Cool Badge, New Cards, More Toys

Oops. I just found another excuse to spend time uploading photos onto my Flickr page -- this cool little badge now heading up the "about this blog" text. You can make your own, too, just click on the link under the badge.

And I also just learned that Moo.com is now making very cool greeting/thanking/catching up/snailmail cards on its site. If you missed my moo card posts, those are tiny little smaller-than-usual calling/business/whatever cards that can each have its very own photo on the back. Upload 100 photos and you can have 100 different tiny pictures. I upload those through my Flickr account too, though now, Moo offers a direct upload feature.

 

Thinking Blog

Congratulations, you won a

!

This message was waiting for me a couple of days ago.  thelmasmith tagged me with this honor (started by designer  Ilker Yoldas who, despite the avatar of the beautiful woman in his banner, is indeed a man, "shy," he says). And, just as these games are meant to do, I've had fun this weekend chasing the links back through some wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking blogs. I really don't spend that much time reading blogs (ha), and rarely have time to surf around to read new ones -- that activity lives in the category of guilty pleasures, somewhat akin to reading really trashy romance novels or supermarket scandal sheets. So, greatful for a legitimate ticket-to-read, there I went surfing about the ether.

Then I realized that I needed to find five  who HADN"T been tagged so that I could pass along the honor. And all the eerie doubts that go with that. Some of the most thoughtful bloggers I read have already been tagged, (Serena Fenton's Layers of Meaning, ) some don't actually fit the definition of blog (June Underwood's collective Ragged Cloth Cafe, for example), And some that I read regularly I don't read so much for "thinking" as for "doing" and keeping up and staying in touch, and while thoughtful, they don't seem to really fit the bill of goods.  And, finally, some bloggers seem so, I don't know, "famous." Like I'd be embarrassed to tag them (Gaping Voidis just one of those I follow). Like maybe they were already tagged, surely, but declined to mention it?  Like, maybe I am in the equivalent of the crash of some multilevel marketing scheme and everyone else has already earned his or her pilot wings (do you remember that AIRPLANE thing?) This is the kind of emotional challenge that makes my inner 4th grader crazy, and perhaps I should be one of those that decline said honor. But, in truth, I am quite pleased, and besides, most of these people I read I will probably never actually have to meet in person, and if I do, I can always give a different name, right?

Now, you all know exactly how nuts I can get.

So it goes.

Here's my list for better or worse: 

Inspiration and New Work by Lisa Call

John Maeda's The Laws of Simplicity 

For purely visual thinking: In the Mood for Arte 

For yet another world view full of food: Brownie Points

And last, but not least: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory 

Yikes

 

Here it is Thursday night, and my time in the studio devoted to art making has been not quite zip. This small art quilt is the only physical manifestation I managed all week.  The rest was business, art ed consulting (stuff like ordering a boatload of supplies, chasing down helpers, figuring out the first workshop), and general disorganizing.(OK, Shuffling the deckchairs around.) 

This is a commission piece, and one that has had its challenges. Here is the second try, the first having crashed on the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The woman who had requested that I make this piece in memory of a mutual friend turned out to have negative experiences and associations with that image. Who knew?

     

However, the altar has already sold at the 1550 Gallery show, and I think the second piece is really closer to the spirit of our friend. In both pieces, I incorporated pieces of clothing and tried to capture the energy and wonderful earthiness of this lovely woman we both knew and loved. She was gutsy and brave throughout her life, and kept her own counsel. As a native Minnisotan, she embraced San Antonio's color and vibrant life, but kept hold of her roots, her accent and her wry sense of humor. When I leave my body, I hope someone makes art from my clothing, cut up and stitched into something playful, bold and full of color. I really can't think of a better legacy, even more so than the quilts I hope to leave behind, scattered around on the walls of friends and strangers.

Talking Art

        

A perfectly good piece or writing should not go to waste, right? Here's the written version of my Art Talk (note the capitols, please) that I made yesterday at the 1550 Gallery in Kerrville. Of course, it was much looser and more fun in person, but you'll just have to imagine the demonstrative off-the-cuff parts.

 

Rudyard Kipling in Conundrum of the Workshop wrote in 1890:

“When the flush of a new-born sun fell on Eden’s green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Til the Devil whispered behind the leaves, “It’s pretty. But is it Art?”

People in my world are always going on about art and craft and quilts and when one is the other and how they relate or don’t and who gets to decide. And, no matter how tired we get of the debate, it still fascinates us and me, and holds my attention.
As introduction to my work I want to explore those notions briefly with you – and share some of my opinions:

The majority of Westerners today, if a survey of more than 500 people conducted by Carolyn Boyd’s anthropology class at Texas A&M has any validity, think that “art is created for the sole purpose of being aesthetically pleasing to people within society and with minimum purpose beyond that of intrinsic enjoyment.” Boyd is studying the rock art paintings of the Pecos River and, she views those great works in a somewhat different light, one that does not make them ART at all, but something more utilitarian than what that survey indicates most Americans think about art.

