By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
For artist Fern Spackman the agreement, after many conversations with Dan Williams of Wayside Books & Select Art, to do her first-ever art exhibition gave her what she describes as a “nerve attack”.
No doubt she turned to a nice hot soothing cup of tea to come to grips with what she had agreed to and with that came a small bonus of a new “canvass”.
By any measure the “From Tea Pot to Mountain Top” exhibition is a very unique show, one featuring the familiar medium of watercolour but with the added twist of “tea bag paintings”.
“Just what is this all about,” all and sundry wonder. Tea as a form of pigment perhaps? It is a question she is perpetually asked, so much so that part of her exhibition even includes an informational flow chart titled “Making Tea Bag Art”.
Fern Spackman now includes a simple infographic to help people understand it really is about the tea bag.
Don Urquhart photo
“People have a really hard time comprehending that these are actually, or still are, tea bags. So if you’re going to have tea tonight, please save your tea bag and ask me to show you how to work on it,” she said with a laugh at the opening of her show earlier in January.
Spackman highlights it’s not an original idea, as there’s an artist on the US East Coast who popularized the technique in a niche way, as that particular artist likes working with recycled materials.
“I thought to myself, I drink so much tea this is something that would be easy for me to play around with,” she laughs. “It took a while to figure it out because tea bags by their nature are designed for water to flow through them so when you put paint on them it just gets sucked out,” she says.
A collection of tea bag paintings, some with the little string and tag still attached to help make the connection back to the tea bag’s original purpose.
Don Urquhart photo
“When I first started painting on them, I would paint with water media and get very frustrated that it was bleeding, so I started putting a clear gesso coat on them, and that seems to stop the water media bleeding,” she explains. For the uninitiated gesso is basically a paint and and chalk mixture that is used effectively as a primer to help paint stick to various surfaces including canvas.
If she’s after a watery diffused background she uses the gesso and if she’s looking for sharper detail and more intense colour then she uses a gouache which is essentially an opaque watercolour and also a primer.
From here she sketches her image on the tiny canvas and then paints with watercolours, sometimes using watercolour pencils to darken up some of the shadows, she says.
Some of her tea bag paintings still have the little tag and string attached and she says this is a more of recent thing as in the beginning, she removed them. She views it as a way to highlight the connection between the artwork and its former raison d’être.
As a final step she sprays the completed artwork with a varnish because “tea bags were never intended to be an acid-free art surface and it could degrade,” she says. This is also why it gets a coat of gesso in the beginning.
And considering she’s been doing this for 10 years with no sign of image degradation, they’re probably good for the long haul.
Don Urquhart photo
Spackman was introduced early to the world of art via her father who would impart his artistic knowledge and skills during the weekly “art lesson Sundays”.
“When I was 10 or 11 we had ‘art lesson Sundays’ where my dad would teach the tricks,” she says adding the process of drawing and painting is “not as mysterious as it sounds.” She laughs and says, “I know, I should keep the mystique!”
“Watercolour was the medium I was attracted to in school,” she says noting that growing up on the island in Sooke it was the natural world of towering mountains (Mt. Baker features in a number of her works) and flowers that captivated her and still does.
Since moving to Osoyoos she’s moving into fruit and is contemplating the desert next.
An important part of her art is the role it plays therapeutically. She says painting fell by the wayside as life progressed and inevitably became more complicated with family etc and it wasn’t until years later after falling ill and having to stop work that she returned to her artistic pursuits.
Her medical practitioners were actually the ones who got her back into it, as the evidence points to the inherently therapeutic nature of art – both through its creation and the simple enjoyment of it.
She says the tea bags are a nice complement to her watercolour work as a tea bag painting can be done in a day or two, as compared to her larger watercolours which can take far longer. Much depends on how well she feels.
Among her artistic products are watercolour paintings, tea bag paintings and greeting cards.
Fern Spackman’s “From Tea Pot to Mountain Top” exhibition is on until March 1 at Wayside Books & Select Art, 8317 Main Street, Osoyoos, tel: 250-486-2929. Her work can be viewed at fernscards.blogspot.com.
