region to stretch their creativity in a unique natural setting.

Our regular Hints & Tips columnist John Hughes was on-hand as a workshop instructor, providing artists who have read his column for years the opportunity to try out his hints and tips under his direct tutelage.|4|

"The weather was unpredictable and the week didn't go without it's challenges," Hughes says of the time in Centennial Valley. "The old saying 'You have to be tough to be a plein air painter' was what we lived by out in the field. The mornings would start out around freezing and on the second morning we even had a howling wind coupled with snow flurries. My usual solutions to situations like this are simple: dress in layers and occasionally duck down behind the car or any other windbreak such as a convenient hill or large tree. A pair of cotton gardening gloves along with a couple of hand warmers for your pockets and you're off and running." 

"The biggest lesson I learned, was if you're going to paint, paint near John Hughes," quipped Bill Fulton |5| during one of the Art Celebration's nightly show-and-tell/critique sessions. Hughes was careful to ask permission first and to tread lightly across his students' canvases, but he was always willing to intervene directly on their works in progress. Intervention of that sort can be unsettling, but all the students commented on how useful it was to see the actual stroke or change in color the teacher was telling them about.|6|

"I think it's best for the students to try and paint like the teacher for the allotted time to get the most out of the class," Hughes says about approaching plein air workshops. "In other words, immerse yourself in the instructors world for awhile to fully comprehend what they have to offer. Yes, this may seem very awkward, but the idea is to take in the new information during your journey with this teacher. Work like crazy to get inside their brain, assimilate everything you like and then leave the rest after you have had time to think about what works for you and what doesn't. This takes courage because you are outside your comfort zone and you will most likely paint worse than you normally do during the class, but what you gain in the long run is worth it!"

"I really thought I wouldn't like someone painting on my canvas," says Merritt Stites, another workshop participant. "But John knew the right dosage of intervention.|7| How much to step in and when to stay out." Stites was also not afraid to disagree. At one point, she says, she wiped out one of the strokes Hughes had made. And when he came back later he remarked she was right to do it.

"The truth is, many times the things you learn from a workshop won't even begin to show up in your own work for a few months," Hughes says. "The artist needs a chance to assimilate the information and make it uniquely theirs. This may sound contradictory, but the worst thing you can do is to try to be a clone of the instructor. Once you are outside the class, paint the way you are used to. Yes, play that game during the class, but don't stay there forever. You will always be you and the teacher you are learning from will always be who they are; you have to fight for your own voice!"

Hughes began the workshop with a Thursday-evening power-point presentation discussing the fundamentals of art, including his 5 + 1 method (see the article here). This beginning was expanded with two days of work in the field, where each student picked up new techniques. "I used to just mix a gray and put it on the canvas, but I learned how you can tweak the grays with warm or cold, depending on what the canvas needs," Fulton says of his learning experience. "I thought it was interesting how John worked all over the canvas at one time," Stites says. "He put the aspen trees on first thing, while I would have waited. Then he developed them as he worked on the rest of the canvas."

With occasional snowfall, swift moving clouds and gusting winds, the artists had dramatic and frequently changing weather to test their skills. "The landscape was gorgeous," Stites says, "the best combinations of cold blues and grays with warm yellows, purples and rose."

Some artists opted to explore the landscape on their own rather than participate in the structured workshop. Paul Trentelman added a stay in Centennial Valley to the tail end of a longer trip through Montana. It was the first time the figurative painter from Ogden had painted a landscape. "Unless I’m painting a live person sitting in front of me, I usually have lots of time to paint and make sure I get the color mixes and values right.
Outside I did not have that opportunity. Does anyone know how to make time stand still for a few hours? Those pesky clouds and the changing sunlight made me realize very quickly that I had to paint, well, very quickly."|8| His first painting took about three hours, he says.|9| "I can’t think of any other way to teach yourself how to capture the feel of the outdoors other than being there. Painting from photographs doesn’t really do it because the photographs have a very limited value structure – our eyes can detect much more subtlety in color and value than film and especially digital cameras, where color value is compressed."

The newly dedicated Francis H. Zimbeaux Art Center on the EHEC campus served as a studio for those uninterested in braving the cold temperatures. Bill Reed, who will be exhibiting his large-scale acrylic paintings this month at Sugar Space East, completed "Cool and Windy," a diptych, while he was there.|10| As he scraped and pounded his colors onto the canvas, Shawn Rossiter also directed a collage workshop inside the cabin.

On Saturday night, The Cottonwood Club,|11| a String Jazz quartet from Helena, Montana that features Victor Daniel |12|(one of the EHEC's 2013 Artists in Residence) on mandolin, filled the EHEC's Red Rock Saloon with its hot and cool jazz sounds. It got the artists dancing enough to warm themselves up from three days out in the chilly field.



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