A Little Help From My Friends

I have recently put the word out with my tea-loving friends that I need tea bags and they have been flowing in! What a wonderful variety of herbal, black and green I've received! I'm finally accumulating enough to begin work soon on a large piece...I will need hundreds of bags, I think, to make this work. So at the moment a lot of time is going into "preping" the bags so they are empty, flat, and ready to use. A little patience is required here, but I do find it relaxing to focus on such a simple task. Here my work table is filled with tea bags in various stages:




Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with collaging tea tags onto small square canvases. Even with the canvases only 6" x 6" it requires a lot of tags to complete a piece. Here again, the contributions of friends is a life saver!

Bring on the Herbal Tea

I'm widening my net in search of tea bags (when will this "craze" ever end, one might ask......I honestly don't know!) By enlisting friends I am finding a wider range of papers and tints in tea bags and hopefully will be able to soon start working much bigger than the 16" x 20" that is my largest canvas now. I've also experimented with working on paper instead of canvas, and I do like the effect.

The pieces tend to be lighter in tone now, and I am layering in different ways. As much as I like the heavily stained works, these are a lot more subtle and and interesting in a different way.


So this work continues. It's wonderful to look up from my work table and see the emerging spring unfolding outside the window. It is a joyous time of year!

All the Tea in China......

I've just returned from Yunnan, China, a stop on the way home from Australia. What a fantastic place! Naturally I wanted to have a tea experience there after all the tea I'd consumed in Sydney.

Tea is taken very seriously in this part of the world and I was fortunate enough to visit tea houses that featured dozens of kinds as well as tea shops where sampling tea is an integral part of the entire experience. Here a friend of our son Nick treated us to a wonderful 15 year old tea grown on her family's plantation which we drank in tiny glass bowls that were filled with freshly brewed tea numerous times:



Teas are general sold in large, solid cakes that are gently broken apart when the tea is prepared:


So I didn't collect any tea bags for my work, but I wasn't disappointed. The tea we drank was rich and delicious and certainly will inspire more tea pieces as I clean the cobwebs and dead ladybugs out of my studio and get back to work.

New Brunswick Hay Rolls

This painting is based on another of the photos I took in Canada last September.  This beautiful vista appeared as we rode along past autumn fields.  There were fallow fields already harvested, fields of potatoes and corn and this field of rolls of hay basking in the afternoon sun...

"New Brunswick Hay Rolls"

acrylic - 30" x 36"

Here, the ski is dominant and the color palette is warm and complementary.  It captures the feel of fall and the land spread out before us to the horizon.

New Brunswick Farm House, Two Ways

This small oil painting of New Brunswick shows a farm house across a large field.  

"Fall Farm"

8" x 10" - oil

Completed awhile ago, it was a study for a larger painting.  And here is the larger acrylic painting I made after the study in oil.  The horizon line has been lowered to show the glorious sky which felt as if it went on forever.  I think that makes the painting feel more expansive and free....

"New Brunswick Farm House"

acrylic - 30" x 36"

The color palette is different too--warmer and more complementary.  Each of these paintings is a view of the same place yet each of them is different in content and in feel.  This is intentional on my part.  On any give day each of us is a different person.  On any given day, as an artist I hopefully have something different to say.

New Brunswick Salt Marsh, Two Ways

This is the first, small oil that became the study for the larger painting I completed last week.  It is quite traditional and peaceful....

"Salt Marsh, New Brunswick"

8" x 10" - oil on canvas

The painting below is based on the same photos of the same marsh.  But it is different in many ways from the study.  I wanted to show the liveliness of the grasses and the light of the day which give a different feel to the experience of viewing the work....

"New Brunswick Marsh Land"

36" x 40" - oil on canvas

I hope I was successful in communicating the brightness and excitement of the natural landscape.

Variations on a Theme

Even though I've been working with tea bags for a couple of months I still feel like I'm just getting started. There are so many ways to push this work, through technique, composition, color, adding different materials, and the scale. I've been processing herbal teas recently and finding that I really like the lighter, more varied and subtle kinds of tones I'm getting.





This group of 12 illustrates some of the variation, depending on the type of tea bags used. I'm also playing with applying light washes to the finished pieces to change the tones.


This triptych uses linear pieces of bags, rather the the recangular shapes and achieves a completely different effect. It would be fun to do this on a larger scale.



Today I began to sew the tea bag strings onto some small finished canvases. I'll continue to explore this over the coming days and see how it goes!