Great and not-so-great minds 2

Imagine my surprise when I saw a recent article in Hyperallergic in my email, with this feature image:

It's a lithograph by Anni Albers, whom I have always known as primarily a fiber artist.  And indeed, doesn't that mottled background remind you of any number of dye jobs you yourself have done in your fiber art career?  It looked  like some of my experiments with walnut ink.

But what really struck me was the tangled-cord motif.  Which looked exactly like one of my favorite subjects from my year of daily drawing. 

So I guess the only artistic difference between Anni Albers and me is that she had the good sense to combine her tangles with her mottles, and make lithographs.  And probably a couple of other things.

And that got me to thinking of another déjà vu moment when I saw my own reflection in a famous artist's work.  Coincidentally, that famous artist was none other than Anni's husband Josef Albers! 

(If you're interested in Albers' printmaking, check out the online exhibit of the current show that Hyperallergic was talking about.  It also features prints by another artist who is primarily known for her fiber work, Ruth Asawa.)

Drawing update -- stealing from my blog friends 2

I wrote earlier this week about stealing ideas and images from other people's blogs to jump-start my daily drawing, a practice which I heartily recommend.  Here's another example.

I had the pleasure of meeting an internet friend, Lisa Flowers Ross, in person last month when we were in Idaho.  She was telling me about an online painting class she was taking in which she had to make many, many small paintings every week to try out different approaches and "recipes."  After I came home I kept checking her blog to see what she was painting.

One day she posted this painting among several others exploring black and white.  The assignment was to get as much variety as possible into each piece, without worrying about balance, unity or resolution.

For some reason, this painting called out to me.  I left a comment on Lisa's blog saying that it looked to me like a bowl and a vase on a table.  And since I hadn't done my daily drawing yet, and my sketchbook was within reach of the computer, I grabbed a pen and drew my version of the image.

To  me the pattern on Lisa's "bowl" looked like a star map, so that's what I drew more explicitly on my version.

I reworked the image several times in my drawings, sometimes connecting the patterns on the dishes with the tablecloth or the view out the window.

In the second half of the year I have been shying away from drawing objects from life in favor of imaginary scenes, and this particular combination of objects has really struck a chord.  I like making the wobbly pottery and messing with the perspective; it makes me feel more like an artist than a draftsman. 

So thank you Lisa!   

Drawing update -- stealing from my blog friends 1

I'm a great believer in stealing ideas from other artists, and have been doing it enthusiastically in my daily drawing project this year.  When you need to do a different drawing every day, it's good to get an injection of fresh subject matter every now and then.  And when you're doing it every day, it doesn't take long for the original stolen image to morph into your own work.  (That's why I encourage others to steal my ideas too -- let's pass along every jolt of creativity we possibly can.)

Many of my best stolen ideas come from my blog friends, such as the Adam-and-Eve theme I got from Margaret Cooter's blog earlier this year.  And I have stolen another idea from her: the "travel lines" that you get by sitting in a bus, car, train or plane and letting the bumps of the journey make interesting lines on your page.  (Check out Margaret's travel lines here.)

This fall I've been doing travel lines as my daily drawing whenever I find myself in the passenger seat.  I've been blessed with smooth flights recently so my airplane lines aren't all that interesting, except for some big bumps upon landing.

My car rides have been a bit more eventful, at least to look at my sketchbook.

Thanks, Margaret, for a great idea, and happy travels.

You can look at all my daily drawings here.

Adam and Eve 3

I'm not sure why Eve is resisting arrest; I can't seem to get a figure that works.

The version I copied from somebody else's print had wide hips and thighs but virtually no shoulders or upper body.  I drew that several times but I didn't like her legs; it looked like she was wearing pants.



So I tapered her calves and ankles to almost nothing; the poor thing could barely stand up.
 


Sometimes she was pregnant.



As with Adam, on the occasions when I let facial features slip into the drawing I generally regretted it immediately.

I can't decide whether I want her to be a massively swollen fertility presence like the Venus of Willendorf, or a curvy cutie. Can't decide whether the breasts or the hips are the female archetype I want to emphasize.  I guess I'll just have to keep drawing her until she reveals her true nature to me.

Adam and Eve 2

For some reason, I'm finding it much easier to draw Adam than Eve.  The wide shoulders from the original stolen idea seem to always be there, but I've experimented with other small variations in the figure.

Sometimes he has a nose.



Sometimes he's missing a rib.



Lately he seems to have arms more often than not.



Occasionally he has a hint of other facial features, but I'm usually sorry I did that, so I try not to do it again.



I'll show you some Eves in my next post.

