Hakodate Shed 01
Story and paintings by Lehan Winifred ramsay
Sometimes I paint a picture, and after I’ve finished I pull up another canvas and paint it again. No looking at the original object or photograph this time, and sometimes I paint straight on without drawing anything first. It bends the picture in a direction. Of colour or shape, some kind of warp. It’s always easier to start something with something. It gives you what you want. Then as you go along you figure out what you don’t want. I don’t want a shed like this, that’s clear to me. I want some other kind of shed and in my second picture I’m sliding a little over to it.
People call up to ask about classes. They’ve read a little about them in the paper. But then if they start describing the classes they want on the phone, they don’t sound anything like my classes. They sound like – they sound like that second shed. I offer to send them a flyer, and smother my exasperation. No I am not going to make an individual shed for each student who walks in my door. I don’t have enough hours in a week to do that. It is not possible to provide customized and attentive entertainment. What I want to do is to have each of them walk in here for an hour, and walk out again having expanded their learning and their capacity to learn a tiny fragment, in reasonable comfort. I want to know not that they are having a good time, but that they are picking up a skill. And that is all. Sheds are complicated, different things for each of us. I provide the shell. Four walls, a roof, a floor and a door. And they can make whatever they want out of it.
Hakodate Shed 02
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I call my shed the Tardis, lost in space
LikeLike
I cannot tarry any longer but am drawn to this piece and its elemental presentation, and by the embroidery provided by the story of the potential students on the telephone.
Dear Lehan, I think we have many artists around us and it depends what we expect and how much we expect of their art. Some of these scenarios I understand from experience of writers and the diversity of their experience, which is driven in their initial presentation by social conditioning as surely as I am, as surely as I believe we all are and the difference is perhaps some of us are striving to write and paint or sculpt or cook our path out of the stricture that we feel as our conditioning and others want to turn a quid come what may…many budding writers wanted to either primarily reward family members by presenting them familial life stories or turn a quid. The exercise of seating a number of people together so that by the end of their first session they are just plain excited is an essential beginning and I believe you will manage the process well. You will profit from companionship in your work, of course. When you undertake such an adventure as you are on, it helps if you have a companionship of like minds and that is not always so easily attainable. The soul can become tired and as well we all need our basic sustenance.
LikeLike
Hey, ‘shoe, welcome back. Hope you’ve bin OK!
LikeLike
Where’ve you been Shoe? Yes, I wish I could find some soulmates over here in this town. I think they may all have moved to bigger places though….
LikeLike
Paul Klee said this, do’nt know to whom and why: “The trained hand often knows more than the head.”
Those students don’t have trained hands and they listen to the head too much…
LikeLike
My shed is not a work of art. Just a steel frame with metal sheeting held onto the frame by many pop rivets. The only art in it is the floor which I made from solid sleepers cut to size by my chainsaw which I kept from our farm together with a special helmet which covers head, ears and with a visor to prevent inhaling most of the copper sulphate dust which the sleepers are impregnated with.
As flimsy the shed as solid the floor. That floor will never blow away. I like standing on it. We all should have a solid floor.
LikeLike
Ah, Gez, you always come back to that chainsaw helmet and chaps!! Yes, a man needs a shed, but, a man also needs a solid floor.
Lehan, I envy you artists with your ability to bend the lines, and bend the light a little. You all seem to be able to allow space and time to sort of flow around things, even making the garden shed into a thing of life and beauty!
LikeLike
Lehan, you can only try and stimulate your students, some of them might be creative, the others just want to paint the shed that looks exactly like the one in the photo.
Not many people are free to see things differently, not many are artists in any field.
LikeLike