How Marti saved me from the quilt guild ladies

I wrote about my dear friend Marti Plager, who died earlier this month, and promised to tell you how she singlehandedly set me on the path to quilting as art. 

In the mid-90s we had both been members of a big local quilt guild, but neither of us really felt at home.  It was the kind of guild where people would give show-and-tell of their latest quilt, and the first question was invariably "what pattern did you use?"  Those of us who did our own designs were regarded with suspicion if not downright disapproval.  Finally Marti decided she had had enough, and quit the guild.  I was reaching the same conclusion.

Marti and I didn't know one another except as faces in the crowd, but she had paid particular attention when I had show-and-tell of a quilt I had made for a contest sponsored by Quilter's Newsletter Magazine.  The contest was called "Rhapsody of Roses" and the rules called for at least one rose on the quilt.  I figured that the vast majority of the entrants would have beautiful roses all over the place, and I couldn't compete with beauty, nor with realism.  So I deliberately went in the other direction, and came up with a quilt that was almost all thorns, with one little rose in one corner.

Rose Among Thorns

sorry for the wimpy color -- this is a digitization from an old slide; the quilt is gone now so this is the only image I  have, unless I can find my copy of the QNM where they printed the contest winners

I explained my thought process to the guild, and showed my finished quilt.  I can't remember whether this occurred before or after the contest was judged, and I got the award for "best interpretation of theme" (a decision that still mystifies me...)  The guild ladies were not impressed, but Marti was.  A few months later she called me, reminded me who she was, and said she was getting together a small group of quilters who were doing original designs and aiming for art rather than bed quilts.  Would I like to join them?

Yes, of course, and for more than two decades this small group, with slightly changing membership, was my closest and most important support as I learned to become an art quilter.  Not only did I have to up my game technically and artistically, I had to learn how to enter shows, how to get my work photographed, how to ship quilts here and there.  

I suppose I could have figured out this stuff by myself, but it was so much easier and better to do it with friends.  Most important, we came to trust each other enough to both give and receive criticism and suggestions without being defensive (or offensive).

Over the years I've participated in many a discussion of support groups, and so often it ends with somebody else saying "I wish I could find a support group like yours."  Often people try to get with others, but find that the others are too judgmental, or too critical, or too arbitrary in what they like and dislike.  Or on the other hand, the others don't have high enough standards or work hard enough or are too easily distracted by distractions.  I never know what to say to these people except to keep trying; if one group doesn't work, maybe another will.  Or maybe if a group doesn't work, you can tweak the ground rules or the membership list and hope that in time the group will get better.

Rose Among Thorns -- detail

Our small group only did two joint projects in two decades.  Once we were asked to prepare a table setting to showcase the dinnerware made by a famous ceramist; we dyed and printed a fabulous tablecloth, napkins and placemats.  Once we ordered four dozen blank silk scarves and did a round robin in which each scarf was dyed or painted or printed by four different people.  The consensus was that we had fun but that wasn't what our group was about.

We didn't talk much about our families or our jobs, just the art.  We didn't have refreshments at our meetings.  We chose the next meeting date based on when everybody could be there, and somehow we almost always stuck to it, with all of us in attendance.  We all grew immensely as artists during our time together.  I don't believe I would have accomplished half of what I have done without that group of friends, and Marti was the one who started it all.

Plague diary May 26 -- leave me alone

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally the official kickoff to summer.  People have picnics and ballgames, and afterwards you can correctly wear white shoes, but only till Labor Day.  Across the country the pandemic has not put much of a crimp into these traditional activities, except maybe the shoes.  I think it's way too soon, but all weekend we've seen scary photos of mostly non-masked people, obviously starved for human society, crammed into restaurants and bars and beaches and all sorts of public places.  I suppose in two weeks we'll see the spike in coronavirus cases, because death rarely takes holidays the way we stupid people do.

But just as a lot of people are eager to take their pandemic response to a new level, I find myself moving in the other direction.  I'm kind of tired of reaching out to other people for social contact.  I've spent many an hour on the phone with friends and family and neighbors talking about what we're doing in seclusion; little of those conversations has been stimulating, affirmative, optimistic, amusing or even very interesting. 

I hear the same words coming out of my mouth when talking to my sister-in-law that came out of my mouth days before talking to my art pal.  I search for something different to talk about, but don't have the energy to launch into a discussion of the book I just read or the art project I'm working on.  I just want to hang up the phone and go into the studio by myself.

I had two more zoom meetings last week, and though the technology is getting a little bit easier, I still don't like it, and certainly don't crave it.  I have found that alcohol helps.

