Final exam -- LA Art

Final exam:  for each of the following installations, say whether it's art or not art.

1. 

2. 

3.

Answers later -- give me a minute to mark the papers. 

You may be interested in the program we attended; I would recommend it!  It was put on by Elderhostel, the venerable and respected organization that puts on educational sessions for geezers.  (Elderhostel is now changing its famous name to Exploritas, one of those names that nobody will ever understand or remember, because they think the baby boomers will be embarrassed to be thought of as "elder."  Well, until it comes time to step up and claim the senior discount.) 

This program is called "Art Collectors and Their Collections" and it's offered several times a year.  Headquarters is a very nice hotel in Monrovia, with Trader Joe's (wine lovers will know it as the home of Two Buck Chuck) and a good Japanese restaurant within walking distance.

Final exam answers: 

1. not art (rainy day at the Huntington Library) 

2. art (Cady Noland, Misc. Spill, at the Geffen Center, Museum of Contemporary Art) 

3. not art (rainy day at the Norton Simon Museum)

Be my valentine

It occurs to me that this blog is called "Art With a Needle" but there hasn't been very much discussion of art with needles.  I will remedy that.

I was in the fabric store, bumped into a rack of tulle and remembered that Valentine’s Day is coming up – but still far enough away that I could sew up some hearts and get them to my assorted faraway loved ones before the appointed time. Usually I have these brilliant ideas the week after, so I was energized.

Making tulle doodads is the easiest sewing project you can possibly do. The only supplies you need are some tulle and some Solvy.

Cut a sheet of Solvy (I cut about nine inches worth off the six-inch roll) and three sheets of tulle a little bit larger than the Solvy. Put one tulle down on the table, then the Solvy, then another tulle. I used two colors of tulle, a red and an orange.

Now get a bunch of tiny bits and pieces of fabric, thread, lace, yarn, whatever you find on your work table or floor or miscellaneous drawer. I found some sheer fabric, some bits of gold cord, a piece of fancy netting with gold inlays, a metallic orange “raffia” cord, and a bunch of fabric snips in reds and purples.

Arrange the bits and pieces evenly over the sheets of tulle, then put the third sheet of tulle on top of everything. You may want a couple of pins to hold it all together and to keep the bits from falling out as you slide the package to the sewing machine.

The fun part: sew and sew and sew the layers together, trapping the bits and pieces inside the tulle sandwich. The Solvy holds everything firm while you sew. I used red cotton thread in the needle and metallic gold in the bobbin (my machine doesn’t like metallic threads on top so I humor it). Eventually you will get tired of sewing and will take the sandwich out.

I used a Sharpie to draw hearts on the sandwich, then switched to a darning foot and went around the outlines once or twice.  I cut the hearts out just outside the outline stitching.  Finally, you soak the hearts in hot water to dissolve the Solvy.

If you are making a lot of hearts, the second batch is even easier because you will save up the snips from the first batch and recycle them into filling for the second sandwich. I saved the snips from my second batch in a little plastic bag and stashed them in my miscellaneous drawer for next year.

One final construction tip: here’s how to put on the hanging cords most efficiently. Thread your needle with your cord of choice but do not cut the thread off the spool. Thread all the hearts onto the cord and push them a good ways up toward the spool so they don’t fall off. Now take the first heart, slide it back toward the end, cut off enough cord for its hanging loop, and knot it. Repeat with the second heart and all the rest.

The Joy of Mending

Checking out Alison Schwabe’s blog this morning, I was intrigued by her comments about an exhibit she saw years ago called “Objets Blesses.” It showed things from Africa that had been painstakingly mended (she posted a photo of a drinking gourd mended with leather) and the point was that people mend things that are important to them – and that “mending therefore confers a higher level of value to the object.”

That resonates with me, as I am an aficionada of mending. With a husband and two sons I have rarely been without mending opportunities in the last four decades and I am really good at it. Once I told a young teenage son that he was forbidden to wear that pair of jeans out of the house unless he let me mend them. He reluctantly said OK, “but only if you maintain the integrity of the rip.” So I did, by putting the patch on the inside and largely hiding the mending stitches underneath the floating threads of the original hole.

Only last weekend I noticed frayed edges on the bottom of my husband’s pants cuffs as they emerged from the dryer, and spent a comfortable hour fixing them. Trimmed off the frayed bits, opened the hem, put a piece of muslin behind the fold line and reinforced it with stitching, then turned the cuffs a quarter-inch higher and rehemmed.

