Visions and Changes Therein

It was a few days before Christmas and all through the house preparations were making me tired and cranky. So when snow was predicted Thursday I envisioned a change of focus with part of a morning dedicated to a quiet session of snow dyeing.

While my newly mixed dyes cooled, I made the mistake of making what was supposed to be a quick call. On Monday night the oven refused to light in our range that is still new enough to be under a warranty and that night I was assured someone would call me back promptly to schedule repairs. Thursday I was checking why my definition of "promptly" seemed to differ from theirs. Two hours later I was still on the phone as the agent, who gets A for persistence but D for solving the problem, searched for a repair person--and as the threat of the snow turning to rain was closing my window of opportunity for enough snow to dye with.

With my stress level rising I took a deep breath and changed my vision. My quiet time all to myself changed to sharing, with the phone call becoming an annoyance instead of a destroyer. I discovered the cordless phone signal reached to the patio as one of the long pauses on hold gave me time enough to cover the fabric with snow, and, to soft strains of generic jazz (they couldn't even play Christmas music!), I poured dye on the snow mounds.

And today I have two pieces of snow-dyed fabric drying in the wind. Now snow dyeing always has an experimental zing and there is a puzzling part to this session: you will notice, above, that one of the bins is basically purple, the other black and those are the two dyes I mixed. But there is no black in either piece of fabric hanging on the line.

It simply washed away, leaving the tiny bit of purple I added to dominate and warning me that perhaps the black dye powder has lost its strength--or perhaps it was something else. They were both in the same soda ash so that is not the problem since the purple made a beautiful strongly colored piece of fabric. Something more to investigate--on a day when I can focus only on dyeing! 

(The oven is still not fixed and it may not be for at least another week.)

Merry Christmas to all of you who are looking for some focused time this busy season. May you find it--or something close enough!

OVERwhelmed

I have been feeling overwhelmed lately--by endless reports of disturbing situations and decisions that will have repercussions that may ripple down the years, impacting my grandchildren's lives--and by trying to decide what I, in my seeming powerlessness, can do about them. So I turned to doing what was in front of me. I stitched on one of my current projects.

And at lunch I picked up the latest SAQA Journal that often leaves me inspired and motivated but today I read about how mastering the art of online video helps connect you with the world and then another article on new opportunities provided by the SAQA seminar, where we can watch videos of master fiber artists, interact with other fiber artists, and even join a stitch session and the list goes on. These are all good things, things that many people have spent much time on and that make a contribution to the arts community. But I am overwhelmed again--not too much bad news but too many opportunities.

And so I asked my spouse and animal companion if they would like to go for a walk on the beach. And both thought that was a great idea.

And seeing the actual waves, instead of the metaphorical ones that threatened to crash upon me, cleared my mind and gave me my perspective back. I cannot do everything but I can do something.

Golden Thread

Outside my window the maples glow

as I add yellow stitches to yellow silk.

A New Leaf

One of my latest works began as a small piece of fabric that I had done some experimental printing on. I so liked the results of the leaf print on top of several textures that I hung it on my design wall and there it stayed for months as I focused on other larger works. Finally I decided to applique it down on a neutral background and add other colors. I had a design worked out and had chosen just the right tones to create a meaningful composition. I am being vague about what that composition would look like because the of-course-I-will-remember-this-because-it-is-so-obvious became I-haven't-a-clue-what-I-had-in-mind, after six months of working on still other projects. Even the small pile of carefully chosen fabric had disappeared as I borrowed one piece after another for those other projects and they never found their way back.

So, having hit a snag on one of those big projects one day I decided to solve the problem--again--of what to do with that fascinating but neglected little leaf. And here is what I came up with:

It's small--12 x 14 1/2"-- and it's done! Is this a better design than my original? I have no idea. It's name is Harmony, a little signature of coherence in this incoherent time.

And someday I will learn that notes and sketches are worth the effort. . . but then again maybe they are not.

Thanks for the company!

I'm linking this week with Nina's Off the Wall Friday.