I wrote last month about two different art exchanges that I signed up for in the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like a good idea to connect with others and swap work.  One was among four of us who regularly get together in person but haven't had a meeting since March.  The other was among strangers, a few of whom are several levels above me in the art world food chain, and I sent my work to them with some trepidation.

Just this week I sent off the last two projects in these exchanges, and while I've had a lot of fun making and receiving things, I am glad this is over.  It allowed me to work on some little sculptures

as studies in technique for ideas that have been brewing for a while.  In particular, I would like to make a bunch of the clay heads and display them in some kind of larger array.

Of all the pieces I sent and received in the stranger artist exchange, here's my favorite, a three-step exquisite corpse exercise.  I had step one, and sent this off, leaving plenty of room for additions:

 

The next artist in the chain added the drawing of the woman, and finally the third added pale beige stitching to put more "pictures" on the wall.  (Hard to see in this screen grab, but you can find a better image on instagram.)

But now playtime is over, and I am relieved.  I responded to the invitations because early in the pandemic, connection seemed important; now less so, at least for me.

I hope this new phase of withdrawal isn't going to send me into a funk.  I need to get down in the studio and make art.

Documenting the process -- part 2, words

Yesterday I wrote about taking a lot of pictures as you work.  But that's only half of documenting your work.  You also want to keep track of your thoughts, how you come up with ideas, how you progress from one piece in a series to the next, how you master and improve your technique, how you solved problems, how you do something that comes up only once in several months but it's important to remember how to do it right.

I can suggest many different ways that you might go at this, but the most important thing is to find a process that works for you.  I used to be in the habit of writing down, every evening, what I had worked on during the day, along with any notes and thoughts that I wanted to keep.  I always used a calendar book with either a separate page or separate box for each day.

Spaghetti was a quilt, not my dinner menu.

I kept track of details like what thread was used to quilt.

One year a friend regifted me with a very nice calendar book that she thought would be good for my notes -- but it was one of those books good in any year, with the days numbered days but not marked with days of the week.  I started out by labeling ahead a couple of weeks at a time, writing "S M T W Th F S" in the boxes.  But then I would forget, and then I didn't label for a while, and I couldn't remember whether today was the 27th or the 28th, and by the time I got to May I just quit using the book altogether.

That may seem like a pretty minor problem, but to me the format of the book was like a bit of sand in your shoe -- just annoying enough to take the pleasure out of my daily notes, a process that had always made me feel I'd accomplished something but now was making me feel crabby.  I don't know what kind of process will make you feel good rather than crabby, but suggest you try out some different ones and see what works.

Some people already have the daily habit of journaling, or "morning pages," or writing down their blood pressure, or sending an email to their mother -- maybe you could add your art notes to that routine.  Some people use a daily or weekly blog or instagram post to memorialize their art progress.  If you were really compulsive, and like to work on the computer, you might make a new Word document for each artwork, and write a narrative with pictures and text.  Whatever works for you -- whatever encourages you to actually follow through on your good intentions -- is the right answer.

By the way, Linda left a comment on yesterday's post:  "I don't really think about documenting along the way.  I guess posting to my blog is my only documentation.  Maybe I ought to be stepping it up."  So I checked out Linda's blog and indeed, she's doing a pretty good job of taking pictures and writing down what she's working on.  She's got that discipline down pat.  So my advice to her might be to stick with the blog as her format, but write a little bit more about the decisions she makes and ideas that come to her as she sews.

I do think it's better to write down your thoughts than to depend on memory.  In particular, write down ideas that did not get executed -- "might use contrast thread next time" or "what if the lines were twice as wide?"  Just rereading what you wrote about past work can help you jump-start your process, decide what to do next, get out of a funk and/or overcome artist's block.

Let me know whether any of this rings a bell with you!

Documenting the process -- part 1, pictures

Last week I wrote about Claire Henderson, who just finished a quilt she started in my workshop at Quilting By The Lake in 2017 and sent me a picture.  I looked back in my files and found some pictures I had taken of her quilt on the design wall, and it was interesting to see how the composition changed during the workshop and then at home.

Vickie left a comment: "I do love seeing the process.  I keep resolving to take and organize photos of my process, and add comments and reflections.  But, then, I think I'm too busy to stop and do that.  I've got to find a designated time for this.  Do you have any suggestions?"

Well, yes, I suggest you figure out a way to do it!  I firmly believe that understanding your own process, both the methods and techniques you use to make art and the way you come up with your ideas, is one of the major skillsets of the serious artist.  Maybe there are artiste savants out there who simply channel the universe into art without thinking about it along the way, but most of the artists I admire and respect don't do it that way.  They are able to articulate and recall what they have done in the past, so it's easier to plan ahead, solve problems and incorporate new ideas into their practice.

