Buckeye in April

This has been a hard month to capture--it seems as if the buckeye is changing hourly. One morning last week I took pictures of the ready to burst open buds, by the afternoon they were changed...so I had trouble deciding which moment to choose.
I have a picture that I printed out on organdy, but it was too realistic even as I had abstracted it in photoshop. I'll make something of it, but not the April buckeye piece.
Instead I went more expressionistic--bud shaped fused pieces, freeform stitching, strokes of shiva, all reinforcing the idea of the buds busting out. The essence of spring.
The actual piece is a little less bright than this scan...I'm having trouble with the shininess of the silk background.

inspiration where you find it

Yesterday I had the chance to watch a great documentary, called 'Rivers and Tides'. It's about a Scottish sculptor named Andy Goldsworthy and the creativity exercises he does. He goes outside and makes art with natural objects, sometimes deliberately placing them where they will be destroyed when the tide comes in, or the wind comes up. He makes beautiful, if temporary pieces this way. Rent the movie and watch it.

Today is one of the first warm spring days here in Illinois, so I took a walk and tried it. This piece was made by gathering oak bark and twigs in a small area, and laying them out ala a log cabin. I made three pieces in all, the biggest around 12" square. It's a very freeing exercise to stimulate creativity--because I knew it probably wouldn't be there tomorrow, and because all the supplies were free, I just played. It would be very easy to enter a meditative state doing this. Try it.

The other thing I have been doing on my walks is taking pictures of the cold patches on the asphalt--for some reason I keep seeing one of my personal symbols, the kayak, on the road...haven't figured out what to do with them, but they're cool I think.

Dance of the Blue Slash

Sometimes I intentionally work in series, exploring a certain idea, exploiting the same inspiration. Sometimes I find a series when I'm two or three pieces into it, when I lay the pieces side by side and realize the connection. Sometimes I've forced things into a series for expediency, as in the planning for my website (soon to be coming to a cyberspace near you). And sometimes the series just explode into my studio, linking the pieces together with some kind of synergy springing from my artistic brain, bypassing my scientific brain.

The Dance of the Blue Slash series is a prime example of the last kind. It began on the kokopelli quilt I discussed before, where the unfinished piece needed some bright blue pieces. I dyed a piece of silk the right color, and fused part of it. I cut off the pieces I needed, and they worked. But I had cut more than I needed, and so there were extras laying on the chest right beside my design wall.

So the March buckeye piece came along, and needed a border. The blue slashes jumped over and formed the border.

Next came an abstract view of the hills around me in their winter dullness...it needed the blue, too, five tiny pieces on the surface, floating in the space between the hills.

Fourthly, there was a piece of silk I had painted abstractly from a memory of the wooded riverbank in late fall--greys, rusts, some blues and a touch of yellow here and there. Although I had added some texture to the piece by pleating it, the piece was unfinished. Until the blue slashes said, hey, make us long and skinny and we'll fit between the pleats and spark the piece up. They do. I currently am trying to fight the fact that this piece would like to be in a windsock shape with a light inside of it--being silk, it glows...the mechanics of that are still giving me pause.

And fifthly, there was a small practice piece that has been kicking around for months. It is a prime example of more is more, having every technique I've been using lately on it almost. But it wasn't quite right, not finished. The small blue slashes danced on to it, and found a home. The piece is now quilted and ready to mat. The edges are uneven and ravelling, but I like it now.

March Buckeye

Spring is finally coming to the midwest, slowly but surely. The temperatures are milder, the grass is greening up, migratory birds have returned.
I decided that this month I wanted to use an actual photo of the buckeye as a basis for the piece. When I went outside to shoot it, I discovered the swelling buds were calling my camera. This closeup has been cropped and manipulated in Photoshop Elements, and printed on silk. I then fused it to a neutral piece that was slightly larger.
These scraps of sky blue were left over from the moon dance piece I talked about last time, and they make a good border--kind of like the sky peeking out with that intense blue we only get at this latitude in spring and fall.
I've been taking a course at Quilt University in using new, nontraditonal stuff. Through that I got entrapped the last few days with transparent ribbon--I'm trying to put it on everything. I used it as a binding on the knots piece (a dark blue that finishes the piece but lets the varigation in the fabric underneath show through), as a border on another piece. And now as strips across this piece. And as part of the beads.


Anyone who knows my art work well would tell you that I am fascinated by the effects of fire and heat on things. I frequently burn the edges of silk, and now I have added melted ribbon to the mix. The strips were first disperse dyed, then sewn in place. Then I melted them with a heat gun hovering over them. I then quilted the background, I wish I had done that before the strips were added, but these pieces are the equivalent of sketches--I learn from the doing, I don't redo them unless they really don't come out (hence the cutup earlier version of this picture currently residing in my stash of bits and pieces).
Wanting to add a dimensional touch, this morning I got the idea of trying to make rolled beads out of the ribbon. I rolled a short length around a wooden skewer, and added some small pieces of another sheer organdy on top. After pinning the ends in place, I went at it with the heat gun. It fused the layers together, and added texture at the same time. The base ribbon has a yellow edge on it, so when I was done the beads echoed the shape of buds on the buckeye.

