Last week on Art With a Needle

Two weeks ago Idaho left a comment on my blog about doing research before purchasing new stuff and I responded by saying how I know I should do that, but I find it hard -- my inclination is always to dive right in and learn by doing, even if that brings missteps.  Last week Idaho commented, "My art group is split between those who just go for it and those who dip toes in cautiously after gathering lots of info...  Info gathering can often be seen as procrastinating, and that can be true -- If I find just one more relevant piece of info I'll be confident enough to give it a go -- that sort of thing.  I DO find myself doing that and have to suck it up and proceed to diving in!"

That made me remember one of the most commented-upon blog posts that I ever wrote, in 2011, about a writing teacher who divided people into two groups: planners and plungers.  If you're a planner, you're big on writing outlines, filling sketchbooks, making diagrams and templates before you get to work on the actual product.  If you're a plunger, you dive right in and start working.  If the teacher makes you turn in an outline before the paper is due, you write the paper first and then write the outline.  Maybe you'll have some false starts and sections destined for the trash can, real or virtual, but working is how you figure out what is it you want to say, what it is you want to make. 

I re-read that post just now, including the comments that many people left on it, and it did me good.  Made me realize, again, that you have to figure out how your brain operates and then develop work habits that go with that rather than fight it. 

Shannon suggested that if I'm trying to do calligraphy that's more-like-art-less-like-letters I should look at Arabic script.  "I frequently find it exquisite, and as a non-Arabic speaker I'm drawn to it simply for the artistic forms," she wrote.  Shannon, you are absolutely right, and in fact it was seeing the work of Golnaz Fathi, a wonderful Iranian artist who makes art from Arabic script that helped me decide to do calligraphy as my daily art this year. 

Golnaz Fathi

I am so glad that you reminded me of looking to Arabic as an inspiration, because it's been on my to-do list since I made this decision.  I promise to start something this week, and I'll show you what I come up with.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week:

Frustration with technology

Yes, I get frustrated with technology sometimes, but that's not what I'm crabby about today.

Today I'm crabby about other people's technology skills -- or rather, their lack of same.

My local fiber and textile art group is getting ready for a show and we want to prepare a gallery notebook with information on each piece in the show.  We have asked members to submit the info and a photo of their artwork; I'm in charge of compiling the info for the notebook.  I want the notebook to look professional, so I want to copy everybody's information into a single document and make sure it's all formatted the same.

We thought it would be easy -- provide a form in a Word document that people would fill out (so all the information would be there in the right order to be copied and pasted into my document), give directions for submitting the photo (don't have to crop or resize, just send us the image straight from the camera).  But it's not.

We are surrounded with technology, everybody with her various devices and connections, and yet to judge from the responses to our call for entries, a lot of people cannot use them for what I consider to be ordinary activities.  They can't figure out how to get a cellphone photo attached to their entry form.  They don't know how to tell whether their photo has been saved as a .jpg or a .dat file. They don't notice that their computer automatically resizes photos to a handful of pixels when sending email.  They send their info in a Pages document or a PDF instead of a Word document.  They don't have Word on their computers and can't open or can't fill in a document.  They don't know how to work around by typing their info into an email.

I know I'm a curmudgeon, and I know I'm way more dedicated to the written and printed word than most people are.  But I worry that ordinary, everyday capabilities that every educated person used to have are now endangered, washed away in the flood of cellphones and tablets and Facebook and Instagram.  The tech industry has enabled this by equipping many smaller devices with alternative programs, perhaps easier to use for minimal tasks but incompatible with the grownup programs like Word on which the business world operates.  And people who own these smaller devices often retire their actual computers, on which grownup business tasks would be much easier.  Meanwhile, the proprietors of grownup programs discourage people from using them, by charging continuing user fees instead of allowing people to buy the programs outright.

As a result, people can easily do minimal things on their phones or tablets, but they can't produce any kind of work that is compatible with the grownup world.  Is this progress?  What do people use when they have to write a letter?  (Do people write letters any more?)  What do they do if they need to print out a biography or an artist statement or a page for a gallery notebook?  What if they are asked to give a presentation to a group?  How do they keep track of their artwork and their show entries?

And I try not to even think about how the "informality" of text and email, plus the "convenience" of voice-recognition dictation, has turned us into a nation of inarticulate, ungrammatical misspellers who never think to proofread before they hit the send button.

I try to be tolerant of people who feel overwhelmed by learning new tasks, particularly older people like myself.  There are tech tasks that I have resisted, preferring to play dumb and hope my kids will step in and do it for me.  But if you want to participate in a serious art activity and can't do things on a computer to enable you to enter a show or take good photos or whatever, then I think you should find a friend or hire a geek to help you.

Now back to retyping my gallery notebook, since I can't copy and paste from what people have sent me.

In the dictionary

Artist mis-statements

I did some volunteer work last week, proofreading the catalog for the Surface Design Association's big show at Arrowmont this fall.  Based on what I read -- I saw only the words, not the pictures -- it looks like a great show and I will make sure that I see it in person.

