Layered Colors, Woodcut, and Life as Process

This week we are featuring another artist conversation, adding a new voice to a growing dialogue about art as an important facet in religious interpretation. 

Melissa Webster is an artist, art teacher, and art historian, who has agreed to share with our community some of her woodcuts illustrating themes of Advent.

JODY W: Melissa, thank you so much for sharing your art and your creative process with us! Can you tell us a little about your preferred media and what it’s like to make the cards we’re featuring here?

MELISSA W: I do painting and pastel drawing, but I especially appreciate the challenge and process of printmaking. A woodcut is an original print made on paper from a block of wood. I work with basswood blocks and oil inks; and I use the reduction method, which means I print a color, cut that away, and print the next color. I can never print the same image again, because as the design grows the wood block is reduced. Printing with hand pressure, along with my love for experimenting with layered colors, means each impression is a bit different.

Prints require lots of thinking, planning, imagining, because one can't start over, erase, etc.  Printmakers like to say that at some point in the process, the process takes over. That's where the surprise happens. Sometimes the print looks better than you imagined; sometimes it doesn't.

JODY W: Wow. That seems like an apt analogy for the life journey. The process takes over, and sometimes it turns out better than we imagined and sometimes it really doesn't.

I’m delighted by the idea of receiving a card during the holidays that is handmade, and simultaneously the same and not the same as the cards others are receiving. You mentioned that you’ve made Christmas cards many times. What goes into designing the cards you make?

MELISSA W: My husband and I have been married for 61 years, and I’ve designed a card for each of those years. I think of the cards as a celebration of our lives and our Christian faith, since I design them around religious themes and they also reflect significant events in our lives. We are bird lovers—we watch them, feed them, and travel far places to see them. And the last couple of decades, I have often used the image of a bird or birds and included lines from a hymn or poem that recall the message of birth, newness, growth, promise, and love.

JODY W: I was particularly moved by your “Madonna of the Apartment.” Can you tell us a bit about what goes into your thinking when you consider how to portray a subject from sacred texts informed by real women’s lived experience?

MELISSA W: We had visited our daughter in NYC, and I had taken a photograph of her holding our grandson in the doorway of their small apartment. That became the inspiration for the Christmas card I made that year. The message inside that card is: “Hope is the Jesus gift, Love is the offering, Everywhere, anywhere, Here on the earth” (by Shirley Murray). I was emphasizing the message of universality—from a modest apartment to "everywhere...." And I think the last part of the message, "...here on the earth," relates so well to women's experiences in life.

JODY W: Art is so rich and offers things that can’t necessarily be conveyed in words. What do you hope these works convey to those who see them? Or what do you hope they call forth for viewers?

MELISSA W: Of course all the arts are able to connect to people, help them understand, learn, and be delighted. When I make prints, I hope my original treatments of subjects will connect with people and draw people’s attention to beauty and to ideas that deserve attention.   

In my Christmas cards, I am first using what my life has been over the year, and other times I often have in mind larger concerns of the country—as in 9/11/2001 when I wrote a poem of encouragement and the image was of Caspian Terns on a windy beach, titled Facing into the Wind. The poem begins:  

Small things. 

       Birds on the beach,

       A man or woman beneath the sky, 

       A baby swaddled—wrapped

       feathers,  Layered over a tiny heart. 

Small things, we know, can bear the wind. 

The last verse continues: 

The Caspian Tern uses the gale, 

Steadying itself and gaining strength, 

From the bump and swirl of air all around. 

It knows beyond knowledge and sign

             the course 

To travel while facing into the wind. 

JODY W: Your words take me right to the feeling of encountering small yet mighty things (a baby’s cheek against mine or walking through a spider’s web) and the feeling of walking into the wind. Like you alluded to above with the phrase, “here on the earth,” women’s everyday lived experience is woven from the mundane and the transcendent. There are threads of joy and threads of sorrow. And women certainly know what it’s like “to travel while facing into the wind.” In many strands of Christianity, this is a season for remembering the arrival of Jesus Christ in the form of an infant, a well-loved infant with visceral needs. It strikes me that in this season when there is a public emphasis on hope, there is also space for sitting with the darkness. I’m thinking particularly of women who have lost family members or gone through untold struggles during the holiday season. May we all find space to embrace the darkness of the womb even as we walk through these coming weeks with twinkling lights reflecting in our eyes. May we hold space for tears and laughter, for quiet and for exuberance, for feasting and for deeply feeling our hungers and longings.