People

Anyone who knows me well knows that on the introvert/extrovert scale, I fairly consistently fall toward the introvert end, but there are times when I do appreciate a good crowd, and the Abstract Artists Group of New England certainly had one last Saturday at the reception for their exhibit Edge. The Newburyport Art Association was just about filled wall to wall and that meant there were a lot of folks looking at the art, including the five pieces I had in the show.

One of those pieces Seascape is above, second from right. Once again I was pleased with how well the fiber art fit with the oils, watercolors, acrylics, and pastels. I also heard many compliments on the quality of the hanging. Twenty-one members participated so there was a wide variety of styles and mediums, but I was willing to accept one-sixth of those positive comments since there were six of us who worked very hard to create a coordinated show. And look at the sight lines that were created! Things moved easily from wall to wall. Here's a bigger view of the downstairs gallery from one perspective:

On another wall the very strong, very large piece by Jane Coder connects with Ethel Hills' and Ted Leigh's small collages:

So the six of us managed to create another work of art by committee. 

And here is a quieter wall with another of my pieces In Possibility on the far right.

Upstairs were more walls to fill, where my piece Dancing with Shadows paired nicely with one of Anika Savage's

And we had plenty of space to give some of the many small pieces our members created some breathing room:

As all exhibits must, this show comes down this afternoon. 

My Favorite Color

Cardinal Flower

Usually I just let these photos speak for themselves but there is a story behind this one. I have always loved cardinal flowers and found what I thought was the perfect spot for one when we moved to our new house. The backyard gets wetter as the tiers get closer to the pond and cardinal flowers love moist earth so I planted one. It didn't grow much the first year--as a matter of fact, it didn't grow at all, but it didn't die. It just sat there all summer but somehow over the winter it gave up and I declared it dead in the spring. 

While visiting a local plant farm, I could not resist the cardinal flower again. But when I got home and looked around, my original choice still looked like the best spot. So I decided not to learn from experience and planted it right there. What seemed to be a foolish decision was rewarded with a plant that grew two feet high and produced three catch-your-eye flower heads that give focus to all the wild vegetation around them. 

If something doesn't work out the first time, that alone does not mean it will not work if you try again. This will be helpful as I embark on yet another new experiment in fiber.

Stitching life

I began work on a new small piece as I often do by thinking about a technique I wanted to explore a bit further. I had been experimenting with lines of stitching of varying value and thickness to suggest depth and thought they might work in a landscape using some of the cheesecloth I had dyed this year. So I began securing one side of the cheesecloth with machine stitching, which also stabilized the quilt sandwich I was working on.

But then emergency rescue vehicles appeared on our street and rushed away with a neighbor who was having a massive heart attack. I spoke with his wife to see if she needed any help and she was her usual calm, take-one-thing-at-a-time self, worried but handling the situation. That evening when she returned from the hospital, I went over to help her put some things away in the yard and, after a few minutes, it was evident that her calm exterior was only an exterior.

And when I returned to my little landscape the next day, the horizon line no longer separated up from down but inner from outer.

It ended up being a rather minimalist piece and now bears the title Psyche-scape. It can of course, as all abstract pieces can, move in many directions, but that was the main theme that generated it. It will hang in the Newburyport Art Association's 8 x 8 Exhibit and is therefore wrapped around an 8 x 8" wrapped canvas, a requirement for the show.

Its theme is an obvious truism--that we often present a face to the world that has little to do with what we are experiencing or have experienced. It is something I have seen in myself again and again, but it is so easy to forget when we are looking at another person. Perhaps now that I have felt it in my fingers, I will be more likely to remember.

There is more fiber art to explore at Off the Wall Fridays, where I am linking this.

Website!

I have a website! Well, I have unofficially had a website for a while that my husband was building from scratch, which meant that not only did I have to find the time to make decisions, prepare photos, write text, but he had to find the time to manipulate them into the site. Consequently, the website had been under construction for years. A couple of weeks ago a great salesman from my website hosting company called and successfully sold me their website building services. For reasons too complicated to list, I ended up with a deadline of ten days to get a reasonable version of my website up and running. Deadlines can undercut the enjoyment of lots of other things in your life but they also mean that you get something accomplished--especially if it's something you do not find particularly fun.

