Van Nuys: Riner’s work conveys a gentle hint of magic

By James Van Nuys | Sunday, March 18, 2007

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I stopped for lunch at the Sage Creek Grill in Custer a couple of weeks ago for the dual purposes of eating some of the best food in the southern Hills and seeing Camille Riner’s artwork, which graces one entire wall of the establishment. (The opposite wall features photographs by Camille’s husband, Paul Horsted.)

I had been looking at her work some weeks earlier at Surroundings, a gift shop two or three blocks from the Sage Creek in Custer’s cozy little downtown area.

Surroundings is not primarily devoted to fine art (which is fine with me) — you sort of stumble on the artwork here and there among the tiny rooms and hallways full of knick-knacks, books and various amusing fripperies.

It’s rather like wandering through a grandmother’s cluttered house (assuming one had a grandmother of very eclectic tastes) only with much less dust and stale cookies.

Camille’s framed woodcut prints are the most conspicuous works in the fine art department, but you will also see Tom Eastburn’s large stoneware platters and some of his smaller pottery.

In the front room, you’ll find a display of Linda Thelin’s jewelry. Linda, who lives in Custer, has an extensive knowledge of antique jewelry in general (having worked for years on estate jewelry restoration in the Chicago area) and antique beads in particular. She’s an avid collector of these vintage elements, which she recombines into her own unique designs.

But to return to my story, I was having lunch and standing up periodically to stare over the heads of other diners at Camille’s prints. In a more sophisticated region, the diners would have said, “Ya want a bite a my #*%!! lunch or what? Get ouda heah!”

But here in kindly South Dakota, they simply asked me if I wanted them to move. Nevertheless, I felt that I was disturbing these polite folk and decided that if I was going to be intrusive, I might as well intrude on the artist herself.

So I did what we journalists do best: I barged in on a hapless citizen with no regard for her privacy or convenience. Actually, I called first, and Camille was very gracious about granting my request for an interview on five minutes notice.

She lives just outside Custer and shares a studio with her 5-year-old daughter, who, judging by the drawings displayed in her half of the space, seems likely to continue the family’s artistic tradition.

Leaning against the wall were stacks of the carved wood blocks and planks, the “plates” from which Camille prints her images.

In wood or linoleum block printing, you carve away areas that you want to be white (if you’re printing with black ink on white paper) leaving uncut the areas that you want to print black.

When you’re finished carving, you go over the block with an ink roller, which of course doesn’t come into contact with the cut-away areas and applies ink only to what’s left of the original flat surface.

Then, you carefully place a piece of paper over the inked block and run it through a roller press, transferring the ink from the block to the paper. This simple process may be varied in many ways, allowing for the creation of very colorful and complex prints.

Camille may use several colors to ink one block, or may print several differently inked blocks consecutively on a single piece of paper. She also prints on her own hand-made papers, which adds another dimension of color and texture to her work.

Camille’s craftsmanship doesn’t end at the borders of her prints; she builds and carves her own frames, creating a perfect visual transition from the imaginary world she depicts to the world where the rest of us live.

The world she depicts? It’s a night world, mostlynstarry skies, moons, silhouetted trees, high-ceilinged bedrooms containing little single beds, and various creatures sleeping, cavorting or going about their inscrutable business in the dim light.

It’s a rather alluring world for someone like me, an insomniac of long experience — a dreamland where nights are paradoxically filled with comfort and mystery, peace and possibility.

There is an undertone of magic in Camille’s images; you get the feeling that they are part of a story, a children’s story perhaps, though it’s more an issue of ambience than of being explicitly narrative.

This literary bent is less tangential in some of Camille’s most recent work though; she’s been producing lovely miniature books based on her original prints and featuring poems and prayers written by herself and others. She has also released a limited edition artist book in a larger format; its title, not surprisingly, is “Into The Night.”

Camille teaches various aspects of her art through Khristi Scott’s Art Spot studio in Custer. E-mail artspot@gwtc.net for information.

James Van Nuys is an oil and watercolor painter and musician living and working in Rapid City. Readers may send comments or questions to him in care of The Rapid City Journal, Box 450, Rapid City SD 57709.