I weigh in on the side of Boyd: Human beings are makers – we evolved these opposable thumbs and then just couldn’t help but start making tools, making clothing, making shelter, making food fancier, making stuff.

As we developed more skills and fancier tools --and perhaps the time to spare, we started pleasing our senses with the things we made --adding aesthetic considerations to their functionality with decoration, embellishment – and also just with making things that had inherent sensory-pleasing qualities of texture, color, shape and form. This concern, these considerations have changed, but endured even into the industrial and post industrial, electronic world. Craft and technical skills become valuable.

We make stuff – and try to make it pleasing --but we humans also make stories. As story makers, we are as concerned with the why and how come and what happened then and what happens next as we are with making our lives run more smoothly. And to me that’s where the art comes in.

Art is about story-making as well as object-making. About the same time we started making blankets and pots to cook in and clothing and nice places to live, archeological evidence shows that we also began telling stories about the elemental forces operating in visible and invisible realms, and within our own psyches.  We painted those stories on walls. We wove robes and carved masks to act out the stories, we constructed sacred places and kept trying to tell the story and about the characters in those stories. Sometimes the stories showed up on the utilitarian objects, but they were also embodied in sacred story objects. And maybe the person who could make a beautiful cooking pot, was the one with practiced enough skills to make a terrifying god sculpture. Probably leading to the first debate about art and craft.

Carolyn E. Boyd also says this:

“Expressive forms, such as storytelling and rock paintings, are integral parts of a hunting and gathering adaptation. These expressive forms. which include rock art, “perform work.” They work to “indirectly” instruct and communicate information necessary to make certain adaptations successful within egalitarian societys where direct instruction generates an adverse reaction.”

In other words, these societies were not ones where it was accepted for one person to “be the boss.” The art became the way to share information and instruction given that social cooperation was so important for survival.

As we humans have traversed maybe 10,000 years of story or more, the stories have gotten more complicated and less functional, just as the objects we make have become more intricate and often less necessary in purely survival terms.
The stories in art can now be about almost anything – even about other art, bereft of character, freed of object. Some stories are about color, about tactile line, about pure emotion or even purely about the material that they are made of.

But elemental stories are still powerful and still hold our attention. The archetypes of hero, princess, savior, guardian, will-of-whisp, fool and befuddled are some of the characters in those stories.  And I think the art that touches me the most still has some qualities of that art of instruction and communication. So I make these big mermaids and saints and angels in series – they are like the chapters of a book and through them I explore different aspects of myself, my own inner archetypes.

We all know instinctually those archetypes – we see them in storytelling in all kinds of media, from ancient rock art to every movie we see and every book we read: characters that resolve problems – hero, heroine, healer, knight in shining armor– that cause them – joker, saboteur, villain, prostitute – the ones that find their way over and beyond – mystic, joker, angel, shape-shifters. Medical intuitive Carolyn Myss explains archetypes like this:

“An organizing principle … is shaping the energy within each of us – and shaping out live as it does so…. These patterns, often ancient in origin, populate our minds and lives in ways that affect us deeply. Yet we are generally unaware of them. These patterns of intelligence are archetypes, dynamic living forms of energy that are shared in many people’s thoughts and emotions, across cultures and countries.”

As to their multiplicity within our selves, our lives. I like what Diane Ackerman says in her book -- (great book The Alchemy of the Mind), this in her chapter about “the self,” quoting first Virginia Woolfe in Orlando:

“A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have as many as a thousand.”

Continuing, Ackerman, writes:

“A long ghostly parade of previous selves trails behind us, as values, habits and memories evolve to better reflect the current I. We often translate how that feels into spatial terms, and refer to our different facets. Or sides. All of our selves seem to inhabit separate spaces. The mind needs paces to juggle its different concerns at once, which sometimes are in sync, sometimes not. When they’re not in sync, there has to be a way to procceed fluently, without stumbling every time there’s a rift in what one part of you is conscious of emotionally and the other part is conscious of cognitively. … A self is a trail of bread crumbs we leave so we know our progress and direction.”

So I like to think of my work as a trail of breadcrumbs. These angels, saints and sinners are characters in stories that resonate with me, or that I somehow see myself living in some kind of alternative universe. The pomegranates and vines and flowers, while decorative, are also part of a language of symbols that humans have evolved in the role of story-makers. I love looking up the use of symbols in art throughout time and using them consciously in the cloth I make, a kind of hidden in plain view secret for those in the know. I am connected through this visual language of symbols, as well as the purely formal elements and laws of design – line, shape, color, emphasis, balance, etc – to those artist who have come before me to make their discoveries.