Vickie is right that there are two kinds of documentation: photos of the work as it progresses, and comments about how, why and how well you did what you did.  Of the many ways you can accomplish this, there's just one thing that absolutely has to be done RIGHT NOW as you work, and that's to take pictures.  So my first suggestion is to get into the habit of taking a lot of photos of what's happening on the design wall.

Making new habits is most effective one step at a time, and step one is really easy -- keep a camera at hand as you work.  Fortunately many people are already in the habit of carrying a phone on their person even when moving around their own house; if you aren't, then make a point of taking the phone or camera with you into the studio.  At the very least, take a picture of your design wall as you leave for the day.  And if you're working on anything complicated, take more -- you can't anticipate when your composition might fall prey to a gust of wind, a helpful toddler or playful cat, or when you lose your place between the design wall and the sewing machine.

(In the age of digital photos, there's no such thing as taking too many pictures.  When I snap the design wall as I close up for the night, I take two or three shots.  Why skimp?  You can always cull out the duplicates, or the ones out of focus or too dark.)

You can't go back and take a picture of what you had on the design wall last week, but you can always organize the photos later.  I was embarrassed, when Claire emailed me last week, to find that I had no folder for the QBL workshop.  So I went back and searched through everything I had taken in July 2017, pulled out the ones from the workshop and filed them where they should have been all along.  Two and a half years late, but now all is in order.  You should aim for a higher standard; maybe once a month?  once a year???

Tomorrow I'll talk about the second part of the process, keeping track of your thoughts.  Too bad there's no way to just shoot photos of what's going on in your head, and organize them later!

Last week on Art With a Needle

I spent four days at the retreat center, an outing that always comes at the most inconvenient time -- we have a perpetual reservation for the second week in December.  Yes, it might be more efficient to be at home working on Christmas ornaments or getting a start on holiday baking or just cleaning the studio, but a small group of us write it on the calendar a year ahead of time and we show up, even though it may mean missing another meeting or driving in from the retreat center for a meeting we need to attend. 

I didn't accomplish much art, but I did go through many, many piles of accumulated stuff and got the stuff read, sorted, acted upon or thought about, as the case may be.  A huge grocery bag full of discarded paper to go in the recycling bin.  I also did my good deed for the joint causes of friendship and literature by reading the draft of a mystery novel written by the husband of one of my art pals.  I'm a good editor, if I do say so myself, and I love mystery stories, so I was happy to spend time with this book and think about what I liked, what I felt was not fully explained, where I wanted more detail, and similar global issues.

I read a neat book about hand embroidery that one of my friends had brought along, and got a bunch of ideas that I'd like to experiment with.  The same friend showed me some little dolls she had gotten from Guatemala, dressed in bits of handwoven fabrics, which in turn inspired me to make a little doll as a daily miniature.

little dolls from Guatemala -- maybe one inch tall?

my favorite miniature -- the dress is a scrap from Vickie's quilt

Since returning home, I've been sewing on ornaments.  All the international ones are in the mail, but several in the US still have to be sent, plus the hand-delivered ones in town.  Left it too late this year, I guess.

Susan Sawatzky was so kind as to send me a link to a YouTube video on calligraphy, but when I went to the site I was told the video is unavailable.  Sob.  I'd love some new ideas on calligraphy.  This week, preoccupied with affairs of state, I have mostly been copying the Constitution.  Sounds boring, but we could all probably do with a refresher course in what that wonderful document says and thus how our government works.
 

On retreat

Every December I spend four days at a quilters' retreat place with a small group of art pals.  Much as it's great to concentrate on art for a while, I have gotten into the habit of using my retreat time to attack my huge piles of papers accumulated over months.

Here I am on Monday morning, with a table full of boxes of piles.

( You're only seeing half of what I brought.)

After a day and a half of work, I've cleared two boxes, caught up on photographing my daily miniatures (I was two weeks behind), gave a tutorial on my quilt facing method, and had a really great night's sleep!

Others in the group are actually making fiber art.  Robin Walston has a new quilt on the design wall:

and
Debby Levine, my bridge-walking companion for many years, is working out how to knit silhouettes of Louisville's bridges into caps:

The week is off to a good start.

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.

On retreat 1

Twice a year, a handful of people from my local fiber and textile art group go on retreat to a quilters' getaway venue about a half-hour up the road from us.  It isn't all that far away -- if you have to go back into town for a meeting or a funeral or a dentist appointment, you can -- but it's a world away from home.  Recent retreats haven't been all that wonderful for me; on the last one, I got sick and had to come home early, and a year previously, I fell on the first night and broke a toe and spent the whole time in pain.  But this time was great for me.