My marching orders as a proofreader were to be flexible; "We would like to keep this as close to each artist's voice as possible," I was told.  If people spelled it "colour" or used varying degrees of formality, that was OK.  But I did flag misspellings (Minnesotta, anyone?) and outright grammatical errors.

I wasn't expecting to find as many grammatical errors as I did.  But what really surprised me was that almost all the errors were the same thing: subjects and verbs did not agree.  Would you believe that eight of the 91 artists committed this mistake?

I'll take off my proofreader's hat and put on my writing teacher's hat.  The reason educated people writing about serious subjects commit subject/verb errors is usually because their sentences are way too long and are way too grammatically complex.  Educated people don't write "the interplay determine how the work will look in the end."  But they might very well write -- and in fact, somebody did --  "the interplay of disparate materials, of concept and making, and certainly emotion determine how the work will look in its ultimate incarnation."  There is so much padding in that sentence that by the time you get to the verb you've forgotten that the subject is "interplay," requiring a singular verb, not "materials, concept, making and emotion," which would require a plural verb were it the subject.

(And if you were to take another step back, what does that sentence mean?  The idea, the emotion, the materials and the technique all influence the art.  Well duh.) 

I challenge you to look at your own artist statement.  Parse it for grammar.  Do not count on spell check to find your typos -- spell check is perfectly fine with a "limited addition" of prints, and can't tell the difference between "its" and it's."

Then read your statement for sense.  Don't waste a lot of long, pretentious words telling us something that means nothing.  Think about what we, the audience, should know about you and your work.  Tell us something that will make us appreciate your work better, not something that will put us to sleep.

The artist statement -- TMI?

Recently I caught an exhibit at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany IN (through April 5) that I liked a lot.  It featured two artists who make art out of found objects, aka junk.  Since I like to make this kind of art too, I figured I would enjoy it, and I did.  But my good art friend went to the show before I did and reported back that she was disappointed with one of the artists, R. Michael Wimmer, who makes large assemblages.

Not particularly in the art, if I'm properly representing her opinion, but in the fact that she thought you wouldn't know what the pieces were about without reading the artist statements on the wall.  Without the explanations, she thought, the arrays of different objects looked like so much random stuff.

And yes, the statements were quite detailed explanations of what each element meant to the artist.  I'll show you a couple of examples.

Part of me appreciated the detailed artist statements.  How many times have you looked at a work of art, fixed in on some detail and wondered what on earth that means?  In some ways it was nice to have the explanations, almost as if the artist were standing there answering your questions.

But part of me wished for a bit more mystery.  Maybe I would have enjoyed attaching my own memories and associations to these odd figures and artifacts.  The titles would have given me a clue, and perhaps that would have been enough to point me in the right direction without hitting me over the head.  Or at least the detailed explanations might have been put in a notebook on the other side of the room, so I could look first and be explained to later, if I wanted.

Now I'll show you some of Wimmer's other works, without the explanations.  You decide whether you like the art better with or without.

Audubon's Habitat

A Child's Dream, A Mother's Nightmare (details below)

Winter Springs No. 5

So what's your opinion?  Do you like artist statements that explain what everything means?  Or do you like the minimalist approach where it's the artist's job to make the art and your job to interpret it?

Light at the end of the tunnel

My father wrote more than 30 books in his lifetime, many of which I helped with when I still lived at home.  In those pre-computer days every book had to be typed at least twice (not counting the author actually writing it) and that job went either to me or my mother.  It also had to be proofread (my specialty; I tried to do that job even after I moved away).  At the very end came indexing: a two-person job at first as Dad called out the items and I wrote down the page numbers, then it reverted to me to compile and alphabetize the results.

As a result, I know a bit about the pressures of getting a book actually finished.  It often seems as though the last 2 percent takes as long as the first 98.  But the book I'm laboring to finish right now is unlike anything Dad and I ever tackled.

Because this one needs pictures.  Sure, Dad's books had pictures, but they were acquired the old-fashioned way, by finding an image somewhere and having the publisher get permission to reproduce it.  Mine are acquired the hard way, by sewing a quilt and taking photos of every step.  And this is REALLY the hard way, because I take my own photos, and taking a decent instructional photo of yourself sewing is tricky.  Among other things, you can only have one hand in the picture!

My friend Marti served as hand model for this tutorial on rotary cutting.

I thought I was pretty much done a month ago when I sent off a reorganized draft.  I had given lots of info about almost every phase of piecing a quilt top: how to cut, how to sew, how to press, how to join the blocks.  Also material on finishing your quilt: blocking, squaring up, trimming, applying a binding or facing, making and attaching a sleeve.

Notice anything missing there?  Right, nothing on quilting.  I had fervently hoped to not discuss this subject; after all, it's supposed to be a book on making quilts without using somebody else's patterns.  At the first, I hadn't expected to make this a technique book at all, just focus on design.  But the few helpful hints I threw in seemed to take on lives of their own, expanding into fullblown instructions.

Damn, guess I have to write about quilting after all, to make the story complete.  I have plenty of photo tutorials in the bag about straight-line quilting with a walking foot, but nothing about free-motion.  So here I am doing one last quilt (I hope!!) to illustrate all the steps of sandwiching, quilting and trimming.