Why quilts and fiber art though? As a woman, I live in a world that values social cooperation over competitive edge, and so I have chosen essentially woman’s art as my mode for communicating stories that are important to me. I was a painting major in school, and I still carry around a feeling that being a painter is a supreme act of independence and even maybe arrogance. If you are painter, don’t take that the wrong way, but for me painting is just too much of a lone wolf path, I like the comforting connection to traditional craft that working in fabric affords me. This community aspect of the work I’ve chosen is what I try to bring to my workshops and teaching, too. It’s why I am committed to teaching more than a technique or even how to make  Art – that “object that is aesthetically pleasing to people within society and with minimum purpose beyond that of intrinsic enjoyment.”

In closing, I want to leave you with one other archetype; Wild Woman. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes to remind us:

 “Within us is the old one who collects bones. Within us there are the soul-bones of the Wild Woman.  Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again as the creature we once were. Within us are the bones to change ourself and our world. Within us is the breath and our truths and our longings – together they are the song, the creation hymn we have been yearning to sing. …Today the La Loba inside you is collecting bones. What is she remaking? She is the sould Self, the builder of the soul home. Ella lo hace amino, she make and re-makes the soul by hand. What is she making for you?"

And one more from Clarissa, that wasn't in the talk, but finding it on Wikipedia, seems to add a lovely footnote:

"The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase."

from Women Who Run With the Wolves (Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992, 1996) (p.14)

Sweating out the Brochure

Click on this thumbnail for pg 1 

pg  2ONE POINT FIVE days, about 8 hours longer than I expected, and my new workshop brochure is ready for a final edit (and reader feedback). Funny how those spelling mishaps and grammatical wierdnesses sneak in after hours and hours of careful plucking away. If you have suggestions that would make this a better document, let me know, too. Part and parcel of the time it took to do this was getting my feet wet in Pages, part of iLife -- a publishing program that I am sure will be easier to use than my old Pagemaker software, no longer updateable or workable with OSX. Keeping up with technology seems to be a neverending task, and one I actually enjoy. But, the learning curse (better than curve, right?) is still steep and fraught with bad language.

I am also testing some new link technology stuff that allows public access to certain pages of my Backpack. So, if you would like to try this out with me, click on this link and see if it happens for you. You may need to register a free account, but I promise they promise me not to spam you. If it opens, then click on the thumbnails of the borchure images. Can you read the text? I will probably just produce a web-based version of this or see if it publishes into something html friendly.

By the way, Backpack is a handy web-based storage/organizational/sharing site that I use to store information and keep records on a remote server, so that if I ever lose my harddrive and backup (AGAIN, AT THE SAME TIME) at least I will have the important at-the-moment project information somewhere accessible.

Of course, I will also put the final version, once comments and corrections are made, on my sidebar on this site, where you can find it anytime! 

Rebirth and Renewal

     

Before and After.

Easter weekend at El Ceilo came with a layer of ice -- sleet piled up on all the new spring growth, swirled around the deck, turned the cedars once more into a sparkling magical forest. Since our last freeze date around here is supposed to be March 15 or so, it was a big shock to the system. But, now that the weather has gentled again, it appears that only the basil may have suffered freeze damage. The ground must have been warm enough to protect most everything else.

This kind of ground-up protection seems to operate at a soul level, too. Some of my protective, powerful inner archetypes -- even rather bratty ones like Miss Priss, or the rather terrifying Dragon Lady Crone -- provide that kind of earth-tied protection when the icy winds blow and unexpected sleet pours onto tender growth.

      

Bobbe Nolan ironing, Donna LaMonico in process, Cher Solis and Mary Ellen Hardy finding fabrics. 

 

During the weekend's Calling All Archetypes workshop/retreat, we pondered, shared, and meditated, took work into new directions, made rebirth a theme and recovery the starting place for art quilts. Some of the archetypes who appeared were rather frightening, others made welcome appearances from earlier lives. Working from resources and exercises from Women Who Run with The Wolves, The Vein of Gold, and Sacred Contracts, each of the participants left with a project in tow -- and material for more. Although the weather was hardly the springtime exuberance that I had anticipated (no walks, no outdoor picnics), the fireplace was cosy and a couple of us even made it out to the hottub, until the sleet started raining down on our heads. The trip into Bandera for the Courthouse lawn Sunrise Service was canceled but I think we all had a sense of spirit, of celebration of Christ's rebirth, as we allowed ourselves time to reflect on our own journeys as women and artists.

Technically speaking, I showed newcomers to printing how to make a thermofax, and also demonstrated printing with water soluble crayons using gel medium, a technique that allows for wonderful spontaneity of drawing, and adds its own interesting twist as the colors dissolve and blend as one prints repeats. This little Easter image shows how the colors morph and blend, with each print changing as you work your way across the fabric.

        

Art and Quilts and Art Quilts, Part 2

 

This is my life on wheels: stuffed full of papery piñatas, careening along, headed who knows where.
What is success for an artist? Or more precisely, what does success look like for me?