You can see all my daily drawings HERE.

Adam and Eve 1

A few weeks ago I wrote about a little book that I made with words clipped from the newspaper.  My dear internet friend Margaret Cooter left a comment on that post saying "I am fighting hard against the idea of stealing this idea."  I subsequently wrote a post encouraging anybody to steal my idea, or any of my ideas.

But I really got a laugh out of Margaret's comment about stealing ideas, because a few days earlier I had stolen an idea from HER blog.

She was writing about a printmaking class she took, and showed work from other students in the class, including this print.  For some reason, the gray ghost images called out to me.

My sketchbook happened to be within arm's reach of my computer, so I pretty much copied the figures for my daily drawing.  Before I had finished, I realized two things: that I saw these people as Adam and Eve, and that I was so taken by them that I would be drawing them over and over.

That first Adam and Eve was on August 18, and I've been drawing them exclusively for more than a month now, with no end in sight.

This sudden love affair is surprising me.  I have never had much desire to represent the human form in any medium, and I struggle in my monthly session in which we draw from a live model.  But something about these primitive figures, with no arms and no features, made me think I could draw them without fear of them looking stupid.

Since then I've been experimenting with every different pencil in my box, trying to achieve different effects of shading and outline.  I haven't varied the forms much but often the figures want to be much bigger than the page.

Sometimes I draw only one of the figures; I'll show you some of them in my next post.

Meanwhile, back to the original thought: stealing ideas.  I don't think there is such a thing.

Ideas are out there in the cosmos, circling around our heads in a huge swarm.  If one chooses to sting you and infect you with its virus, you're no less sick because that same idea bit somebody else last week.

Finding the connections

I've been writing about my daily drawing adventures for a couple of weeks, and finished up that thread on Monday with the remark, "And now that I've brought you up to date, I promise to write about fiber art for a while, not drawing."

Then someone left a comment, "You say drawing and fiber art like they have no connection with each other."

So let me defend my remark.  First off, what are we talking about?  To me, "fiber art" means my serious work in quilting and other fiber formats; work that I would enter in shows or want to be in my career retrospective.  I think I'm pretty accomplished in these formats: I can often get into the good shows, maybe even win a prize, I can teach and write books about this line of work.

In addition to my serious fiber work, I always have some side projects going that don't rise to that level of importance or achievement.  Specifically, every year I do a daily art project, often chosen as a way to force myself to try something new and unfamiliar.  I did two years of daily photography and three years of daily collage.  In both cases my initial apprehension and inexperience gave way through practice to better technique, a better eye, a personal style, but I can't say that they had any influence on my fiber art, or vice versa.

For many people, of course, there's a big connection between drawing and fiber art.  Lots of fiber artists use drawing as an integral part of their serious work, such as these two examples from Quilt National '15, where the quilted line forms the image.

Paula Kovarik, Insomnia: His and Hers  (detail)

Brigitte Kopp, On Her Road To... (detail)

I don't think that's going to happen in my own work; I'm going down a very different road these days.  I admit that a few times in my daily drawing I've used curvy lines that greatly resemble a particular quilting style that I used to do a lot, but I didn't feel the patter of little feet migrating from one medium to the other.

That said, I know that it often takes a long time for the artist to recognize connections in her own work, perhaps not until an outside observer points them out.  I used to think that my "postage stamp" quilts and my standard-format quilts were two entirely different bodies of work, until somebody commented that they're both little bits held together by fragile bonds.  Head slap / of course!!!

Kathleen Loomis, Postage 2: Regatta (detail)

Kathleen Loomis, Crazed 8: Incarceration (detail)

I have also noticed commonalities among my different approaches, such as the way text keeps creeping in despite my alleged attempts to keep it out.  That certainly happened in my quilts, again during the three years of daily collage and it may be wanting to occur in my daily drawings.

And I also see a recurring theme between my "tangle" drawings and my 3-D knotted constructions, although the sketchbook knots are a whole lot looser than those in real life.  I guess they too are fragile bonds barely holding things together.

Kathleen Loomis, Infusions (detail)

So are there connections between drawing and fiber art?  At this point, for me, I would say not many.  But who knows what might develop -- or what I might come to recognize -- in the future.

Drawing progress report 8 -- the roads become tangles

Previously on Art With a Needle....

My daily art drawings started to organize themselves into series as I deliberately explored various styles of abstract, doodle-like approaches.  I realized that I love to work in ink, and fastened on the finest Micron pen as my tool of choice.  I realized that "roads" made of two closely spaced lines were a favorite and recurring motif.