Choosing how I use my time has been a constant effort for me. Since Tom and I both no longer have a work schedule determined by a larger entity, each week must be given some attention. Sometimes I just tumble through, which can be a wild success, or more often, becomes a succession of scheduling repairmen, spending too much time on Facebook/email, making shopping trips--ending in a depressing feeling that I am dribbling away my life.

To market or to create--that seems to be an easy question to answer. When I finally sit down to try to come up with some appearance of control over this finite quantity of time allotted me, uninterrupted time in my studio is way up on the list and sitting at a computer creating a website is way down near the bottom, almost as far down as cleaning closets. But yet a website, like a clean closet, has a certain usefulness, particularly when I enter a show that expects all its artists to have websites or when someone expresses an interest in buying one of my pieces but lives too far to visit in person. And, like a blog, a website provides an opportunity to reflect on work I have done and perhaps even may inspire a new path to take.

And so I now have an official website--madquilts.com. The name comes from the nickname my mother bestowed on me that seemed to fit with the crazy nature of some of my experimentations and the nature of the muse that orchestrates this passion of mine. Already it needs to be updated since several newer pieces are not on the site yet, but that will happen another day. No closets have been cleaned but I did manage enough time in the studio to finish another piece. More on that soon. And I even got a picture of (and identified--one of my priorities this summer)  an eastern pondhawk dragonfly--an eight-winged one!

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Of Stitching and Sloughs

Finding myself in an endless Slough of Despond occasioned by just one too many (twenty too many?) stories about human beings wreaking or threatening to wreak havoc on whole groups of other human beings, I sat down to stitch. Making could be a useless act at this point in time but it might just be an act of defiance in the face of all the destruction and hatred. And making does nourish my spirit, which is sorely in need of nourishment.

So instead of railing against walls and guns and governments slipping into chaos, I will focus on a little 12 x 12"piece I finished, called Spring Thaw, the time when trickles keep expanding into rivers of new life:

This is another of my textured series, with hand stitching creating those wonderful ridges and wrinkles in my hand dyed cottons and silks--lots of silk in this piece. It was supposed to be sent off to the auction benefiting SAQA but didn't make the deadline. There's always next year and  it will be useful for several other shows.

And just to reinforce my decision to return to my studio for a while, this morning I happened upon an article by Carey Dunne about a new study demonstrating that making art (even if you're not very good at it--thanks for the encouragement!) reduces stress hormones in most people. This may not help a family trying to flee Syria but it might help those of us who are trying to find a way to help.

Examining a bit of life

"Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things." This quotation by Georgia O'Keeffe that accompanied one of her memorable minimalist paintings, Gray Wash Forms, was only one of many elements of my day at the Museum of Fine Arts that I wanted to think more about.

Abstraction is a different way of seeing, a clear contribution that art can provide to our figuring out why we are here and how we are connected. Her piece and accompanying quote were in a paired exhibit with the galleries focused on the work of Lawren Harris, each of whose paintings of the Arctic and northern Canada exemplifies O'Keeffe's statement. The one that held me the longest was Pic Island, an embodiment of eternal serenity and mystery.

But as I thought about the day I realized O'Keeffe missed an aspect of abstraction that can also contribute to getting at the real meaning of things. Repetition offers a way of focusing, of noticing that a single image cannot. Megacities, a new major exhibit at the MFA, includes the works of eleven artists responding to conditions in the major cities of Asia, and I kept saying Wow as I wondered through the main gallery of the exhibit. Here is Take Off Your Shoes and Wash Your Hands by Subodh Gupta of Delhi, a wall of stainless steel kitchenware so shiny that the light creates even more patterns. 

And pattern is the point here. The repetition of similarly set up squares reminded me of the history of my own medium--quilt blocks, and the fact that these dinnerware "blocks" are similar but not identical keeps your eye moving, changes the rhythm that it sets up just slightly enough to keep you looking and looking closely. But the overall feel is multitude, of closeness that can be comfortable or uncomfortable. 