If I am not willing to make some definitions, to set some, dreaded word, goals, will I get "there?"  If I don't have a clue where  there is, is it enough to "follow my bliss?"

For a few years, charting a new path in the domestic dimension of my life has determined most of the path I have been trekking: selling a home, buying a new one, moving and balancing a new kind of daily life, different than my city life of King William. The rest of the time was defined by other almost-automatic steps, once the new house and studio were in place: starting my workshop/retreats here at El Cielo, closing Textures gallery. And the rest of my time has been taken up with the things that are on automatic repeat status: the teaching stints at Southwest School where I am an established adjunct, King Ranch Art Camp for a week in the summer, being an active member (now President) of FASA.

Then, last fall, two consulting projects came along that seemed a good fit for my life (and my rapidly diminishing savings account): Dora and Diego's Garden Adventure and the Botero Family Days at the branch libraries. My friend and partner in art ed stuff Zet Baer was available and off we went. And then a crazy plan to spend three weeks in Italy!

Now, mid April, nearly, all the chickens are heading home to roost. For the next four months my calendar is chock full of activity - weekends blasted, travel bleary, wild woman on fire. So, success. And money, at least a bit, coming in. And time squeezed in here and there in the studio. Even art in a few local and regional exhibits (but note, these opportunities to show my work came to me -- I didn't apply or send out a proposal or write any letters, I just said yes).

I figure I can either continue the mode of planning/notplanning that has gotten me through these last two years, or  imagine some active, precise images of what I'd like my life to look like in five years. I'll be 59 in about three weeks, 60 seems an almost impossible age to be, but I am counting on it!

Deep breath. It's scary to write outloud about goals, don't you know. "Someone" is going to think me big-headed. "Someone" is going to think I have a lot of nerve. "Someone" is thinking you gotta be kidding. And "others" are going to wonder why I would ever tell everyone reading this blog about my plans. And "they" are going to think I am some kind of idiot.  (Did you hear the Drudge report on NPR about "the someones" in Katie Couric's interview with the Edwards?) So, despite all that from the arena, here goes, 5-year targets:

Art/Quilts -- I will make more art and sell my art. I will see my work in a couple of national exhibits a year, including some of the prestigious juried shows. I will have a solo show in a good gallery somewhere. I will see my work published in national magazines and journals. I will earn $25,000 a year selling art. (NOW that's a leap, my inner critic is yelling.)

Teaching -- I will have eight successful sold-out workshop/retreats a year here at El Cielo. I will continue teaching at Southwest School of Art and Craft, but with fewer on-going classes. I will teach at three prestigious national schools, conferences or events each year -- places like Arrowmont, Split Rock, QSDS.

So what gets in my way? Fear. Saying yes to things that don't add up. Being disorganized with time and money and paperwork.

Intermission

Multitasking is too kind a word, and, to be truthful, inaccurate. I have been skipping/skidding/surfing/sliding and surviving different world-ways-and-means since my last entry:

Nose-to-the-sewing-machine production to meet exhibit deadlines (Anyone in the Kerrville vicinity in April is invited to see my work at the 1550 Gallery). (Note- the quilt "altar" in the photo below is one of the Borderlands series that will be featured at the gallery.)

Visiting the familial home  in Waco (including a tornado watch with my 80-plus year old parents, my sister, Linda, my niece home from Zambia Peace Corp service, the neighbor boy with two really pissed off cats and me hanging out for a couple of hours in the interior hallway stuffed with pillows and a mattress)

Texas springtime gardening involving the neighbor's Bobcat and very large rocks

 

Mingling at the Southwest School of Art and Craft All-School exhibit opening, a command attendee gratefully accepting an award as " teacher of the year" 

So, Part 2  of success saga story will just have to wait until I get my breath. Meanwhile, here are a few pictures from the former contexts-in-conjunction. 

Sirena: Falling or Flying

Art Quilt, 84" by 60" 

 

P.S. No tornado materialized, though conditions looked really favorable and the sirens were a-wailing 

Art and Quilts and Art Quilts, part 1

Lately I've been following some discussions about the field: the art quilt in the fine art world, the shortcomings and advantages of entering juried quilt shows, the path of the artist to success. These discussions (which I suppose take place among artists of all sorts) are certainly stirring my brain dust.

Principally, I have been following the thoughtful discourse on the blog of Lisa Call, whose quilt work and writing both I admire, Rather than recap her remarks and that of those commenting on her posts, I invite you to look in on the conversation. Perhaps you will find them as delightully disturbing as I did.

First,  I need to  tell myself (and you if you stay with me) my story as an artist. Warning: this may be far more than you want to know about me, but in order for me to get to where I am trying to go with this "success" discussion, I really need to succinctly chart where I have come from.

