Friday, March 2, 2018

Samuel W. Webb "PAPER MARBLING, a true abstraction."




Samuel W. Webb marbling from:  https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18718467/
 Samuel W. Webb was a little known American marbler who practiced oil based marbling in the early 60's. He marbled on a size of gum tragacanth with lithographic ink thinned with rectified turpentine.  He is mentioned in an early 1963 edition (Vol. I no. 2) of The Guild of Book Workers Journal and was featured in the February 1962 American Artist magazine (below).

In the 1960's there was a renaissance of many things in the U.S. including marbling. I think I started to marble quite by accident some time around '64 or '65 in Provincetown, Cape Cod. We hippies were living in a very small duplex on Commercial Street in front of Yeffe Kimbal's studio cottage. She was making large thick polymer paintings from plastics that her husband had helped develop.

Yeffe Kimbal, American Indian Woman Artist, A painting from her "space period".
 In our tiny backyard were a couple barrels of solvents Yeffe used in her work. I would 'appropriate' a little and mix them with waste paint from my family's little paint store (The Color Bar, Milford, CT) and pour them on any discarded cardboard I could find. I was like a mad crazed scientist/artist high on the fumes from the solvents that I had liberated. One day it rained and I had to pour off the excess water from my half-dried makeshift canvasses. The oily film on the pooled rainwater, when poured off that film printed a simple marbled pattern onto the receiving piece of cardboard ... a light went on in my toasted brain.










From 'American Artist' February 1962.