Am I almost finished?????  I really hope that light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train.


Update:  I'm linking this to Nina-Marie's blog; visit her to see what other fiber artists have been doing this week.

Writing the artist bio

Yesterday the Quiltart list was talking about artspeak (we disapprove -- nobody knows what you're talking about) and somebody asked about how to write an artist bio without reverting to artspeak.

Since I spent my entire career writing for pay, I have lots of ideas on how to write things.  Here's my advice on artist bios:

Should you use first person or third?  One advantage of third is that a common use of the web bio is for other people -- such as a guild who has engaged you as a speaker -- to copy for their newsletter or flyers.  One advantage of first is that you may come across as more accessible and friendly to people who visit your site.  If you're writing a bio to be given to gallery visitors or included in a catalog, third is probably best.  

Which situation seems to be more important or more common to you?  It depends on how you plan to use the bio and what you think is going to happen as a result of it.  And remember that you can have different bios for different purposes.  For instance, you might write your bio differently to post on your website than to submit to a magazine to accompany an article.

How long should a bio be?  I have a hard time thinking of anybody so fascinating that we really need to know more than a paragraph about her life -- at least at first glance.  Sure, once I get to know you I might be really interested in your college career or your cats or your children or your world travels, but the casual observer probably isn't.  Choose the details of your life that are (a) most different from the ordinary and/or (b) most relevant to your art.  Omit others.

I recently read a blog from a professional gallery owner/art dealer suggesting that the artist bio is a strong selling tool, that buyers are more likely to connect emotionally with artists who have compelling stories.  This guy thinks a bio should run from three to ten pages.  I respectfully think this is ridiculous.  Life is short.  Attention spans are even shorter.  I have a hard time thinking that potential buyers are going to go home, fix a martini and read ten pages of your bio before calling the gallery back to read them their credit card number.  Maybe people are willing to make this investment of time before they invest five or more figures worth of money, but not in the art quilt portion of the art world.  

Besides, what can you possibly say about yourself that will go on for three to ten pages?  Your SAT scores and GPA?  Every guy you ever dated?  Your favorite books, movies and vegetables?  Your net worth and investment profile?  If you have the world's most melodramatic life story, then go a bit longer, but for most of us ordinary people, a page is plenty long.  Probably too long.

In writing an artist bio there's a fine line between putting forth your accomplishments and appearing to be boastful.  If your art quilt hangs in the Museum of Modern Art or the Oval Office or went to the space station on a shuttle, by all means mention that in your bio.  If you got into Quilt National 10 times, mention it.  But if you recently had work in a group show at the Caterpillar dealership in West Podunk, leave it out -- along with the 28 other shows you recently had work in.  It's fine to memorialize all the shows and exhibits in your lifetime, but do it on a separate page on your website or in a separate document called the resume.

Above all, don't use artspeak unless you are represented by Larry Gagosian (and if you are, he'll probably have some high-priced ghost writer do the bio for you).  Pretend you are talking to a friend of a friend, somebody you've just met.  Use the kind of words you would use in speaking to a well-educated but ordinary person.  Never use a word you have found in a thesaurus or have had to look up in the dictionary (except to check on the spelling). 

And when in doubt, tone it down.  It's better to present yourself in a modest manner and allow people to be pleasantly surprised by how wonderful you are than vice versa.

Found poetry 3

I've written before about my practice of "finding" haiku on the printed page, and art form that is satisfying to me because it combines visual art with the written word.  I had the chance to use this practice in a challenge project with my local fiber and textile art group.

Seems that one of our members is active in her Friends of the Library group.  Several months ago that group was given 16 large boxes of romance novels, and after disposing of many of them at book sales, simply couldn't even give them away any more.  So the remainder came to our textile art group and we held a challenge to make art out of the books.  Last week we had the great revelation.

I decided to find haiku in the book to make a reader's digest version of the novel, and pasted them into a book I made using various stamps and stencils with acrylic paint. 

Here's the first page, which was also the first page of the book -- you will notice that it didn't take long for our heroine to start losing her clothes.

I won't show you every page, but will give you the full text:

stripped down to her slip
her rented car.  It was hot...
taken a wrong fork


Like a black panther,
energy to stalk his prey.
the danger in him


hard against the bed
his scent... the scent of danger
Why don't you lie down


What are you  hiding?
swept her up against his chest,
muscles of his chest


outrageous passion.
wrapping like satin barbed-wire
her widening thighs


like a scream of pain
She drew a breath on a sob.
Do you even care?


the unspoken pain
she didn't yet comprehend.
A tingling began


Your beautiful skin
creamy velvet all over.
he had studied her


breath caught in her throat
Falling in love at my age
want to marry you,

Lots of fun with this project!   The only drawback was having to read the novels in the first place.  It was kind of like watching a snake eat a bunny rabbit -- so awful that you can't look away.  Do romance writers think that women are attracted to men who treat them like dirt and regard rape as a logical, if frowned-upon, courtship tactic?  Apparently, since they publish over 7,000 romance novels every year.  Even in the readers digest version it would be difficult for me to get through many of them.