I had been making maplike drawings with lots of details such as rivers, beaches, mountain ranges and variously textured fields.  But one night I drew just roads, and they started to tangle up in the middle of the page.



Clearly a direction that I had to pursue! On subsequent days, the tangles started to fill more of the page and become more complicated.  And when one road met another, it would go over or under it like a freeway, not make a grade-crossing intersection.



If you draw a road across the entire page, then fill in with more and more roads, the first one will always appear "on top" because later roads will have to stop and "go underneath" to cross the first one.  So to make a more tangled-together or woven effect, you need to leave spaces in your early roads for subsequent roads to "go over."  Here's what a drawing looks like in the earliest stages:

I wasn't thinking of these as roads any more; now they looked more like threads or yarns.  How many times in my long career as a sewist have I had to untangle piles of thread or yarn that look just like this!



You can check out all my daily drawings at my daily art blog HERE and see what has happened with this approach in the last month.  The only problem was that I discovered that it was taking me two or three hours to make these very detailed tangles, and that's a lot more time than I am willing to invest in daily art.  So I decided I had to ration myself: tangles on days when I could draw while visiting with other people or watching TV, less detailed drawings (or smaller tangles) on days when I was working alone.  I had a blissful week of tangles recently during a family vacation, and could sit overlooking the lake, draw and talk all day!

And now that I've brought you up to date, I promise to write about fiber art for a while, not drawing.

Drawing progress report 7 -- maps

Continuing with the combination of thin wash with fine ink lines, I started drawing maps.  Sometimes the wide wash made roads, other times rivers and lakes.  I would outline the wash areas with lines, then enjoyed putting in more details with the pen.  Always experimenting with different kinds of shapes and different kinds of marks to fill in the shapes.



Working in series felt good, as I discarded approaches that didn't work so well and continued to practice approaches that did.



But no matter what else ended up on the page, I almost always had "roads" made of two closely spaced pen lines.  That seemed to be a style that I did naturally.  I like the way the road isn't always of uniform width, because the lines aren't perfectly straight and the bumps don't always correspond.

I found myself going into zen state when I would draw the roads.  Sometimes I would deliberately hold the pen way up at its top end to introduce some uncontrolled jitters into the line.  I almost always finished my daily map drawing with a tinge of regret because I didn't want to stop drawing those roads.

Fortunately I realized what was going on and decided to let the roads keep going on and on.  Tomorrow I'll show you what happened then.

Drawing progress report 6 -- start with a wash

In mid-May I was drawing at my desk and noticed a bottle of brown india ink lurking behind some other stuff.  I think I had been tidying up and the ink was newly visible to the naked eye, and it called to me.  I grabbed a brush and made a loose circular form, then doodled around it with my 005 Micron pen.

Even though the ink was not behaving very well -- it had globs of pigment instead of a smooth solution -- I liked what was happening, especially the contrast between the light wash and the black ink lines.  I experimented with this approach for a week or more.

In lieu of laying down the colored ink with a brush, I tried drawing curves with the tip of the eye dropper.  I liked that even more. (The curves reminded me of free-motion quilting.)



I was experimenting with different kinds of doodles around the edges and was particularly taken with the curves and shapes drawn with two parallel lines, as in the sketch below.  The second line gave more weight and made the mark more visible, but still had the delicacy of the very fine pen point.

 

I was happy with these drawings; again, I felt that I was developing my own ideas instead of just randomly drawing whatever showed up on the table.

Drawing progress report 5 -- doodle buildings

My second sketchbook for the daily art project had brown paper, and I quickly learned that pencil didn't show up very well.  So I started using either a Sharpie or a fat Micron pen.  During a boring meeting in early April I found myself doodling buildings or blocks with distorted perspective and slots or holes cut into the sides.  After a while I realized that I should be working in my sketchbook instead of on the edge of my agenda.

I drew buildings for a couple of weeks, realizing that I liked going back to the same concept over and over.  Each day's drawing seemed to come naturally from the previous day's; I tweaked the concept, experimented with different methods and densities of shading, came up with new ways to draw holes and slots in the buildings, tried different vantage points.  Some days the perspective was very distorted, other days it was more realistic.

I got the same familiar buzz out of working in series that I have always felt when my quilts are in a groove. And most important, I felt for the first time that I was working from my own imagination, finding my own voice and refining my style by drawing the same subjects over and over.

Then I ran out of pages in my brown-paper sketchbook and stopped doing doodle buildings.  With a new white sketchbook I thought it would be exhilarating to go back to pencil and try something different.  But I floundered.

---

Update: linking this post to Nina-Marie's blog -- check it out to see what other fiber artists have been up to this week.