You can read about some of my other retreat experiences here and here and here and here.

The ladies who typically come to this venue are traditional quilters.  Occasionally some of them who are working at the next-door facility will drop by for a visit, and we can always detect their slightly uneasy smiles covering up the thought "what the hell is going on here anyway???"  Because we rarely have more than one or two people making quilts, and those quilts aren't usually traditional in any way, shape or form.

So this year, we had people doing felting, hand-stitching, machine-stitching, assemblage, sketching, and yes, quilting.  One of my fellow retreatees, Beth Schnellenberger, wrote about the week and said that the mediums being practiced included "organization."  I had to laugh, because that meant me.  And if organization is indeed an art form, I'm a pretty lame practitioner.

For years now, I haven't taken my sewing machine to the retreat, nor have I produced much that could be described as art.  I usually take several boxes of miscellaneous clippings and junk, plus a bunch of unread newspapers and magazines.  I have the bad habit, when left to my own devices at home, of clipping things from the newspaper, or saving entire sections that I haven't read yet, and putting them in a pile.  This occurs at the dining room table.  When somebody shows up for dinner and we need to clear the table, my pile often gets picked up and deposited into a box.  Where it may stay for weeks, or months, or years.

So I take those boxes with me on retreat, and I go through them.  I clip what needs to be clipped, I paste up what needs to go into books or daily art, I file things to be kept in folders, and throw out the rest.  This takes a long time, because much of the stuff has to be read first.  In 3 1/2 days I came up with one huge grocery bag full of discarded papers to be recycled, plus a whole lot of bits and pieces to be filed or processed.

clippings to go into an artist book

I also came across things to give to others in the room.  Beth was working on a quilt that happened to be the same colors as a little scrap of batik fabric that I found in my pile.  Who knows why that scrap got into a pile of clippings, but it ended up in Beth's quilt.

Somebody else asked if anybody had a bit of MistyFuse, because she needed to add some new fabric to her hand-stitching project.  What had I come across only a half-hour before in my boxes but a sample pack of MistyFuse!  I don't remember where I got it, but it leaped into action when it was needed.

I gave a piece of tatted lace that happened to be in the trunk of my car to somebody else, and some clippings to yet another person.

Best of all, I got several weeks ahead on my weekly "found poetry" project.  Every Sunday I post a "found poem" on the blog, composed of clippings from newspapers and magazines.  In the ten weeks so far this year, I have most often been composing and pasting up my poems after dark on Saturday night.  This makes for stress.  And I have been looking forward with a bit of trepidation to our longish vacation planned for late spring, because the kindle I carry on trips doesn't allow me to do much blog posting.  So it was good to crank out a bunch of poems and put them in the queue in advance.

I'll tell you more about the retreat later this week.

A week on retreat -- and not much to show for it

I got home yesterday from a week at our twice-yearly retreat, just 25 miles down the road but so far away in mental distance.  It doesn't seem that I accomplished very much at all -- mainly I read through a huge pile of newspapers, cut out this many little clippings for my daily art and other found-poetry projects

and put a foot-high stack of papers into the recycling bin. But yes, it takes three full days to accomplish that much, and I didn't even get the little clippings sorted and filed.  And I brought home another stack of papers that still haven't gotten read.

I did come across interesting things in the pile that I should have noticed months ago.  Here's one that made me crabby.

It's from an art review in the New York Times of a show by Nari Ward, a sculptor who immigrated to New York from Jamaica and who has worked extensively with themes of African culture coming to the new world.  The photo shows an installation of bricks covered with painted copper.

photo from New York Times

The reviewer comments, "African-American history is embedded everywhere. The colored patterns in the floor installation are derived from 19th-century African-American quilts....  The quilt patterns derive from African textiles."

Well, I beg to differ.  Perhaps the artist was inspired by a Bear Paw or Shoo-fly quilt made by an African-American -- those traditional quilt designs were no doubt popular among quiltmakers of all ethnicities -- but those patterns did not derive from African textiles.

It's just another example of people who don't know much about quilts being glib -- and wrong.  (And on that same note, the other day I saw an announcement about some woman giving a speech about quilts used as code on the Underground Railroad....)

On retreat 1

I spent the beginning of this week at my twice-annual retreat, just 30 minutes up the road but it might as well be hundreds of miles away.  Something about your work table being 2 minutes away from your bed, and a lack of distractions makes those days quite productive, or at least that's the plan.

This year I repeated my usual approach of bringing paperwork: still working on my longtime series of book review haikus.  I look through old New York Times arts sections, find review of art exhibits, and find haikus in the copy by identifying five- and seven-syllable phrases that put together, not only make nice poetry but faithfully reflect the opinion of the reviewer.  Then I paste the haikus, plus a small picture from the review, into my two little notebooks.