Stolen words

After I wrote about doing "found poetry," Valerie Kamikubo commented: "I know another person who sometimes writes poetry (she calls them 'stolen words') from the first phrases of blogs."

Don't you love that phrase "stolen words"?  I thought I might steal those words to describe my own work, but then remembered that I had already used that concept in a poem that I actually wrote all by myself.

     Grand theft

     They call it Midnight Auto Parts
     A blend of larceny and luck
     That TV just fell off a truck
     Much easier than shopping marts.

     Why not try Midnight Poetry?
     Pick clever rhymes up off the floor
     Hijack somebody’s metaphor
     Or steal a stunning simile.

Found poetry 2

I wrote yesterday about my newfound literary/art form of found poetry.  I've asked myself why I am so enthralled by this approach -- why don't I just sit down and write a poem from scratch?  Actually I do occasionally write my own, but I'm hesitant to let them out in public. 

I enjoy writing poetry, but am a beginner with a lot to learn.  Besides, I have a strong sense of privacy and am reluctant to put my heart on my sleeve, even for limited distribution.  But for some reason finding poetry is much easier than writing it.  Choosing from pre-existing words somehow mediates the expression and makes me much less reticent -- much as artists often find that monoprints, with their mediated mark-making, are easier to do than painting directly onto the paper.

An artist friend of mine sent me a link to a blog that posed a found poetry challenge.  We were too late to participate in the challenge, but decided to do it ourselves.  The rules were to look through your bookshelves and choose titles that would become part of a poem.  Then stack the books up and take a picture. 

Technically you were allowed to add words to fill out the poem, but I decided to make it harder and use just the titles. 

Here's my found poem:

     Away from home
     living dangerously
     wanting
     a lost love.

     I want it now!
     Set the stars on fire!

     Bad love
     over the edge:
             moment of truth.

     Coming home.
     150 ways to play solitaire.
     Time enough for love
     before I die.

Click here to see what a lot of other people did with the challenge.  I like mine better with no added words.

Found poetry 1

I've been thinking a lot about poetry in the last several months.  Since my last college English class I have never done much of that, but for some reason I got interested in "found haiku," an art form that I don't suppose I invented but have not seen done by other people. 

You tear a page from a book, then search for three phrases -- five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables -- that make some kind of interesting "poem."  Then cut or black out everything else on the page.  I started finding haiku more than a year ago, and then this year started using them for art, mounting them on backgrounds and perhaps collaging them with other elements. 

Part of the impetus for doing more with the poems was joining an internet group that does a fiber art haiku every month based on a common theme.  I asked to join with the understanding that I would not write my own poem, as everybody else did, but use a found poem.  I've enjoyed that greatly; haven't exactly made great art but it gets me working once a month and has been a good discipline in practicing with my collage. (Click here to see what I've made in this group.)

Then I got the idea to do a daily art project with found haiku.  Each day I find a story in the newspaper with an illustration.  I cut out the photo, and then look for my three haiku phrases somewhere in the story and make a little composition in a sketchbook.  I've just finished the first book of 50 days, and plan to do another book this year. 

This approach is different in a couple of subtle ways from the full-book-page poems.  It's a bit easier in that you do have the freedom to arrange the phrases any way you want, rather than use them in the order they appeared in the original.  But it's more difficult because newspaper columns are much narrower than book pages, and many appetizing phrases don't all fall on one line. Sometimes it's hard to find any lines at all with seven syllables!

Here are a couple of my favorite pages.

 

A new project

I wrote last week about the big sale at our art supply shop, and how the line moved so slowly that I  devised an art project while stalled in front of the sketchbook shelf.  I bought two tiny sketchbooks, 3 by 4 inches, and decided they would be just the right size for tiny collage compositions. 

You probably know my fondness for daily art, projects where you set yourself a rule of making a certain kind of art every day (or week, or whatever the rule says).  I've done many such projects, but have usually started them on January 1 and worked on them for a year.  This time my commitment lasts only 50 days, because that's how many pages are in the sketchbook.

My project is to find a haiku in the daily newspaper and illustrate it.  Not too demanding on the face of it, since we have two papers coming into the house.  But it does require me to actually read the paper the day it arrives (always an objective, but not always realized).  And it should require that my husband has also read it; he got a little crabby when he came upon a big hole on the other side of the red car.

So here are my first couple of days worth of art:

Planning vs. plunging -- part 3

More today to follow up on my post about planning and plunging.  From the comments to that post, apparently there are many of us who plunge -- we work (write, sew, whatever) in order to find out what we want to say. We’re the bad girls, the noncompliant students, those who won’t do what we’re told.

By contrast, the good girls are planners. They write their outlines first, then their term papers. They keep sketchbooks and journals, plan out their quilts, arrange their compositions on the design wall before they start to sew. They are teachers’ pets.

