FROM THE NEST by AwA
Old-Fashioned Art
Can you remember the last time a card arrived in the mail? The handwritten address, perhaps
a special holiday stamp? The feeling of unsealing the envelope to reveal a card sent just for you. Sent out of love. Sent for a special occasion. Sent just to let you know someone was thinking about you. Barb Sanders is that bright light in people’s lives around the holidays. Each year she creates a new card that is a work of art, inspired by the first snowfall of the year. The idea of making her own cards started when she was a little girl watching her mom sending Christmas cards. Years later she began making her own. The store bought cards just didn’t feel right. Each card starts with an image that is carefully paired with a quote that comes from part of a poem, or her book of Christmas quotes. Finding the perfect quote to make sure the verbiage and the image work together takes a lot of time. Barb’s work is defined by textures and shadows, lots of shadows and memories. She views nature through a close lens, finding the small details in how a leaf overlays another with plump drops of melted snow, or how a fence casts a late-afternoon shadow on the ground. Windows and doors, wood and the West are captured with a love that comes from a lifetime of being exposed to ranches and the out of doors. Her focus as an artist has been photogravure, an intaglio printmaking technique with origins in the mid-1800s as one of the first ways to reproduce photographs for publication. The contrast of black and white images gives her works a timeless feel. If there is color in her art, the color is expressed in layers to add another dimension to the work, which is why her cards feel so whimsical with bright flashes of red or green. Barb often falls upon an image, some microcosm of the natural world, and knows “this has to be it.” As she looks at each card, they all bring back memories, one of her daughter and granddaughter enjoying raspberries, one titled First Snow, an image of the last burst of green leaves laden with snow, red stars, sprinkled with glitter. “The glitter was fun,” said Barb. Her husband worries about the amount of effort she puts into creating the perfect card, yet to be the person receiving the card, feeling her light and her love, makes the worry of finding that perfect image and perfect poetry to accompany it worth all the time in the world. 58
Winter 2023
Art with Altitude