I'm reaching the end of this project, I realized on the first day of the retreat.  Not only are the notebooks getting full, I'm running out of steam.  No wonder, because I've been working on this series for several years, but suddenly this year I detected less enthusiasm than in the past.

I forgot to pack my tweezers, which are indispensable for picking up tiny bits of gluey paper and positioning them for pasting down.  So after fumbling through a half-dozen poems pasting by hand, I decided to simply "write" the poems (the time-consuming part) and wait till I got home to paste them into the book.

I got many finished, but it wasn't a particularly satisfying experience.  I found myself easily distracted by anything else going on in the room, and when you have to force yourself to do art it's a good sign that you should stop making art.  Or at least go make some other art that will make you happier.

I'll tell you about the rest of the retreat in my next post.

Art reader's digest

From a review by Holland Cotter in the New York Times of a show by the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi:

(Near the end of his life,)  "His hand had lost steadiness; his eyesight was, perhaps, failing,  But he didn't rest.  He kept painting.  Why?

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morte (Still Life), 1954

"You might ask other artist-poets this question: Joseph Albers, say, or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin or a New York artist I know who sits down at his apartment desk for two hours every day -- only two, but always two -- to embroider small squares of raw canvas with abstract patterns in silk thread.  The work is close, slow and painstaking, done stitch by stitch, row by row -- letter by letter, line by line -- in calligraphic loops and tufts.  An inch of embroidery, approximately the size of a sonnet quatrain, takes months to complete.

"But the work goes on.  Because it is controllable reality.  It is a form of thinking that frees up thought.  It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling.  It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near."

---------

Kathy comments:

The good news: a lyrical description of the making of art, perfectly capturing the transcendent allure of slow handwork.

The bad news: why couldn't Cotter have named his admirable artist-friend?

Control freak?

I took a road trip recently to deliver a carload of work for a show, and was happy to have a friend ride along for company.  During our several hours of conversation I told her how I enabled my son and his fiancee to get married.  They had been engaged for a long time but she confessed that she was so busy at work and the thought of organizing a wedding was so daunting she couldn't deal with it.  Her mother had died a few years back and there were no other female relatives to help.

So I ended up organizing the wedding (and holding it in my living room), a delightful task that mothers of sons don't expect to do.  My friend, who had organized her daughter's wedding at about the same time, marveled that I seemed so nonchalant about it, and that the whole thing got pulled together in two months.  (Heck, that was leisurely -- I did my own wedding in six weeks.)

Later she commented that it was funny to contrast my work, meticulous and controlled, with my real-life personality, nonchalant to the extreme, and speculated that all my control-freak qualities must find their outlet in my work.

It's always revealing to hear what other people think about you, and I was kind of surprised to hear her describe my work as controlled.  I see it as meticulous, yes, but controlled no.  I've never sketched things out in advance; I'm too much in a hurry to start sewing.  In fact, I often have to rip out seams because the first iteration turned out to be wrong.  But that's OK -- I'd much rather rip out the occasional seam than lose the excitement of seizing the moment of initial enthusiasm.  Spontaneity and creativity are inseparable for me.

Here's what my design wall looks like this week, the second and third panels of my work-in-progress.  Panel three was going to have both cool and warm colors, but after I sewed and sewed and sewed on the cool -- they were looking so beautiful I just wanted to do more and more -- I was more than halfway done and there didn't seem to be enough room left to properly transition into the reds.  So I'm auditioning fabrics to keep it cool throughout -- well, maybe some brown/red in the bottom corner.

Still haven't figured out what will happen in panel four since my vague plan seems to have run off the rails.  Maybe I'll keep that panel cool also.  Maybe I'll add a fifth panel.  Maybe I'll order another carload of stuff from Fabric.com, which is advertising a special on stripes this week, and the quilt will end up having ten panels.  Of course, the minute I get beyond three the piece outgrows Quilt National, and I have no idea what kind of venue will accept something vastly bigger.

I'll worry about all that when I get there.  Not exactly the thought processes of a control freak.

Isolation

If you have listened to much classical music, you're probably familiar with Haydn's Farewell Symphony.  It's a clever piece in which one by one, the musicians stop playing, put their instruments away, and leave the stage.  Finally there's only one violin playing, and when he finishes, he blows out the candles and leaves too.

It was written as a not-so-subtle hint from Haydn to his employer, the Prince of Esterhazy, who had packed up his entire court, including the orchestra, to spend the summer away from Vienna at his country estate.  Months passed and the employees were getting really antsy to go home, but the Prince apparently was having a good time and not yet ready to change his venue.  The farewells in the symphony were code for "Hey, boss, enough already!  It's time to get out of here!!"