My favorite piece was another wall:

For Build me a nest so I can rest, Hema Upadhyay painted commercially produced bird forms to capture an amazing variety of bird species. I found no duplicates while I was looking although perhaps there may have been some. Here again the similar but not identical repetition sets up a rhythm further emphasized by the strip of paper each bird holds in its beak with a small bit of a long quotation written on each strip. It begins: "They will never be the same again because you can never be the same again once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. What you end up remembering isn't the same as what you have witnessed. . . ." The strips suggest a wave uniting the individual elements. The theme here appears to be migration in all its forms but particularly of the move to an intensely urban area like Mumbai, where the artist lived.

In among all the seriousness was the pure fun of Tech Styles: how the fusion of technology and fashion can produce such pieces as the 3D printed spiral dress.

The day ended with an all too brief visit to the museum's Zen garden, a discovery that I made on this visit and that is open only during the warmer months of the year. The peace is palpable as you enter. Can what we see, can what we surround ourselves with make such a difference? Lawren Harris certainly thought so.

And peace to those of you who have been on this ramble with me. Thanks for the company!

Indisputably Uncertain

I have launched into a new series, conceived when I felt I could no longer stand the stridency of today's rhetoric. Reasoned argumentation and thoughtful questioning have given way to name-calling and belittling. Our genetic desire for certainty and our tendency to follow someone who simply asserts he has found the Truth works against the reality of the uncertainty of our lives. And so I decided I could either hide under a pile of blankets until things got better or I could work out my frustrations by creating pieces that celebrated uncertainty, reminding myself of the need to question, of the fact that I can never be absolutely sure that the next step I am taking on the path is in the right direction. It's always a judgement call, but take that next step anyway.

So here is a piece I have named "I Dwell in Possibility":

I also got the opportunity to try out a new technique. (Does this make me an opportunist?--an equally annoying type these days.) I had experimented with dyeing some cheese cloth and I loved how it soaked up the color and this seemed an ideal piece to use it on. I wanted to attach it to the background so that it would maintain its freeform shape and texture and felt that fusing it would reduce this effect. So I handstitched the cheescloth to the top layer with a fine matching thread making sure the stitches were invisible but the shapes were securely attached.

I do admit that any abstract piece could potentially fit this series since abstraction by its very nature, a nature I have grown to love, opens itself to many interpretations. And while I was nearing the finishing of this piece I came across a review of an abstract art show at FiveMyles in Brooklyn by Alexis Clements, who says all this much more eloquently than I have done: "The paring down, the removal of a prescriptive dogma or interpretation, allows the viewer to explore on their own. It is a highly personal experience. . . . And at a time when haranguing proclamations and categorical insistence seem to be everywhere, stepping however briefly into a space of not knowing, into an acknowledgment of uncertainty or at least curious exploration, feels like a cool drink of water."

I may have explained away this piece--which is just 16 x 21 inches. Perhaps you should just ignore my strident rhetoric and make of it what you will--something a viewer of abstract art does as a matter of course. Anyway, thanks for the company!

Experimenting with Tradition

I don't remember how the tradition began but for years I have made my husband a small quilt for Valentine's Day. It's an opportunity to connect with something memorable from the year, as in 2014 with our new experience of frequent walks on the beach, or to try out a new technique. This year I found myself with a pile of Thermofaxes I had created and had not yet tried out. Several of the screens had text on them not because I wanted to make little samplers of wise words but I thought I could play with making text a design element.  So here is my 2016 Valentine (you can click on it to make it bigger):

It's a quote that resonates with many conversations we have been having, and layering echoes the text. I am not sure how successful it is--the text is still a bit more central than I would like-- but I got to play with three different screens as well as photoshopping and printing the three repetitions of "Emerson," the source of the quotation. I also attached the raw edge applique with large French knots, a kind of short cut way to use hand stitching that works better than I thought. It's 16 x 11", not as small as my more recent Valentine creations.

For some reason last year I did not post the tiny Valentine I made for Tom--perhaps we were too busy shoveling whatever part of our seven feet of snow had by mid-February. So here is Cardinal in the Snow in honor of the blizzards of 2015:

It is only 4 x 6" and was an experiment of sorts since the background was a lighter paint printed on a bit darker fabric.

And now I must return to the real snow that must be shoveled once again.