My path into art quilts is a bit odd. I was always an arty kid -- hand me a crayon and I was one happy kid. My parents enrolled me in an innovative and creative art/theater program at Baylor University, after I had won and had to leave behind a scholarship to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts school.  A bit later, I earned an art degree (B.A.) from a liberal arts university in the late '60s -- about the time that even conservative universities were throwing out some of the traditional curricula and giving students a rather freehand in their education. For my senior project I sewed a room full of paper bag sculptures -- no one really got it. And, as a young woman, I was still (in 1970) living in a rather patriarchal world where it seemed pretty impossible to be a "real" artist. (I never learned anything about how I might make a living as an artist at university!)

Continuing within the construct of an arts-in-education research and teacher training foundation (the outgrowth of that childhood theater program) I made art banners/tapestries. I was inspired by Martha Mood, whose work stirs me, and Becky Crouch Patterson, whose wonderful  fabric wall art dances in my memory when I sit down to work. I also ran into Sister Mary Corita (Corita Kent) though work with several of her students who taught me the  joy of found imagery, to cut rather than draw, and to make a mean alphabet stamp. My personal art work was mostly within the context of community art projects, collaborations with children, using a variety of media for installations, exhibits, art works and experiences -- Happenings, books, banners, and performance events. Some of which took place in quite prestigious settings -- the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Blaffer Gallery at U of H, to name a few.

 

Ten years after that art education career had morphed into journalism, and then to work as a designer of interactive exhibitsmostly for children's museums -- I found myself wanting desperately to make art of my own. I added art cloth techniques and a devotion to making it via study with Jane Dunnewold. Then I took a weekend workshop with Sue Benner and WonderUnder was the answer to a question I hadn't even figured out to ask. Jumping into the world of art quilts with the mentoring of Jane, of Beth Kennedy, of Judi Goolsby, of Leslie Jenison and many others who worked and talked and shared ideas and techniques at Art Cloth Studios, I have in the past 8 years slowly  but steadily found my voice in cloth, in art. Through conversations and our Complex Cloth sales booth I discovered the Houston International Quilt Show, that there was such a thing as an art quilt, and that maybe that's what I was making. Along the way I had joined Fiber Artists of San Antonio, (intentionally not-a-guild group, but still with some guildish qualities, like juried exhibits).

You notice, there is scarce mention of quilting or quiltmaking in any of this. And hardly anything about sewing, except that I had to learn to do it in order to keep the WonderUndered edges in place. I didn't even know it was called raw edge applique. So now, 13 years after taking that first complex cloth class, I find myself a fulltime professional artist and teacher. And not quite sure how to define success, or at least not the NEXT success.

 

 I haven't entered any national art quilt juried shows -- but, yes, have had work in local and regional fiber arts exhibits. I've been part of several invitational shows or exhibits put together at the sort-of co-op gallery that I was part of for three years. Part of my reluctance to enter the big time national quilt juried exhibits is that I really don't have the precise sewing skills that seem to be highly valued in such venues. To tell you the truth, I don't really care about burying my threads or making a perfect mitered corner (I avoid the whole binding issue by just edge-stitching around the edges.)

So, this is where I've been. Next, where to go? It seems I've gotten here without much planning -- I just knew eight years ago that I did not ever want to have to take a fulltime job working for someone else. I've managed that. But now I need to chart the next ten. And as I turn 59 in a couple of weeks, my sense of time is certainly not what it was when I was 35 or 45.

I still feel awfully new around here. Only since I've been reading some good blogs by quilt artists, have I even begun to fathom the pathways and pitfalls to "success" in this in-between art world. I still bristle against the capitol A Art World that, to me, has often worked itself into such an elite language, that the work fails in approachability. I see a place in the world for this level of visual art work -- but for me, and I think to many people, its relationship to where we live daily is the much the same as that of string theory or particle physics. Perhaps it's important that someone is doing that work, but it doesn't touch me much, and I'm not really aiming at being in a contemporary art museum anytime soon. I have a parallel and equally passionate devotion to the teaching part of my life (a vocation I have followed since age 12). I'm not sure whether I make art to have validity as a teacher, or teach to have viability as an artist. So where am I headed? Stay tuned for Art and Quilts and Art  Quilts. part two. And maybe, if you are an artist, you might try this same  map charting exercise. What got you here?

Art in Elgin

 

Here's a short heads-up. My art quilts arrived safely in Elgin for the TX Originals exhibit. If you are anywhere near Elgin (A bit outside of Austin, TX) on Saturday, March 24, I hope you will stop in to see the show. Texas Original artists will display ceramics, fiber art, jewelry, wood, sculpture, furniture, treenware, quilts and metal art.

The exhibit will be celebrated with live music, food and beverages at a reception at Kingfisher Fine Art and Music, 116 Depot Street, Elgin, Texas.  E Flat Porch Band will play until 6.pm. but the other festivities will be from 4 to 8.  The exhibit remains on display until Saturday, April 14.