It worked, and the Prince dismissed the players to go back to town and their families.  But meanwhile, Haydn had come to terms with the isolation.  Because he was totally out of touch with the sophisticated music world for those long months, he later wrote, "I was forced to be original."

While many quilters were in Houston earlier this month, and now are blogging about all the neat things they've seen, I've been home, thinking about that remark by Haydn.  I love to go to quilt shows, museums and galleries, each with its particular set of attractions.  I always come home with my head spinning, full of ideas and connections, on an adrenaline high.  But it's a tossup whether that energy will translate into a burst of productivity in the studio, or leave me too excited to accomplish much of my own work.

I think it's excellent advice to artists that they should look at other people's art, and that they should seek out companionship and support from other artists.  I do a lot of that myself, whether in person or indirectly.  Technology and the internet have made it possible to be in close contact with artists around the world, whether you make them your virtual friends or simply keep up with their work.  And the old-fashioned ways such as library books are still as valid as ever.

But maybe there comes a time when you have to just go into your studio all by yourself and make art.  For all you lucky enough to go to Houston this year, that's your challenge.  For those of us who stayed home, that's our challenge too.

The next destination

For the last couple of weeks I have been following along with one of my internet friends, Margaret Cooter, as she prepares for her thesis show at the end of an MA course in book arts.  I have been so impressed by the artistic quality of her work, and by the intellectual rigor with which she is articulating her vision and how the individual pieces fit in with her overall worldview.

I'm also cognizant of a potential obstacle in her very near future: what to do next.

I've been reading "Art and Fear," a classic book on the many, many ways that artists shoot themselves in the foot.  The authors talk at length about people who quit.

"But curiously," they write, "while artists always have a myriad of reasons to quit, they consistently wait for a handful of specific moments to quit.  Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.  And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work -- for the place their work belongs."

I find the second of those descriptions most relevant to my current thoughts.  The authors note that artists often hit the wall right after a significant accomplishment: a big solo show, a major commission, writing a book, and more to the point, graduation.  For months if not years, they have been working toward this huge goal, and now that it has been reached -- nothing is left.  The goal has been so all-consuming that it has consumed not just the person's time and energy but her creativity.

I know several people who worked diligently toward a degree, put together an impressive thesis show, and since have done not much.  Instead of a gateway, the degree became a gate, which has apparently taken too much effort to open.  I'm thinking about the same potential situation in my own life, now that I'm on the absolutely last steps toward completing the Quilt National entries that have occupied me all spring and summer.  And I know from reading blogs and emails that a lot of other people, having worked very hard toward QN and Fiberart International, are at the same point.  A few have confessed that during the long mindless hours of quilting they've been having doubts as to whether their work has value and whether they should be doing something else.

So what next?  Of course, once you finish a huge task you allow yourself some relief.  Yesterday, in between working on facings, I indulged in a couple of hours cutting up an old book for found haiku, and vacuumed the studio.  I went to bed early and read a trash novel.

But I'm already planning my next art project.  I'm very fortunate to have a bit of creative energy left over at the end of this long marathon.  I wish the same for all of you who are about to close the door on one chapter of life and open the door to another.

Work of art

I'm finally at the tail end of what has been a long summer chained to the sewing machine.  I've made four large quilt tops and quilted three of them, often in nine- and ten-hour days at the machine.  While I have on the whole had a good time, else I would have gone to Scandinavia with my husband and son instead of staying at home to sew, there were many hours in which it seemed a lot like my previous life of paid tedious labor except without the pay.

I continually had to bribe myself to stay at work.  "Finish this section of piecing and then you can work on your blog."  "Quilt as far as the row of pins and then you can stop for the night."  "Sew till the opera is done, then you can eat some watermelon and read the newspaper. "  "Get the entire worktable cleared off and then you can check email."

great! now I can go check email!!

I would find myself inexplicably away from the sewing machine.  One minute I was sewing away like a good girl, the next I was taking the clean laundry out of the dryer and folding it.  Or I was in the kitchen fixing a little snack.  Or I was playing spider solitaire.  How did I get there?  Why did it take so much effort to pry myself out of these other places and get back to the studio?

This doesn't happen so much when I'm piecing.  By contrast, I often go into a zen state in which time passes without my noticing, when I suddenly realize it's way past time to fix dinner or go to bed.

For me, the quilting is work.  It's physically taxing, it's relatively mindless, and it goes slowly.  I need something to think about (because there are no decisions to be made) and to distract me from wanting to go eat watermelon and do a sudoku.  The finishing -- blocking, trimming, sewing in facings and sleeves, is work, too, but that's a mere fraction of the time it takes to quilt, so I don't mind it quite so much.