March is a changeable time in the midwest, 60 one day, 30 the next. Grey one day, clear and windy the next. But it is a time when hope returns, when life returns. By next month the buckeye will probably be in full bloom, I'll be mowing, be outside without a coat. That will be good.

symbols as cliche

I'm working on a big piece, well big for me. It's around 3 foot by 4 foot. The working title is 'Dancing in the Light of the Moon', subject to change. This piece has done a lot of its own decision making, veering off into directions I never intended. For instance, the background fabrics started out as an attempt to replicate the rolling hills and fields around the river here. That's a little hard to see now as it wanted to be dyed fairly dark.

Anyway, it's time to quilt it. I want to convey more of the dance feeling, and my first thoughts were of adding a Kokopelli. I can see him playing the flute in the bottom left corner, some little moonlight sonata, enjoying the moment.

But then I became obcessed with the thought that Kokopelli is too overdone as a symbol, has become a cliche, some kind of southwest joke figure. Do we have the right to claim anything as a symbol in our artistic lives, or are we limited to things that come from our personal past, our personal culture? Is living in the same country that Kokopelli's inventors lived enough? Does using him step over the line of trendiness, becoming trite in the process?

And if I invent my own symbol, what does it convey if no one knows the background of that symbol? I use the kayak as a symbol in a lot of my work, but it's never a very realistic kayak, and only occasionally does it become instantly identifiable as a kayak. And does the viewer think the same thing as I do when they think 'kayak'? I think of floating down the river, leaning back and staring at a rising full moon, my hand trailing in the water. It's a peaceful symbol to me. But if someone else is a whitewater kayaker, I can see that the symbol would be entirely different.

Maybe I just overthink these things. Maybe I should get back to the mind space where the quilt would tell me what to do. Maybe this is part of, a continuation of, the doritos principle--do it, I can make another one...

the abstraction continues

My fiber pieces continue to evolve. I now find it nearly impossible to do realism in either fiber or my other medium, watercolor. I just don't see the point of doing something that could be duplicated, or improved, by capturing with a camera. And they become less refined--it's more about the texture than the properness.

Take this piece for an example. I was experimenting with putting different types of silk together, and then dyeing them so that the color was independent of the sheen. For some reason, I liked it with the seams showing when it was done--something that wouldn't have occurred to me a couple of years ago. Silk is a bugger to deal with, and the quilting of it (carelessly I admit) left some puckers here and there--but I like them. The raw edges are fraying and exciting.

But the orange needed something. I first added the curved blue piece, but that wasn't quite enough. Up close you can see that I kind of replicated the shape, although enlarged and more freeform, in blue stitching above the actual blue piece of silk. Overall, the piece began to come together.

One of my mentors in art told me that art should look good from three distances--something like 20 feet, 3 feet, and 1 foot. For the 1 foot part of this, before quilting, I used the Shiva paintsticks again, rubbed over the same rubber stamp I talked about in an earlier post. The marks are subtle, but they add to the surface interest.

Now about the abstraction. So far I haven't mentioned the name of this piece, because it will reveal part of what I was thinking about--it's called 'blue bird'. Before that, has you recognized the swatch of blue as a bird shape? Does the name influence your view of the piece? I can't separate the two when looking at it, but then I created it so I find it hard to be totally objective.

And that lack of objectivity is part of my view of abstraction--I can't separate my inspiration from the piece, no matter if the inspiration is foremost in my brain as I begin a piece, or if it only reveals itself as the piece progresses. Does that matter? Probably not. But the process of coming from realism to abstraction has made me look at other abstract art with a different eye--the education of doing rather than just looking.

February buckeye

Once again, I beat the month to the punch and started on my Feb. buckeye rendition in January. Lately I've been noticing that from a certain angle, the tree looks like a checkmark. This particular tree has not had an easy life, we've had to prune off some dead branches, and the result is a little lopsided. It will grow out of it, they always do. But I wanted to capture that simplistic single stroke that represents the way that tree looks at this time.


Ok, it's a checkmark with a stem. I picked out a piece of hand-dyed silk for some color in my life (it's been rather grey around here) and the texture in it. I decided to keep things simple and do the tree with a brush and Tsukineko ink. I started out with brown, and while it was still wet added some yellow to shade it a little. I went back in some places with more brown. Left to dry, some of the yellow blossomed out of the left hand branch--which kind of resembles how plants are trying to force the season with the warm days we've had recently.

I added some words (February The Hope Springs Forth if you can't quite read them) and some yellow rays of sunlight, and finished off the edges. It's probably done, it's just a journal piece, only 8x10 inches, and it says everything I want it to say.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the whole abstract/realism thing. I'm kind of put off by photorealism at the moment--why not just take a photograph? And I'm sure I don't quite understand the official definition and meaning of abstract art. But for me, what I'm doing is taking an inspiration from my microcosm, and capturing the essence of that in fiber by whatever means works. The question is, does the viewer understand that process without a long caption, and does that even matter? What my art is to me may or may not be what it is to the viewer. And I'm pretty sure I'm all right with that. While I make my art to sell, I also make it for me.