For more information about the Texas Originals program, the artists and the event, click the link on the right hand sidebar.

Continuous, Continual

How do you work in a series? Or do you? Why or why not? And what makes it a series?

I see some individual works of art -- in many different media -- that intrigue and interest me, make me want a continuing conversation with that artist. But then, I look further, and I can't get a hold of what is going on. I can't find the path and I want more than one stepping stone for the journey. I strongly believe that commiting to one (or a few) clear paths is an important decision toward having one's work taken seriously out there in the broader art world.

And yet I know the challenge of working and reworking a theme or image or technique with the fear that someone will say, "Hasn't she done that already?"  or even worse, being bored with it myself or doubting my loyalty to a theme or direction that is played out.

My solution recently (say the last couple of years) has been to work in several series simultaneously -- each of which has its own direction, but has some distinction, some major differing factor, from other work. So far it works for me, though I'm not sure how it works for "marketing."   Some of what I do is about the medium itself: I still want to do some art cloth for art cloth's sake -- yardage that isn't about being cut up and used for anything, fabric that exists as form enough. Right now I am continuing to make my wooden frame shaped altares, each house shaped, but I still dip back and forth on subject matter. I have one series of smaller pieces that include photographic images of the Hill Country (the Borderlands series) and I still continue to explore the image of feminine sacred icons. And now, my mermaids are really taking flight (and falls).

 But what about you? How do you work in a series?

Linking up

I'm following the advice of Alyson Stanfield's Art Biz newsletter and linking up to a number of "blog crawlers" so that this site has more visibility. Why do I care? I am an artist, and I am a self-employed business woman. I like the creative side of this work, and I even like learning more about the business side of things. The web is such an ever-evolving sphere out/in/over there. In the world without storefronts (or maybe it's a storefront on every laptop) it's fascinating to me to find the maps that make it work.

Technorati Profile

INDIE Arts

El Cielo Studio this morning was "on-location" when producer and mixed media artist Karen Landey arrived to interview me for the July issue of iNDiE Arts, the DVD magazine that features live interviews, studio visits, on-line galleries and other on-location video of artists and their work. The project, now heading toward issue number 4, is  a wonderful way to share information and to find out more about the work, techniques and approaches of other visual artists. I'll be sure to let EVERYONE know when my interview is published, but meanwhile, I encourage everyone to look into this interesting DVD product. Back issues are available, and I plan to order the two I haven't seen soon -- and to subscribe to the future issues.

Log into an intro  and some short previews of interview from iNDie Arts on YouTube here.

Or check out the iNDie Arts web site here. 

 

Words on the Surface, Redux

 

Putting text to the test, we creative women printed, dyed, batiked, stamped and calligraphed through the weekend. Candid comments took my planning to the next step, toward turning this workshop into a proposal for on-the-road teaching. The upside: it seems to be an intriguing topic, one that can take participants in many directions. It works for both advanced professionals and for beginning students (with a bit of tweaking and not too many in a class). The techniques taught can be applied to work of different scale and different formats. Downside: it takes a lot of supplies.

Here are some of the samples I made, and some of the results from participants, as well as a few candid shots of the artists (Mary Ann Johnson, Elizabeth Romanella, Caryl Gaubatz, l to r). The samples are some of Kathy Hayson's pieces. We used soy batik, thermofax printing with shaving foam, sun printing, original stamps and other techniques -- and combined and layered them to create Complex Cloth.

Our intent in these samples shown was to embed the text messages into the surface of the cloth, with the form holding as much importance (and as much of the "message" as any literary element.  That could mean really making it disappear or become a surface texture, or, if we wanted the words to still be legible, finding ways to integrate surface color and texture.

I'm open to ideas and suggestions, and would love to collect jpg examples of other artist's works to include in a slide show for future events -- with due credit of course. If you are interested in being part of this teaching aid, please contact me though the comments section. 

 

 

 

 

 

Emotional Commitment

 

I am temporarily unable to download images from my camera (lost cable), so to keep us all thinking, here is an short excerpt from Dr. Richard Hemming's speech on research. Hemming was a famous big thinker in the development of computers, and the complete speech is well worth a read -- be ye scientist or artist.

 Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ``creativity comes out of your subconscious.'' Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Simplicity and Dyeing

A bit more on the dye ceremony: Pat Schulz, another artist among those present, shared her pictures of the final "product," a unique silk scarf with ruffled edges, due to the two different weaves in the silk. First, the scarf being dyed (before the mordant of iron).