I often mend holes or spots in sweaters or knit shirts with ultrasuede. These below do double duty of holding up cuffs that would droop if left to their own devices.

Usually I restrict the stars to women’s clothes (I call it a designer detail, and have received oohs and aahs) and stick to rectangles for men, but I did put a high-contrast heart on my husband’s sweatshirt when the neck ribbing started to disintegrate. The grocery clerk loved it – “Look at this heart! His wife sewed this heart on his shirt!”

Here’s a purely utilitarian mend, occasioned when I was sewing the facing on a quilt and managed to snip open my own shirt instead of snipping the thread. This was a purchased shirt, so I didn’t have scraps stashed away. I took off the pocket, cut a piece of fabric for the patch and replaced it with something else, then incorporated the patch underneath the button. I like to think it looks deliberate, like one of those safari jackets with doodads that you don’t understand but must have some purpose.

We lived in Germany in the early 1970s, at a military base with a pathetically haphazard library. I found a book published in Great Britain during the war to tell all about mending. And this was heavy-duty – not just how to mend sox, but how to transform a worn-out man’s coat into children’s clothes and the like. I was fascinated, and imagined myself creatively and frugally mending everything in sight. It’s just like I consider myself as a potential pioneer woman. Thank heaven I don’t have to mend socks and transform coats into kids’ pants and chop wood and kill bears – but I bet I would have been great at it.

But back to Alison's point about the mend conferring value on the object.  That's one lovely concept that is 99.9% absent in today's consumption-mad world.  Sure, the grocery clerk loved the heart on the sweatshirt, but in general a guy in mended clothing elicits pity as a victim of poverty, probably homeless if not outright wacko.  Maybe I can fob off my ultrasuede patches as designer details, and cover up the stains on my shirt by overdyeing, but I feel latent guilt when I do so -- will people see my creativity or just my inner bag lady?  Most of the time I wear the shirt anyway, but it nags.

For some time I have been wrestling with the concept of mending as art.  I even have the title for the show:  "Mended In Gold."  Haven’t figured out how to execute it, but I have started to save my world’s greatest mends after the garments nevertheless wore out. Some day….

LA Art -- the Huntington Library

The Huntington Library, also in Pasadena, surprised me. We had been told about its collection of old books (I like old books as much as the next person, but had flown across the country to see art, not books), its gorgeous gardens (ha ha, with the fourth and worst day of torrential rain well underway), and its trove of Gainsboroughs and other 18th century British portraits (what could be more boring than Blue Boy and Pinkie). By the way, everybody thinks of BB & P as being a pair, but they aren’t – only their showing up in the same museum in the 1920s made people think that.

I thought this might be the day when I should have slept in and skipped the festivities.

Was I wrong! Our first stop was a special exhibit of color lithographs, which doesn’t sound very exciting but occupied us for almost two hours. It was a survey of how the lithography process was used in American business for ads, packaging, posters and other ephemera. In effect, it was several shows in one: a history of the American economy, a process tutorial on lithography, a reflection of a century of popular culture, to name some aspects that I found fascinating. Granted, my professional interests in printing and history made me a sucker for this stuff, but I don’t think you need those inclinations to find something to learn and enjoy. Did you know, for instance, that Mr. and Mrs. Butterick invented paper dress patterns in 1863 and printed them with, yes, lithography? The exhibit is up through February 22 and it’s worth the shlep to the far end of the grounds, even in the rain.

Then we slogged across to the American art building, which had a lot of portraiture (not my cup of tea) and some nice stuff from early 20th century. My favorite piece was a huge, brilliant painting by Helen Frankenthaler; also was struck by a Diebenkorn and some Robert Motherwell drawings which he made by applying ink heavily with a brush to an absorbent Japanese rice paper, then going away and letting it wick and spread as it wanted.

Helen Frankenthaler, Adriatic

Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #24

Robert Motherwell, Drawings from The Lyric Suite

Luigi Lucioni, Still Life 

I'm always happy to find a Lucioni in a museum because I happen to have inherited an etching by him, probably the most prominent artist whose work I own (with the exception of a Picasso lithograph which was probably done in an edition of 732,000).

