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The first of my two solo shows in the Month of May is hung, and it looks pretty good (if you ignore the shaft of sunlight moving across one wall--the windows look darkened, I'm only a little worried). This is in the Fairfield (Iowa) Arts and Convention Center (200 North Main). The opening reception is this Friday night (May 2), 6:30-9pm, as part of their monthly First Friday Art Walk--a great event, in which several local businesses and galleries within walking distance of each other hold openings. I think that this month there is a theme of Fiber Art.
My second show will be hung tomorrow, at the Quincy Medical Group, Quincy, Illinois. It can be viewed during normal business hours.
So I feel like my hard work of the last few months of making art has paid off--I am able to mount two, albeit small, solo shows at the same time. That's a good thing.
Check them out if you get the chance.
I wish I could say that I went to Chicago to the International Quilt Festival, and all I got was this lovely pile of hand dyed wool roving. I didn't go overboard, got a few other things, but this is my favorite.
It is from a shop called Wool & Needle in Fond du Lac, WI. (I would link to their website, www.woolandneedle.com, but it seems to be down right now.) There were several vendors there with roving, but this spoke to me--there's lots of variation in the coloring, which will be good for making natural looking landscapes. Even if the landscapes I make are abstract, I still want the play of light to figure in the composition.
These got me to remembering when I first started dyeing fabric. I was obsessed with getting the pieces evenly colored--you know, like commercial fabric. I don't remember what the lightning bolt was, but at some point I realized I should be looking for the happy accidents I find in watercolor painting--something they can't make 1000 yards of. Part of my plan for the summer is to go back to those fairly uniform pieces and overdye or paint them. Make them unique.
As for this wool, I'm thinking nuno felting to make some more landscapes. I have thought about buying an embellishing machine, but have decided for now to stick with hand felting with some hand needle felting thrown in. It's the process I'm after as much as the final product.
Where has the time gone? What have I been up to? Well, aside from spending last week nursing a sick husband, I was getting ready for not one, but TWO solo shows in the month of May. I almost didn't accept the second one because of the timing, but I thought a minute and realized I finally have enough work to pull this off.
That's partly because I spent a lot of the last few months just making art. It doesn't feel like it today, but the pile speaks for itself. The problem is, I made art and stopped there. No framing, no matting, no sewing on of hanging devices.
So I spent the last couple of days figuring out what piece goes where, making prices lists to submit to the venues, figuring out what goes in what frame. Boring, but necessary.
Oh, and the two venues? One is the Quincy Medical Group in Quincy, Illinois. They have a large skywalk connecting their two main buildings, the work will hang there for the month of May.
The Fairfield (Iowa) Art Association will host the other show in the Fairfield Arts and Convention Center. There will be an opening reception (with me in attendance) on Friday, May 2, 6:30-9:30pm, in conjunction with the Fairfield First Friday Art Walk--a big local event held monthly.
In between the sick, the getting ready for this, a quick trip to the International Quilt Festival in Chicago next week, and a vacation with family to Lake Barkley, KY, this is shaping up to be a quite busy month. I'm anxious for May, when I can seriously make art again.
But I am feeding the muse--making a small piece every day, playing with some new techniques when I have an hour or two. There are a couple of bigger pieces on my design wall right now, but both are kind of stuck--not telling me how to continue with them--waiting for me to find my way back to them. I will. Just not this week.
Ann Miller Titus thinks I give her all my scraps. I used to do so. And I still give her some things I think I'll never use again. But now I keep the best ones for myself.
Because I never know when they'll come in handy. Like in this little piece I made last week:
It is quite small, like 3"x5". The background is one of the leftovers from the silk piece I cut up last fall, the part where I decided it would be a good idea to add some black paint. Not. Anyway, a small piece found its way into the jumbled bin I keep such little treasures in. I pulled it out the other day, found a piece of already fused hand dyed green silk. The shapes I cut of the green were inspired by some rubber stamp designs from my stamp carving month. Pretty simple.
But these leftovers find themselves in my larger pieces, too. I'm in the process of getting Strata 4 up on my website; part of its focal point is some leftover strips trimmed off of a previous work.
I guess the point of this is that I'm starting to see how these little bits and pieces tie everything together--because my palette evolves over time rather than jumping from color to color, I can see the evolution by looking at these pieces side by side. I've been working on putting together a professional looking portfolio, and after I printed out some pictures of works and laid them in a row to determine their order, I finally saw the connection between the pieces that I hadn't noticed before. I am starting to see the 'style' that others have seen in my body of work.
All that being said, the main purpose of saving these bits and pieces is a practical one--I can try out an idea quickly, with little investment of time or supplies, and can tell whether to pursue the idea or not because I already have something that meets the idea's criteria in that bin of bits. Sometimes I end up making a bigger or slightly different bit from scratch, but the saved bit led the way.