Last week I was with a bunch of artists talking about work.  We discussed how we all embrace our respective processes, whatever they are, and we make art because we love the making.  But we agreed that some parts of the process are more fun than others, while some parts are just plain work.  And we agreed that depending on the medium and the process, we all have different moments that seem more like fun, and that seem more like work.

My friend the paper artist wrote me afterwards, "thinking about your comments about the part of our art-making that is "work:"  for me it's when I must glue cut paper elements to a surface.  It just takes a lot of concentration, time and care, no emotion, no intellect to speak of, no woo-woo from outer space."

For painters, I suppose it might be stretching the canvas or applying the seven coats of gesso; for ceramists, I suppose it's cutting and smacking the clay to get out all the bubbles before you can start to sculpt.  Another fiber artist friend was complaining to me about the long stretches of her process where all the decisions have been made and she just has to sit there and knit stitch after stitch after interminable stitch.

But that's OK.  I tend to think -- my protestant work ethic rearing its head? -- that if we didn't have to put in the work along with the moments of sheer joy and inspiration, the end product wouldn't be nearly as good.  Unearned income just doesn't seem as precious as that made from hard work.  The challenge is to remember, during those hours of work, why we're doing it, what vision we are trying to make incarnate, maybe also what we'll do different next time...  And to come up with plenty of bribes to ourselves to keep the seat of the pants in the seat of the chair.

I guess there's a reason why we talk about "works" of art rather than "whimsies" or "games" or "woo-woo from outer space" or even "gifts from God."

From Corporate America to art

Yesterday somebody posted a question to the SAQA email list that sparked much discussion.

"I'm in the midst of a career transition, and am considering all kinds of new paths to take.  I've been a graphic designer most of my career, working primarily for publishers and design consultancies.

"However, my first and truest love is visual arts. I studied painting and printmaking in college, and I have a decades-old dream about finding a place out in the country that has an outbuilding I can convert to a studio, with room to do fiber arts and mixed media works on paper. To finally be able to say that I'm an artist whenever anyone asks me what I do.

"Has anyone here transitioned from Corporate America to fulltime artist?"

Having spent my previous life in Corporate America and my current one as fulltime artist, I thought I might have some insights for her.  In addition, one of my avocations is career counseling.  So here's my answer to the writer, in hopes that she might find it helpful and some other readers might find it interesting:

I infer that your "career transition" means that you need another career, and that you are considering fulltime art as a way to make a living.  That means your task is very different from the person who is retiring from corporate life and can do art as a labor of love.  So if you are going to do this as a business, you need a business plan.

You need to figure out what you can do that will bring in revenue, and how much of it you will have to do to bring in sufficient revenue to meet your needs.  You don't have to just make and sell art to get revenue; you can also teach, write or do art administration.  You'll have to do research on which of these activities seem possible in your situation, and how much money you could reasonably expect to make per hour, per work or per whatever other measure you would like to use.  Also take into consideration that in any freelance business, you generally can devote only about half your time to revenue-producing activity; you also have to market yourself, find and cultivate potential customers, keep track of your finances, maintain your website or other public presences, do paperwork and other tedious chores. 

What concerns me about your question is that you seem to have a wish more than a business plan.  You talk about a dream about a certain way to live and a certain way to describe yourself, but not about what you might do to earn money.  

Realistically, unless you have been selling art consistently and profitably in the last couple of years, you should probably not expect to do much as you embark on your new path.  Even established artists who were doing quite well financially until the economic downturn are finding it extremely difficult to sell in the new climate.  Many artists I know, in all mediums, believe that the whole paradigm of non-billionaire people buying art has changed, perhaps permanently.  

Unless you have very good reason to predict that you can buck this tide, you should probably look to other ways to earn money.  But again, unless you have a solid reputation as an artist it will be difficult to count on making money as a teacher or writer.  Especially in fiber art, the market is crammed with workshops, books and magazines, and even if you are successful in establishing a foothold as a teacher, it will take time to build up enough business to support yourself.

If this sounds pessimistic, I'm sorry.  The world is tough these days and it's hard enough to earn a living at established and traditional vocations, let alone from those based entirely on discretionary spending.

But let's look at the bright side.  Your dream is to find a place in the country with a studio, to make art and to call yourself an artist.  None of these aspects of your ideal life depend on this stuff constituting an actual business.  Perhaps you would be happier if you found a day job in another field, one that you could leave at 5:30 every night, and come home to evenings and weekends of making art.  You could make some money on this "second shift," and if you were very fortunate, you might be able over time to grow this into a fulltime business.