Because so many people seemed intrigued and heartened by this line of thought, I want to stick with it for a bit. First, a response to Janet’s comment: “Okay, what's the difference between carrying a sketchbook around and carrying a camera around? Just because you're not putting pencil to paper doesn't mean you're not looking, seeing, thinking about art, which I presume is the point of using a sketchbook.”

Well, there is a difference, in execution if not in purpose. Some people don’t think well with a pencil in their hand; I am one of them. I have long ago realized that although I am working as a visual artist, I do not generally produce images in my head that need to be documented. Instead I produce ideas, expressed in words, that need to be transformed into images. I might jot down my words, but not my images, because they don’t exist yet.

Perhaps this strange brain wiring is why I have come to love my camera so much. When I see images in nature, I do scrutinize them and look for the picture inside the scene. I often take several photos of the same interesting thing, experimenting with cropping, camera angle, zooming in or out either with my controls or by walking closer or farther away. But I don’t know the picture I want to take until I’ve taken a lot, looked at them on the big screen back home, and selected my best. Again, I work in order to find out what I want to say.

Janet is absolutely right about “looking, seeing, thinking about art” -- that is the whole point. But some people do it with a sketchbook, others with a camera, others with neither of the above. Just as we discover the medium and the style that suits us best (fiber? paint? marble?) (representational? abstract? geometric? cartoony?) as artists, we need to figure out the working method that suits.

I realize that my propensity to plunge is one reason I stick with fiber art rather than moving into painting, which in many ways I envy.  I can sew up a wonderful area of red and yellow fabric, pin it up on the design wall, and let the rest of the quilt evolve around it. I don’t know yet -- and don’t have to know yet -- whether it’s going to end up in the center of the quilt or at the lower left-hand corner.

But if you’re doing a painting, you have to decide immediately where to put your brush full of red. If you put it in the lower left-hand corner, it’s going to be there forever. Sure, you can paint over it and try to reproduce it in the center of the picture, but unless you slice up your canvas and paste the red and yellow bit somewhere on a new canvas, you can’t change your mind.

Another commenter said that she plunges in her writing: “I appreciate being able to just start writing somewhere in the middle and add pieces here and there.” That could just as well describe my feelings toward fiber art. Make that red and yellow, and then see where it ends up.

Planning vs. plunging -- part 2

Last week I wrote about the difference (according to a writing teacher) between planners and plungers -- and how that distinction in working style is equally valid when it comes to art. Several people left comments that make me think I’ve hit a chord. I want to respond to some of their points, and will do so in a couple of subsequent posts.

You may know that last week Blogger had a technological crisis, was off the air for a while and had to scramble to retrieve many old posts and comments from the bazillions of blogs it supports. I know that at least one comment about planning/plunging has apparently disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle of cyberspace, along with my reply. So I'll reply again.

Someone asked what specific tips my writing teacher had for those who plunge.

His main advice was that you should not revise or edit your writing while you’re in first draft mode, aka thinking. Why waste time polishing up stuff that may not make it into the final draft? Instead, write as fast as you can, trying to capture every thought in your head. If you realize in mid-paragraph that you’re going nowhere, or off on a tangent, just space down and start a new paragraph with a new train of thought.

In particular, he advised that you not worry about the beginning until the end. The beginning of a piece of writing is important, worth a significant investment in time and trouble to make sure you hook your readers and properly advertise and lead into what’s ahead.  But you can’t possibly write it until YOU know what’s ahead.

The teacher did point out that your tolerance for first-draft looseness will probably vary. (He, for instance, is perfectly willing to let misspelled words sit there on the screen while he gets his thoughts down. My dear departed dad, who wrote 27 books but never learned to touch-type, was the same way. In his early pre-computer life, he knew that Mom and I, his designated secretaries, would fix the errors when we retyped his drafts. In his later life, he was legally blind so misspelled words on the screen, even in 30-point type, didn’t distract him one bit. Many writers, though, including me, can’t stand to see those zits in front of them and have to take the time to fix what autospellcheck doesn't, or what autospellcheck does wrong.)

But he advises that you correct only what you absolutely must. Later on, after you’ve written your way to understanding what the essay will say, you can go back and fix your sentence structure, edit out your redundancies, correct your spelling, improve your organization.

Plan ahead -- or not

I’ve just spent some time on a cruise ship with an excellent educational program; on days when we didn’t have shore excursions, there were many lectures and workshops that we could attend. One was a series of classes on how to write.

Considering that I spent a 40-year career writing for a living and teaching other people how to write, you might wonder why I chose to go to these classes.  I suppose it was mainly curiosity: I was interested in how somebody else taught what I taught, how his methods and examples differed from mine, and if he had any insights I might find useful.

And sure enough, he did. He believes that there are two kinds of writers: those who plan and those who plunge. You can fit yourself into the right category by recalling how you approached your seventh-grade English assignment, write three pages about your summer vacation, and turn it in along with your outline.

If you plan, which is clearly what the teacher wanted you to do, you dutifully wrote your outline and then followed it to produce your composition. If you plunge, you wrote your composition, then produced an outline of what you just wrote.

