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I'm still dealing with our upcoming move (including keeping an overly clean house--unlike my usual standards) and other family stuff. So I don't have a lot of time for art.
But I continue to be startled and gladdened by the family of orioles that deigns to come to my feeder. After numerous unsuccessful tries, I finally managed to get this picture of two of them this afternoon.
In their honor, and as a way to at least think about art, I've been, in spare moments, trying to figure out how to make hand felted pieces inspired by oriole nests, using the hand dyed felt I got at IQF. After a couple of attempts, I think I've figured out how to get the shape.
But then I realized I had not envisioned them beyond that point--other than felt with thick and thin spots and color variations, what was I thinking? Apparently nothing...so I'm still working out that part. I could go over the top and encrust them with threads and beads and such, but that seems so antithetical to the 'less is more' esthetic I've been cultivating lately. So I'll dither on that for a while.
And ponder this really cool tree stump/burl I found in the Hamilton City Park today:
Is that nifty or what? That texture....how to capture it in fiber....
I haven't been making much art lately. I have a really good excuse--my husband is being transferred to the Geneva, Illinois area. So I'm currently swamped with decluttering and cleaning and painting the house we have now, getting it ready to sell.
And there's also the whole sucking out of any artistic feeling thing--the idea of moving after 30 years in this area, 19 years in this house, fills up my head. But once in a while I see a glimmer of the creative force. It'll come back, I'm sure. Maybe next week while I'm sitting around waiting for a buyer, trying to keep the house spotless...I'm thinking that needle felting doesn't make such a mess, maybe I could work on that.
For marketing purposes, I have to disassemble a large part of my studio--the downside of having put it in what should be the master bedroom of this house. Goodbye design wall, boxes of fabric, ironing board. But it's all in a good cause, and things will get back to a new normal soon enough.
One of the sparks of art is kind of strange. There's a city park in Keokuk on the Mississippi River where I like to eat lunch. They have been marking dead trees in preparation of cutting them down with blue paint--the contrast of the bright sky blue paint with the peeling bark is pretty cool.
I'm thinking of manipulating the pictures and printing them on organdy. One of these days, in my new studio, whereever it is.
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.
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