 

 

The simplicity of the ceremony and the beauty of the scarves came to mind with a bit of synchronicity in my reading last night of John Maeda's The Laws of Simplicity. Maeda, a graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist, is the founder of the SIMPLICITY Constortium at the MIT Media Lab (where he is a professor). He writes in Law 7 (Emotions: More emotions are better than less):

"Growing up, my siblings and were taught that everything in our environment, including inanimate objects, had a living spirit that deserved respect." 'Even a cup?' we asked. 'Even a desk?'...The answer was always, 'Yes.'....Believing that all things around you -- rocks, river, mountain and clouds -- are somehow 'alive' was something that I couldn't grasp as a child. However, as an adult, I prefer the world with its mysteries intact and I find myself comfortable with the thought....

And he  goes on to explain:

"Aichaku (ahy-chaw-koo) is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an artifact. When written by its two kanji characters, you can see that the first character means 'love' and the second one means 'fit.' "Love-fit' describes a deeper kind of emotional attachment that a person can feel for an object. ... Acknowledging the existence of aichaku in our build environment helps us to design artifacts that people will feel for, care for and own for a lifetime."

 In the midst of our disposable culture, a consumerism run rampant, we as artists and as owners of "stuff" could perhaps think a bit more about aichaku.

Dye Ceremony

The day was beautiful. The setting perfect. The ceremony perhaps less of a ritual atmosphere than I would have liked (but as my friend Susan said, perhaps Izukura realizes how little tolerance and experience westerners have of ritual). We sat in the circle of the riverside gazebo, in this early spring wind and sun, and dyed beautful scarves, each woven in two weaves to give texture to the wisp of color that resulted. The dyes were from plants and insects (mine, a final soft grey) was dyed with cochinil. 

  

Sensei Akihiko Izukura

 

I went to church today, although it was Saturday, and the chapel was a gallery lined with chairs. The spiritual master who presented his message was textile sensei Akihiko Izukura, and, although he spoke in Japanese through a translator, the message of his personal presence was clear in any language. Izukura, born into a traditional obi-making family business, has welded tradition, history and innovation into his factories, his dye ceremonies (more on that after I participate tomorrow) and his garments that manage to be both ethereal and earthy.

 

His dye baths are used until the pigment is all transfered to the cloth; the dye materials are burned and their ashes incorporated into handmade paper and glazes for pottery. People in his workplace are as carefully matched, and he refuses to go to cheaper labor markets for his handmade clothing, keeping work in the rural communities of  Japan where women sit at looms to weave the silk garments -- the garments themselves designed much as sweaters are, without cutting and waste of fabric.

      

At the heart of his work is the idea of "not choosing."

"Using natural materials is using and borrowing their lives to make something new. All is appreciated. All the stages, all the the parts.  This is the basic thought: not choosing, not one thing over another as more beautiful. To appreciate all of the lives. This is what I call the aesthetics of consideration." 

I don't know how I can incorporate more of his zero waste philosophy into my own work -- in a way, my insistence on using thrift store fabrics and old clothing as the raw material for most of my work -- is my own version of that philosophy, if not as stringent and well conceived. I also like to use my dye liquids as much as I can -- throwing fabric into "exhausted" dye pots, to achieve background tints, if nothing else. Yes, I use commercial chemical dyes and probably too much of them. Today's lecture does inspire me to look more closely -- and yes, to get back to the recycling I gave up when it started seeming too hard to do from 30 miles north of the city limits. (I'll add photos of the exhibit and of Izukura when I get home and can download the pictures, so check back if they aren't here yet.)

The Southwest School of Art and Craft website says this about Izukura's philosophy and practise:

Through his nearly spiritual engagement with textile processes, Akihiko Izukura imbues his garments and artwork with beauty and a sense of peace. As one of Japan's most extraordinary textile artists, Izukura’s personal philosophy of natural harmony has led to an extraordinary zero-waste philosophy. For instance, he works mainly in silk, and every part of the silk cocoon – even parts considered waste –  is used in the weaving. Garments are designed and engineered as they are woven, eliminating the need to cut into the fabric, which would leave waste.

Izukura has pioneered a way of dyeing that doesn't pollute water. He uses only natural materials (nuts, betel palm, onionskin and so on) for colors, and then uses every drop of the dye liquid, so that color intensity changes from piece to piece. In fact, even the materials used to extract the dye are processed into a powdery ash that is then used for pottery glazes or papermaking.

Read more about Akihiko Izukura at his website, http://www.akihikoizukura.com/en/.

Archetypes

Last weekend's El Cielo workshop (Full Moon/Fool Moon) was a lunar event extraordinary. Because I had read the lunar calendar wrong, it was actually a dark/new moon event, but turned out to be the Lunar New Year, the most revered Asian holiday of the year.  We combined our own investigations of spontaneity and accident in dyeing and painting, rusting and painting with a red-decked rituals for this celestial new year. So, here's your next opportunity to join this adventure:

Calling All Archetypes

At El Cielo Studio, Pipe Creek, Texas

With fiber artist Susie Monday 

April 7-8, 2007

 

Each of us depends on a cast of inner characters to get our work done: the organizer, the dreamer, the judge, the caretaker, the scout, the wild woman, the fool, and the wise one. (I'm sure you can think of others!). Whether we call these inner guides, inner selves or archetypes, their multiple voices help, hinder and guide our creative work.