Planners, in short, figure out what they want to say, then write it down, while plungers write in order to figure out what they want to say. I know this, because I plunge; always have, always will. It sometimes takes me a while to write something, because I make false starts, and then have to delete lots of lovely paragraphs that turn out to be tangential to what I eventually realize the composition is about.

The cruise ship writing teacher’s main message was that school was difficult for plungers; in order to get good grades you had to pretend to be a planner. But in real life, it’s OK to plunge. If you know how your own mind operates, then you should adopt working methods that complement that mindset. And he proceeded to suggest a variety of working methods that might work for some people, but certainly not all. The buffet approach to advice -- take what you like.

Of course we could be talking about making art instead of writing.

How many times have you been frustrated if, for instance, a teacher or guru says you have to keep a sketchbook, and you hate to sketch? Or if a teacher says you have to compose your entire quilt on the design wall before you sew it together, and you get so antsy you can’t stand it, needing to start sewing?

You might infer from the previous paragraph that I’m the person in the second clause of the sentence, the one who can’t stand to plan ahead. In art as in writing, I’m a plunger. I usually don’t know what I’m going to say or make until I make it. My thoughts tend to coalesce only when I’m sitting at the sewing machine or at the keyboard.

Sometimes teachers will tell me “you say you hate sketchbooks, but it would really be much better if you would use one; why don’t you just try it?” or whatever pet working method they espouse. Just like those teachers who wanted me to hand in the outline three weeks before the term paper was due. (I really had to work hard to get those term papers done three weeks early so I could do the outlines.)

I like to think I’m open to new techniques and new approaches, so occasionally, in the presence of a teacher I like and respect, I give it my best shot. I‘ll carry that sketchbook around, even make some sketches. I’ll try to arrange a lot of fabric on the design wall before I start to sew. But those approaches never take for more than a couple of days.

I know myself. I’m willing to risk sewing a wrong seam, and maybe have to rip it out later on, because it’s the stitching that gets my head in gear. Your mileage may (will) vary. Know yourself, and act accordingly.

Disaster art

I wrote yesterday about my "elevator speech," a very brief commentary about my quilt "Regatta."  I referred to a cheerful scene, "But the threads holding it all together are so skinny, so delicate. What if there is an earthquake or a big storm, or the power plant blows up?"

Postage 1: Regatta  (detail) 

Sandy in the UK responded, "I am wondering about the dating aspect of the comments about current events. Were these things on your mind when you made the piece?  Not to be too picky I hope, but it might be better to just go on from mentioning the delicate strings to the comments in the second paragraph about the fragility of life.  People will make their own connections."

First, Sandy's question.  Obviously I wasn't thinking about the earthquake in Japan when I made the piece three years ago.  And I wasn't specifically thinking about disasters at all when I made it and others in my "postage stamp" series.  But I was specifically thinking of disasters when I did another body of work at the same time.

Crazed 3: Red Tide

My "Crazed" and "Fault Lines" series both deal explicitly with disaster, whether actual or potential.  "Fault Lines" even look like geological disruption and instability, so they probably go more toward the earthquake sector of the disaster universe.  I've given subtitles to my "Crazed" quilts, referencing a lot of other types of disasters. 

Fault Lines 1

One day I was discussing art with a friend and remarked that I was working in two parallel and unrelated bodies of work.  She laughed at me and said "They're all the same!"  And of course, the second she pointed it out I realized that both the pieced quilts and the postage stamp grids are made of many, many tiny bits held together by fragile bonds, an apt metaphor for the state of our world.

Don't you feel stupid when you realize the existence of something that was there all along?  When you belatedly bring something important out of your subconscious and put a name to it?  So is it intellectually dishonest to ascribe a meaning to a piece of art that at the time you made it, wasn't yet articulated?  I hope not, because they they'd have to lock me up.  I've often made quilts whose real meaning didn't surface until late in the making, or even a while afterwards.  Occasionally I've held off giving them names while awaiting clarity in my own mind.

But once I realized that all my recent work has been about disaster and disorder and our inadequate attempts to keep things under control, it brought me to a new plateau of intellectual smugness.  When you worry about these kind of things current events are always confirming your dark thoughts.  Before the Japan quake there were plenty of earthquakes (Haiti, Chile, NZ) and big storms (Katrina) and power plant accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl).  There will be another disaster of some sort in the future, whether environmental, economic or otherwise, and I may very well have already made a quilt that already deals with it.

Postage 5: Epidemic  (detail)

Was it heavy-handed to include the specific references to Japan in my elevator speech?  Possibly.  Maybe people would make their own connections, as Sandy suggests.  But what the heck -- why take a chance?  There's a time and place for subtlety, and I'm not sure thirty seconds in an elevator is it.

The one-floor elevator speech

How many times have you been advised to prepare an elevator speech?  That's the very brief summary of yourself and your raison d'etre that you give when you meet a stranger.  In the time it takes to ride on the elevator, you give the key elements of what you want to say.  If the stranger is interested, presumably you can both get out of the elevator and continue talking.  If not, at least you've given it your best shot.  Having an elevator speech keeps you from fumbling about or being tongue-tied when you get an opportunity to chat with Bill Gates while you're both waiting for the valet to bring your cars around, or trade pleasantries with Hillary Clinton in the ladies room. 