And it's kind of a treasure hunt--just today I found a piece leftover froma couple of silk pieces that I had completely forgotten about--the leftover piece, I mean. It's big enough to do something with. So I'm off down another tangent, thanks to my scrap bin.
Sorry, Ann. But not too sorry.
My other art medium is watercolor. I have taken several workshops from an outstanding watercolorist, Wendell Mohr, of nearby Keosauqua, Iowa. He does a lot of 'wet on wet' work, and one of the exercises he teaches involves this process to get a varied, glowing background:
1. thoroughly wet the paper and attach it to a board
2. starting on one edge, with the board upright, brush on a pigment heavy, juicy swath of a color
3. let it run down the page
4. turn the board 90 degrees, and repeat with another color--all while the first wash is still wet
5. let this run down, blending with the first color
6. turn again another 90 degrees, and repeat with a third color.
This can result in a beautiful, glowing, varied background. Any three colors can work, and done wet on wet you don't get any mud.
So I decided to try this on fabric. My first attempt was outside with a large linen tablecloth hung on a clothesline, using Procion Mx dyes. Although very messy, it worked great. Do I have a picture of it? No. Did I mention it was a LARGE tablecloth?
The other day I decided to try the same process with Setacolor fabric paints. This time I chose a linen napkin and pinned it to a piece of gator board. I got the fabric wet, and used a yellow, ultramarine blue, and oriental red. Here is the result:
It is close to what I intended. I found that at least with Setacolor, i have the ability to muddy it up some, whether I want to or not. This paint doesn't flow on this substrate as well as watercolor does on paper, so I had to help it along by continuing to add water and 'pushing' it along. I like the piece, and will do more like it--and make something of this one. I put paper towels beneath the edge of the board to protect my tabletop, and got some interesting paper towels that I've been using in mixed media work.
So it was a successful experiment. And I continue to like the implied texture provided by the pattern of the damask weave on linens--I like that a close study of my work would show this reference to the past.
I've had an Etsy store for about 9 months now. In that time, I've sold one piece and traded two. This week, about half of my listings expire. In another month, the rest expire.
At least for now, I'm not going to renew the listings. It just hasn't worked like I wanted it to. Someone suggested that my prices were too high, but I see plenty of other stuff on there that's priced similarly. And I'm not going to lower my prices for a particular venue, that's not fair to the other places I have my work, or to me.
It seems to me like Etsy is a great idea that has run amok. There are stores with genuine original pieces of art, but there are many more selling crafty stuff made in an almost mass produced style and priced dirt cheap. I cringe at the thought of using 'bargain' in the same context at 'buying art'.
Pricing art is one of the hardest parts of the business side of art for me. I have increased my prices over time, as I got into more national shows, and as I progressed in my art. But I never undervalued my time--and like it or not, art takes time. Some of that time is spent thinking, problem solving. Some in spent in the mundane, like finishing edges and attaching hanging devices. And materials aren't cheap.
So what's the answer? Fewer sales, I guess. But that's ok. The purchase of art that you live with should involve thought and consideration, and recognition of its value by the price you pay. I'm not saying here that art must be expensive--but it must be valued, both by the artist and by the new owner.
Soon I will be adding the ability to purchase pieces directly from my website. I'm not convinced that will make any difference in sales, but it's worth a try. Just like etsy was.
So if there's something you've been eying on my store, act quickly.
Lately I've been working through the exercises in Jane Dunnewold (and Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan)'s new book, Finding Your Own Visual Language. One of these exercises involves carving 30 stamps in 30 days.
I used this to explore some shapes that consistently show up in my work, mainly a pointy oval that I see as a kayak shape, but which sometimes morphs into a leaf.
I am now done with the 30 days. I strayed afield on some days, developed some background stamps using similar lines to the other stamps, and discovered that the birds I've been drawing (with pen and with thread) are really the same shape with legs stuck on.
The yellow one in the corner is a rubbing on one of the stamps to see how they work.
To save money and to get something locally, I chose to use Pentel's Hi-Polymer erasers. I got them in a three pack for around $1.50 at WalMart. They measure 1" x 2.5", which was close to the aspect ratio I use on the kayak shape. They carve like butter; I used wood carving tools because that's what I had at hand, but they cut with an XActo knife quite well. I used both sides of the eraser.
So what have I accomplished in this 30 days? I saw the intersection of different icons that appeal to me. I got some cool stamps, some so-so. I reinforced the value of repeating designs with small variations, because sometimes small changes make all the differences. I see this shape everywhere. I experimented in the visual journal I kept of the process with combining different stamps going in different directions.
And where do I go from here? I have more erasers, I'm thinking of doing a series that could be used together in a tray of some sort to make a larger surface to do rubbings on. I'm thinking of doing bigger stamps. And there are more exercises in the book.
Even when I think I've made a stride or two forward in the process of being an artist, it's good to go back to basics once in a while. You never know where they'll take you.
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