That was fine, but the best was last – a Gutenberg Bible! When Henry Huntington bought it in 1911 for $50,000 that was the most that had ever been spent for a book. The most recent sale of a complete Gutenberg was more than $5 million, in 1987, and single pages now sell for as much as $100K. It’s a beautiful piece of printing, perfectly preserved, bright white (it's on vellum, not paper) and I felt as though I was in the presence of ----- somebody/something transcendental.

Also a huge collection of other important books, which I didn’t have time to look at carefully, including originals of Chaucer, Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, Copernicus, etc. etc. Nicely displayed, given the fact that they have to keep the light very dim to preserve the books.

I must give a shout-out to the Huntington for its people. Unlike the gestapo at the Norton Simon, the attendants here were the nicest museum staff I’ve ever encountered. When we came in dripping, the attendant tipped us off to the lockers at the end of the hall. In another building, there were no lockers but the guard said he’d be happy to keep an eye on my wet poncho if I just stowed it in the corner on a rug alongside other people’s umbrellas. I knew there was no photography in the lithography exhibit, but asked whether it would be OK to shoot the large wall signs with lots of good explanatory info; the guard cheerfully went to track down the curator and ask (they said yes).

So this made five for five for the week. Not a bad batting average.

LA Art -- Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is a strange place: it contains the formerly private collection of Simon, a fantastically rich dead dude, who toyed with giving his art to various existing museums but apparently couldn’t stand the thought of anybody else touching it. So he bought a financially struggling museum, took it over, spruced up the building, hung his stuff on the walls, provided a huge endowment and told them not to buy anything new, ever. A few random donations aside, that’s pretty much what happened. As a result the collection is largely frozen in time and reflects Simon’s personal tastes, which were strong and idiosyncratic.

He loved Degas, and the place is packed with paintings and more than 100 little bronze ballerina sculptures. Excellent collection of impressionists, not much really new art, but a spectacular trio of paintings by Sam Francis hung at the far end wall of one of the wings so it called to you the whole time you made your way through the other galleries. Lots of very old European art, which except for the Rembrandts I breezed through to have more time with the newer things. I totally skipped the huge collection of Indian and Southeast Asian artifacts in the basement. (When you’re on a group tour and the bus leaves at 3 pm you have to set your priorities!)

Simon adorably attributed his own success to "power, publicity and paranoia" and you can still detect those traits by visiting his museum. Especially paranoia.

We showed up at the museum an hour before it opened, and there were three or four docent tours going on for groups. Each group was trailed by a glum security guard who looked like a former Stasi agent and gave you the hairy eyeball should you try to hold back and look at a painting instead of trooping on to the next room. The security guards were even glummer when it got to be lunchtime and we had to sit outside in the monsoon to eat (god forbid they might drag some tables into the lobby to accommodate their paying visitors). Two guards stood guard outside while about 20 of us huddled under a canopy and ate our damp sandwiches. Somebody had thoughtfully put a couple of those big propane heaters out on the patio, but had unthoughtfully neglected to gas them up sufficiently. When asked whether the heaters couldn’t be turned back on, the guards “explained” that sometimes they didn’t work. Of course they did not go for help, lest any of us vandalize the potted plants in their absence.

It was pouring when we left the museum and it was amazing how far away the bus had to park, because of course no buses could be permitted into the parking lot or driveway. Probably because you could pack a bus with explosives and storm the building. Neither could visitors be let out through the staff entrance 20 feet from the bus parked at the curb.

In the Simon’s defense, I must commend their excellent wall labels, which gracefully and economically covered artistic design, art process, artist biography and overall cultural context. And of course the art was spectacular. 

Edgar Degas, Wheat Field and Green Hill

I never think of Degas as a landscape painter, although apparently he did some in later life.  The notes said that he started by making a monoprint of tha pale yellow background, then worked over it in pastels.

Sam Francis, Basel Mural I

A special exhibit of portraits was far more interesting than I had anticipated, as generally I don't like this genre of pictures.  But the wide variety of artists, subjects, mediums and artistic approaches made it exciting.  One of my favorites was this one of Van Gogh's mom.  One of the ladies from my group said to me as we both looked at the painting that she didn't like it, because the poor woman has a green face.  (That's probably why I liked it.)

This week's art-a-day

It's cold this week!

January 24 -- holly berries in the park

January 25 -- reflections

January 26 -- first it snowed, then it froze -- or something

January 27 -- cloudy day in the park

January 28 -- in the alley

January 29 -- big boy's toys

January 30 -- snow again