Detail shot, work in progress. Southern Pines Lumberman Team, 1930s. Acrylic monoprint, Stephanie Khattak.
Desktop view, work in progress. Southern Pines Lumberman Team, 1930s. Acrylic monoprint, Stephanie Khattak.
This work in progress is of a logging team, part of the Southern Pines Lumber Co. in the 1930s. The image was pulled from the Diboll History Center, Durham family photo collection. My great-great uncle (my father’s great-uncle) worked on this team and is in this photo, something I didn’t learn until I started to research the image.
This was not a branch of the family tree that I was close to, so learning more about them, and their place in history, has been interesting and a nice surprise.
An image this large and detailed required not only my 16X20 plate (aka Big Betsy), but also a bit of my 8X10 plate to extend the edges. This is the largest and most difficult piece I have attempted in terms of balancing aesthetics, details and expediency so that I can pull the print before the paint dries. It is pretty abstract (keeping with my artistic style) but I wanted to make sure that the horses mostly looked like horses and that the large trees came through.
One reason the source image is so striking is the size of the cut trees against the horses and workmen. When I post the final, I will link to it so you can see for yourself. It’s pretty cool, and there are many other photos in the collection that I want to work from.
“Rail Town, Paper Town.” Acrylic Monoprint by Stephanie Khattak. Based on “Railroad Gang,” a 1939 photograph by Russell Lee.
With pine trees come timber, with timber come sawmills. From sawmills come pulpwood and from pulpwood, paper is made, along with plywood, lumber, and other “forest products”. In the case of my part of East Texas, towns are made, too. Businesses, goods, and services that comprise an economy and an identity.
The Deep East Texas timber/sawmill/pulpwood boom started before this image, but nonetheless it captures important ripples of the timber wave. According to the Library of Congress, where I found the source photo, these men were building a railroad to service the Southland Paper Mill, where many years later, my father would work as did his father, his brother-in-law and many if not most other fathers, grandfathers and uncles I knew. The mill changed ownership many times since its construction and finally closed for good in 2007 as Abitibi Bowater. My father and most workers had been laid off a few years before. My father went on to have a happy “semi-retirement” and follow his dream of being a professional singer, achieving some notoriety and many dedicated social media fans. Many others were not so fortunate.
But at the time of this image until roughly the late-90s, timber was a stabilizing and driving force in the community that it had ultimately changed forever. This piece captures a time of hard work and hope for the future.
As I am more of an artist and less of an academic historian, please explore these links forcitationsand further reading:
Image Source: Lee, R., photographer. (1939) Railroad gang, Southern Paper Mill construction crew, Lufkin, Texas. United States Lufkin. Texas Lufkin, 1939. Apr. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
The source photo for this piece was taken by Russell Lee, a contemporary of Dorothea Lange, hired for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic documentation project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. In 1973 this body of work was described as “the greatest documentary collection which has ever been assembled.” I’m so grateful to have Lee’s iconic images available to build on and inspire me today.
This year, I did three Christmas prints, two as part of the Pine Curtain Project, and another as part of K.Co Travel Art, a collaborative project that James and I are working on with our creative travel guide business, K.Co Press.
This print is my grandparents, on what is probably their first Christmas together in East Texas. I was told they’re at my grandfather’s parents’ house in Huntington, TX.
“Christmas 1950s.” Acrylic Monotype by Stephanie Khattak.
The next print is my aunt and two cousins. I believe they were at my grandmother’s house in Homer, Texas, all dressed up.
“Christmas 1970s.” Acrylic Monoprint by Stephanie Khattak.“Vintage Truck, Palestine, Texas.” Acrylic Monoprint by Stephanie Khattak.
We saw this festive truck on a day trip from Dallas to Palestine, Texas. We met my parents there for some (extremely socially-distanced, outdoor, etc.) holiday time. We aren’t visiting our families at home this year since home is full of oldsters who we want to keep safe. We found Palestine to be the perfect place for a holiday visit, and this truck was just one fun scene in Old Town Palestine. I’ll write up a blog post for K.Co once James edits the rest of his photos, but I will go ahead and say that if you find yourself in Palestine, don’t sleep on Oxbow Bakery, aka the pie shop. (Literally, don’t sleep! Get there when it opens because many flavors sell out!)