Insight

Okay. So I have to admit that I, like so many other people, am reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. I am not sure why I feel a bit guilty about admitting that, other than I was worried when I put it on hold at the library that it was yet another overpopularized and underresearched rah-rah self-help book, telling you that you are wonderful just the way you are if only you would believe in yourself. While there are a few echoes of that attitude in the book, it does say a number of things that I need to hear, particularly about perfectionism and how it is different from striving for excellence.

And I discovered another aha! moment. I had been getting frustrated that I was not spending enough time in my studio and had always been impressed with those artists/quilters who start working at the crack of dawn before breakfast, perhaps break for a piece of toast and then keep on going. These are the people who seem to have the great blogs, the full teaching schedules, the prize-winning work.

But I, slug that I am, often don't get to my studio until 10 am and my plan had been to sit down with my husband at dinner that night and talk about how I could get to my studio earlier. Then I read Brown's description of the two alternatives to handling anxiety and stress: those who tried to assuage the anxiety by, for example, wedging more work into the day (making phone calls while waiting at red lights or while checking out at a store) or those who addressed anxiety "at the root by aligning their lives with their values and setting boundaries."

So I began to look at what I valued. Aside from getting work done, whether that is stitching, planning, or dyeing, I do value sleep but I am usually up before 7 (sorry, 5 AM is not going to work for me), and I also value healthy food, time with my husband and my crazy Goldendoodle, and yoga stretches that keep my joints moving and my shoulders and hands able to do hand stitching. Getting to my studio earlier would mean giving up a long walk with Terra, some fruit-filled hot oatmeal shared with Tom, and those vital stretches. I was beginning to think this was not worth it but decided to give it a try, shifting the walk to the afternoon, the stretches to before lunch,and the breakfast eaten after I had worked for a while.

The afternoon walk was fine on this day but there would have been time for only a short walk, and I realized as I got ready for bed that I had gotten so involved in my work that I never took time for the stretches. This morning I went back to the old schedule, but I did not begin working  (at 10:30 am! because of an extra long walk) berating myself about getting to work so late. I felt energized by my morning tasks--and actually got more work done by lunchtime than I had with the extra hour or so on my experimental morning. Just as my work doesn't need to look like all those big name quilters, my schedule doesn't need to either.

And, while I am not sure why anyone would still be reading this long post, if you are, thanks for the company.

Word Play

Last week was full of art. Well, every week is full of art, but this was other  people's art--at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. And both have set my mind moving is a variety of directions that I want to record--so you will be hearing about those directions as well.

Black Mountain College in North Carolina was the scene of an incredible stew of artistic talent in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that included Rauschenberg, Twombly, the de Koonings, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. An exhibit at the ICA does an admirable job of recreating that feeling of so many people pushing the limits of their art and gaining inspiration from all the ideas and works in progress surrounding them.

I went to the exhibit expecting to see a lot of abstract paintings but didn't realize that one of the major artists there was Anni Albers, a weaver, who just happened to be married to Josef Albers. Unfortunately, her beautiful textiles were displayed under glass so that the textures were not as exposed and photos were exercises in frustration as reflections were always part of the picture. But I will share a few anyway.

Large weaving based on ancient Mexican ruins

Detail of weaving on left

Nigel's Weaving (small)

Cityscape (small)

An exquisite untitled watercolor by Ray Johnson shows how he used both Anni's weavings and the color theory taught by Josef. (The white dots are, alas, reflections of lights across the room.)








On one of the walls of the exhibit in large letters was the word "Haptic." Now this was a word I discovered a number of years ago and was planning a blog post about that must have never gotten itself completed. Here is the description the ICA provided:


      . . .If any description can encompass the whole of the Black Mountain aesthetic, it might the
      haptic, as opposed to the purely optical. Defined as "relating to the sense of touch," the
      haptic in art refers to works that appeal to touch through the selection of materials,
      the process of making, and the bodily engagement of the maker. Haptic objects
      intertwine visuality and tactility so thoroughly that they are inseparable.

And there you have a description of textile art. I like that idea of intertwining the visual and the tactile--and hope I can remember it when I am called upon to say something wise about the work I do.

And thanks for the company!