I've given this advice many times, in my guise of career counselor or communication consultant, and I've tried to take it myself.  For instance, I've decided that when I meet a stranger, I say "I'm an artist."  Sometimes the person says oh how nice and changes the subject.  But sometimes he says what kind of art?  In which case, I say "mostly I work in fiber, sometimes on paper, sometimes with found objects."  If the stranger is still interested, we can talk more about whatever aspect of art seems to be of interest.

You may notice a word that is missing from my elevator speech, and it starts with Q.  I have learned that if you drop the Q-bomb too early in the conversation, strangers immediately think about their grandmothers and get the wrong idea of what kind of art is under discussion.  So I won't bring it up until well into a conversation, after we've firmly established that we're talking art, not sewing bees.

But that's the open-ended elevator speech, where you can augment your initial remarks as needed.  Today I've been working on a closed-ended speech about one of my "postage stamp" quilts.  It's a piece that has been touring in Fiberart International 2010 and will soon be on display with that show at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester NY.  The gallery wants to offer brief artist commentaries to visitors on their cellphones, and we were asked to record a message between 30 and 60 seconds long.

Thirty seconds is a fairly short time.  If there are other people getting on and off the elevator, it could be a journey of only one floor.  Often when I talk about my postage stamp quilts to quilters I start by describing why I use sew-off squares in piecing, and how I started making little compositions onto the squares to relieve boredom while sewing, and how they eventually took on a life of their own as art.  But not in thirty seconds!

And of course, that kind of conversation would probably be totally meaningless to museum visitors who aren't quilters and wouldn't know a sew-off square from a blintz.  So I decided to talk only about the meaning of the work, not its construction.  Which is probably a better way, since meaning is always more important than technique.

I found this to be a useful exercise for me.  It helped me clarify the ideas I want people to walk away from my quilt with.  I think the message will be understandable and meaningful to artists, non-artists, adults and children alike.  Now I'm going to think about a 30-second elevator speech for each of my other quilts, just in case I need one!

Here's the quilt:

Postage 1: Regatta

Here's the speech:

I’m Kathy Loomis and you’re looking at my quilt “Regatta.” It’s a happy scene, people out in their little boats on the water, having fun. But the threads holding it all together are so skinny, so delicate. What if there is an earthquake or a big storm, or the power plant blows up?

So much of our life is like that – the bonds that hold it together are so fragile. We’d all better do what we can to keep them from breaking.

 

The Jane Dunnewold extravaganza -- part 2

Last week I took a three-day workshop with Jane Dunnewold on improvisational screen printing, a technique that I have done my best to avoid for many years.  For several reasons I have always been intimidated by the process -- let me count the ways. 

First, it takes a lot of room to spread out the work in a wet studio and you need an actual flat, sturdy surface, the larger the better.  (My wet studio is the top of my washer and dryer, complete with nice crevasse around the edge of the washer lid.)

Second, you need screens, and from everything I've heard, twelve screens is a lot better than one.  That starts to cost money, and take up space.

Third, you have to mix up thickened dye in careful proportions, whereas my usual dye method is far more slapdash and accidental.

Fourth, what would I put on the screen?  Would it require (gasp!) drawing???

Finally -- and most substantive -- many of my closest art friends, not to mention a substantial portion of fiber artists in general, are heavily into screen printing, and I thought this might be a pretty crowded ballpark to be playing in.  By contrast, my chosen niche of pieced quilts seems to be getting less and less populated all the time.

But I decided I couldn't pass up the chance to take a class from a giant in the field.  And am I glad I made that decision!  We tried several different techniques, and one really struck a chord with me.  That may seem like a low batting average, but I believe that a workshop is wildly successful if you bring one thing home with you to love.  It may even be better to bring home one thing than to bring home five, because if you have too much whirling around in your head you may have a hard time deciding what to focus on, and too often that means you don't do your best with anything.  I know this from experience.

What I loved was a technique of coating the screen with a thin layer of flour paste, then drawing into it with a skewer.  Because the flour comes off in little flakes, any line you make will have wonderful scratchy edges.

Here's Jane drawing onto her screen.

Most of the people in the class made beautiful abstract designs with their flour paste. 


Valerie White

Denise Furnish

I chose to write words.  At first we thought that we had to mark from the back of the screen, where we had applied the flour paste, so my writing printed in reverse.  But we found out that the paste had penetrated the mesh and we could write from the inside of the screen as well, thus enabling readable writing.

Here's what I came up with.  I'm delighted with the quality of the writing, especially since I have a strange mental block that generally prevents me from making letters that I like.  Something about the imtermediate step of the screen made me happier with the letters than if I had written them directly onto fabric or paper.

I have no idea how (or if) I will be able to use this technique in my art, but I sure love what I made.  I will be thinking about what to do with 10 beautiful copies of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

So thanks, Jane, for getting me past my fear of screenprinting and giving me a new toy!