During this renewing Art Journaling and Art Quilt workshop, participants will explore these inner aspects as characters, as well as their relationship to the archetypes of legend and myth. With personal imagery developed through journaling, each person will transform his or her insights into a small art quilt. Participants will explore their inner teams with a series of interesting and revealing art journal exercises adapted from diverse readings including Caroline Myss’s Sacred Contracts, Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With the Wolves, as well as other writers. Then, using the information and images that were developed in the journaling exercises, each person will design and create a journal quilt or artist’s altar art quilt honoring one of their inner archetypes, angels or voices. Quilt design techniques include working with fusible webbing, machine and hand quilting and embellishment with printing and stitching.

Those present will share meals (bring a sack lunch for Saturday, Saturday supper and Sunday brunch are included in the fee), vistas from the deck and hikes or bike rides down the country roads or into the cedar as the weather permits, as well as participate in a variety of fun and meaningful exercises using simple materials. Accommodations are available at my home and studio for a modest fee ($15 to $30 depending on the room). For the commute, count on an hour drive from midtown, or 30 minutes (16 miles to Timbercreek turnoff) from the intersection of Hwy. 16 (Bandera Rd.) and Loop 1604. Then 3.5 miles on the paved road to the studio.

Supply List: A shoebox full of fabrics of your choice, scissors, embroidery threads and beads, journal and favorite writing materials, a poem that speaks to your inner self (selves). Any snacks, toys or treasures you wish to share. You are welcome to bring a portable sewing machine, but you can also share the studio resources.

TO REGISTER: Send me an email at susiemonday@sbcglobal.net 

 

FEE, including supper and a simple brunch: $150 per person. Limited enrollment, 10% discount for registration before 3/21/06 ($135).

Good Blog/Bad Blog

I'm just 6 months old as a blogger. Nothing to boast about, in this area of technology, I've been a late adopter I think. And the technosphere keeps blasting past me (is blogging even still considered an edge?).

 

Me and my morning blogging companions, Cheech and Lucky (big blur). 

 

 However, I  have made it past the danger zone of short starts, and after the initial stage of panic that I would have nothing to write about, I find the discipline and order of keeping track of my studio ideas and activity, even in a two-or-three-in-a-lucky-week mode, has much to reccommend it. If nothing else,  this writing keeps me on the lookout for ideas outside "my field." We artists can so easily find ourself locked into the the art ghetto, even the art quilt ghetto. Time on our hands is wisely focused on our craft, our colleagues, our cliches, the next deadline. It's quite easy to forget that an enormous world is happening out there.

Keeping a blog has been a key for me to the outside bigger world of business and enterprise, fine art and fashion, technology and trend. It keeps me honest, when my little world is exploding with ego. Keeps me level headed when the next crisis pops up in the fiber arts world of San Antonio and surrounds. Keeps me stretching with ideas that challenge my own self-importance. And, as someone who once wrote for a big city paper, gives me the writer's satisfaction of self-publishing sans city desk deadlines.

I may never have a readership of 2,000 or 20,000, as do some of the blogs I follow, but every month the number of readers grows and the comments I receive feed my inner scribe. Sobeit.

 Here's what one was posted today at my newest finds --Merlin Mann's site about personal productivity, 43folders.
(He was sharing his contribution to Brian Bailey's new book, The Blogging Church: Sharing the Story of Your Church Through Blogs. )

The most exciting and difficult time for a new blogger is the barn-raising period after the new blog is launched and the daily dash for new and interesting content begins. As perhaps thousands of ostensible bloggers discover — sometimes as early as their site’s inaugural week — this can be surprisingly hard work. It’s hard not simply for the obvious reasons — that regularly-scheduled writing (or photography or even just linking) takes time, preparation, and care. You may also have days where you just have nothing to say and are tempted to meta-whine about how you have nothing to say. You may find yourself padding pages with the results of online personality tests or the latest funny-once meme du jour. Resist this with extreme prejudice.

Remember that your blog is only incidentally a publishing system or a public website. At its heart, your blog represents the evolving expression of your most passionately held ideas. It’s a conversation you’re holding up with the world and with yourself — a place where you can watch your own thoughts take different shapes and occasionally surprise you with where they end up…
That last fact is something I learn and re-learn every single week, and it’s still the most surprising and illuminating dividend of thinking and writing in public.

Thus said, and so well, if you are thinking about writing a blog, I say, GO FOR IT. This internet thing is changing the world, and at 59 (nearly) I am determined to stay on the slopes for a while longer, even if the lifts operate on ether and the black diamond trails are reserved for 20-somethings. (OK, I never was a skier, but you get what I mean.)