Meanwhile, why not call yourself an artist if that's what you dream of doing?  You don't have to produce your tax returns to do that, you just have to make art.

Cleaning the studio

I had to laugh at some of the comments left by readers of my post yesterday, assuming that my studio is now neat and organized, just because I said I'd spent a couple of days puttering around.  First, I spent most of the time braiding cords, not actually cleaning.  But more important, the messiness of my studio is legendary, and it would take a couple of hundred days of puttering around to actually achieve organization.  That will not happen in my lifetime.

Once I spent the better part of three months trying to clean and organize my studio, and did make major improvements, but then I realized that (a) the place was still not ready for the Fine Studios Magazine photographic team, and (b) I hadn't made any art in three months.  I came to the conclusion -- not sure if this is reason or rationalization -- that cleaning the studio can be one of the higher forms of procrastination.  If you say you haven't made art in three months because you've been cleaning your studio, people approve, whereas if you say you haven't made art in three months because you've been playing Spider Solitaire, they don't.

I clean on a need-to-know basis.  If I need the whole work table or design wall panel to assemble a very large quilt, I'll clear it off.  I do a great deal of cleaning and organizing in the course of searching for something I need, but when I find it, I go back to work.

Fortunately I must have the kind of brain that thrives on chaos.  I think some of this is genetic, but it was certainly exacerbated by my first career, as a newspaper journalist, in which you had to do your work in a large room full of ringing telephones, people wandering in and out, a dozen conversations going on within earshot.  I learned quickly to tune out distractions and focus on my work.

My first (messy) desk at my first real job.  The typewriter was manual; the balloon and the vacant look were temporary.  PS -- some years later I married the cute guy sitting behind me.

I've always thought that an empty desk was the sign of an empty mind, and eked out a successful career from piles of papers stacked on the desk, the bookcases and occasionally the floor.  Not as bad as some offices I've seen, and probably my studio is not as bad as some others.  But certainly not ready for the magazine.

In a sense, that brain vibe is probably related to much of my work.  Although I admire spare, minimalist compositions by other people, my own work tends more toward the termite end of the spectrum.  (Termite art = that which is composed of a bazillion tiny bits, put together in an obsessive manner.) 

I would love to have a beautifully organized, clean studio with everything in its place and all horizontal surfaces empty, ready for making art.  I'm just not willing to spend the time to get mine that way (and unless my studio were to miraculously triple in size, or I were to throw out much of my stuff, it's physically impossible).  So I've decided to grin and bear it.  And just writing this has made me feel a lot more energetic than I was earlier in the week.  Time to go downstairs and see if I can make some art instead of just braiding cords.

Getting antsy

I have been sewing nonstop since returning from my workshop and Quilt National opening weekend, the end of May.  Since then I have completed nine quilts (one of them from scratch, eight from my long-unfinished pile) and two tops (both from scratch).  And almost as time-consuming as piecing and quilting them, I sank all the thread ends and sewed on facings.

Monday I had everything photographed, a huge accomplishment because now I have lots of work to enter in shows if opportunities arise.  Tuesday I made the sleeves for all the new quilts and have started sewing them on.  It's time to start something new.

In the normal course of events I know what to do after I finish a project; I usually have a to-do list of work in process, or ideas that are waiting to be started.  And I do have several things on that list, but none that are shovel-ready.  I had two ideas that I thought would be very good, but after piecing those two tops earlier this month, I realized they weren't as great as I had anticipated.  The only idea that I am still really excited about is still not resolved in my head enough to start on.

It's too hot to be outside, which ups the crankiness quotient.  So when all else fails, clean the studio.  I'm not going nuts over this task, but I have been puttering around for the last couple of days, getting some things in order.  I found a bag with an old sheet, labeled "frayed on edge; use for quilt bags" and so I made three nice long bags, big enough to hold a 60-inch pool noodle with a big quilt or two rolled around it. 

After finishing nine quilts in the last eight weeks, I had left a trail of skinny strips of fabric behind me, the edges that were trimmed off after quilting and before facing; I also came across a box of scraps that included lots more skinny strips.

So I braided them into lanyards, a perfectly mindless task that goes well with watching trash TV and jumping up during the commercials to do the laundry.  Excellent for antsy folks with short attention spans and a reluctance to throw things away that might conceivably become useful.  So now I have a dozen or so sturdy cords that will be great for tying up the rolls of quilts that will fit into my new bags. 

This is really pathetic, isn't it?  I sure hope I figure out what to do next and get back to working on grown-up projects.  Also it would be nice if the temperature got below 90.  No hopes for either one in the immediate future, I'm afraid.

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.