Why I blog

The question du jour on the Quiltart list is why do you blog?  I dashed off a response to the list but continue to think about it, and here's my new and improved answer.  I started my blog in January as a way to execute my daily art project for 2010 -- taking a photo every day.  Didn't think I would do much else besides post the photos, but I was wrong.

The beginning: January 1, 2010

I spent my career as a writer and editor in both journalism and corporate communication.  When I retired in 2000, people often asked me whether I was now going to do some creative writing.  I said heck no, writing is what I do for money, not for creativity.  I never had any urge to write "the great American novel" or any other type of fiction, and I didn't know enough about any actual subject to write non-fiction.

My favorite kind of writing was explanatory, which came in handy in 30 years of writing about the inner workings of the tax code or the finer points of pharmacy benefit management.  But in retirement I didn't encounter much that needed explaining, nor did I have an audience who needed explanations.  I did write some magazine articles and a couple of books on quilting, although the books languish because I haven't gotten around to getting them published.  (The scourge of working for yourself: to be a success, you have to spend an hour marketing for every hour you spend actually doing what you like to do.)

A decade later, however, things have changed.  First, the internet has in fact provided a potential audience.  Second, I've now spent enough time as a quiltmaker and artist to have things to say that apparently are interesting and valuable to that audience.  So once the blog was there, it turned out that I had a lot of ideas that wanted to be let out to play in public.  Blogging is way more fun than I ever dreamed it would be.

After almost a year, here's what it has done for me:

-- My photography has gotten much better, thanks to the discipline of carrying my camera with me everywhere and always being on the lookout for good pictures.

-- I'm doing more research into art, because when I want to write about, say, the Expressionists, I want to make sure I don't say something really stupid in front of the whole cyberworld.  Google, of course, is even a worse time-waster than the dictionary or the one-volume encyclopedia, because it's so easy to skip from one subject you're looking up to another, and some of those tangents are deadends, but you do find gold much of the time.  I'm also looking back at my actual hard-copy books.

-- My museum visits are much more focused, because I'm always thinking about what I'm looking at and what I'm going to write about it when I get home; I think about the relationships of the different artworks to one another, which I like best and why, what might be interesting to point out to others.  Having those thoughts while you're still on premises is much better than having them next week at home, because you can go back and look again, rather than wishing you'd noticed the brushwork or read the little writing in the corner of the painting that's illegible on the Google image.  The same is true for reading; you know you always pay closer attention when you have to write the book report later.

-- I'm reading other people's blogs more carefully, because I'm more aware of how much work and thought goes into a good blog (and how easy it is to do a slipshod one).  Some bloggers write regularly and frequently, and I greatly respect their commitment as well as enjoy their content.  Others write infrequently but I eagerly wait for them.

-- I've been able to talk about my own work, how I make it and what it means to me -- kind of an extended artist statement.  I know it can be tedious to hear people ramble on about their work, so I try hard to edit myself and stick to what's important.  Having no adorable cats or kids at home makes it easier to keep my remarks focused on the art.

-- I've been able to share a lot of knowledge with other people, which I find extremely gratifying, and in many ways a lot easier than shlepping all your stuff to teach at a workshop.  I do love to give explanations, and it's a whole different universe when you get to explain things you understand all by yourself, rather than explaining things that other people understand.  I mean it's much more fun explaining how to piece a curved line than how to amortize actuarial losses in your pension plan.

-- I've made friends through blogging, leaving comments on their sites and reading their comments on mine; the dialog often brings out the best in both of us.  This is probably the best part of it, and in the end, why I blog.  Thank you all for reading, and for your comments, and I hope we will stay friends for a long time in the future.

Text in art -- Bette Levy

I wrote last week about text in art, and said that I think using found writing is a good way to avoid the self-conscious, heavy-handed effect that sometimes occurs when artists use words to augment their visual imagery. Today I’d like to share a remarkable work of art made by my friend Bette Levy. Bette is best known for her beautiful silk embroidery but for a recent show she made two stunning pieces from found writing.

The found writing was her own – her parents had saved every one of the letters she wrote home in college and for years after graduation. She took the fronts of each of the envelopes, arranged them chronologically, stitched them together in rows, then coated everything in wax and suspended the envelopes from a rod.

Bette Levy -- A Life and Times

A Life and Times -- detail

She also treated the letters in the same way – except she cut them into small pieces first, not wanting people to be able to read them.

Bette Levy -- Letters Home

Letters Home -- detail



















What made these two pieces so powerful was the reality of the letters having been kept through the years. Bette said in a gallery talk that she thought at first the two artworks were about her: how the envelopes reflected the changes in her own life, becoming more colorful, more dramatic, more psychedelic. But as she worked on the project she realized that the artworks were about her parents, who kept the letters and loved her even though they didn’t fully understand or approve of her hippie lifestyle.

One of the classic messages in art is the expression of love, and it’s not all that simple to achieve that honestly yet simply. Many artists have done it by picturing their loved ones; Bette has done it with the potent metaphor of letters as connections. I suppose you could also do it by putting the word “love” on your artwork, but could that possibly be anywhere near as elegant and understated and powerful as Bette’s envelopes?