This will be my last post for 2020. What a horrible year! I truly believe that next year will be better, maybe not immediately, but eventually. May your holidays be festive and your new year be hopeful. Thank you for your support, and I’ll see you in 2021!
The Texan Theater, Athens Texas. Monotype Print by Stephanie Khattak.Grand Theater, Paris, Texas. Monotype Print by Stephanie Khattak.
I’ve been missing our more ambitious travels, but at the same time, I am enjoying the day trips that my husband and I have taken recently. Because of the pandemic and the fact that we have two rambunctious kittens at home, we are choosing day trips to scratch our traveling art adventure itches.
James enjoys photographing facades, historic downtowns and other iconic scenes of the places we visit. As I looked through the photos and admire the retro details and colors of these buildings, I wondered how they would look translated into a monotype print. I like it!
The Pine Curtain project is still my priority, but it is nice to have creative options, and to extend our travels a little further.
Abstract Floral “Butterfly Farm.” Monotype Print embellished with Acrylic, Gold Leaf. By Stephanie Khattak.
After a long hiatus, I am reopening my art shop on Etsy October 15! I’ll be exclusively selling monotype prints, including the one above, in a variety of sizes. This art store launch will include ten original pieces, and I’ll do a flash/mini update for Small Business Saturday in November, just in time for the holidays. More regular updates to come in 2021!
“Multitude of Matriarchs,” Monotype Print: Acrylic and Ink by Stephanie Khattak.
This print was taken from a 1960s baby shower at the Homer United Methodist Church. These were the hostesses, family friends who could always be counted on to spray their hair, polish up their cat-eye glasses and punch bowls, and run the show.
Many, many years after this, I hosted my first shower for my own expectant friend, in the same church fellowship hall where these ladies stand. I remember standing in the church breezeway, cutting gladiola stems, wondering if we had enough tablecloths and feeling a connection to the community of “aunties” who I had seen do the same things over the years. I’m proud to come from a community where it is second nature to show up and celebrate people.
Today is the first day of fall, and here in Texas it is finally cooler and a bit rainy. “Hygge Weather,” I call it, and for this year at least, at my house late September to late February is “Hygge Season.” No one knows what Halloween and the holidays will look like, but we can be pretty sure that being cozy at home is still the best way to go, at least for those of us city-dwellers. So, I decided to try and take a bit of control over these things we can’t control, and embrace the positive.
Yesterday, in my Instagram archive, an interesting post popped up from seven years ago. I was in East Texas at The History Center in Diboll, TX, researching for the novel I was working on at the time. (And technically still am, as I put it away with about a third of it left to finish.) My research was centered on the more salacious bits of East Texas history, not something I’d really make into a print. At the same time, that research is still very valid, as I still go back to the materials I copied to check my facts around locations, names and milestones as I create art around and write Pine Curtain Stories. I put my novel away when my professional career started to ramp up, and I didn’t have any time to devote to it. I had often regretted not finishing that story. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I have many fewer regrets because I see that time wasn’t wasted. The work I put in then is helping me now, and who knows, maybe I’ll eventually drag my book back out and finish it, too. So, if you’re struggling or feel like you’ve wasted creative time on a project that fizzled out, don’t worry so much. Put it aside and revisit it from time to time, and life may surprise you.
As I keep returning to Homer as a creative focus, the concept of Ghost Towns rattles around in my head. Ghosts of the past, ghosts of what might have been. Literal ghosts? Some say yes. And yet, to me, it never really felt sad or like it has dwelled in missed opportunities. Homer’s population is small, for sure. It has hovered between 350 and 500 for most of my life. But it has always been so busy and vibrant. At the same time, it was definitely insular, “the bubble” as I call it, and I did have a hard time acclimating as my life got bigger. So, in a way, those woods and fields are also full of ghosts I loved and then left behind.
So, how does this circle back to art? As I have mentioned before, for me, art helps me make sense of things that are hard to process and harder to articulate. When I am making a print or painting, especially for this project, it opens up new parts of my mind to communicate with, and to communicate without overthinking. At the same time, art begets art, and when I am working on a piece, thinking about the story behind it, my mind is more open to ideas about future pieces, or stories, or research I want to go back to.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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