For your crabby reading pleasure 3

From the New York Times, a sappy little recurring feature in which some rich guy you never heard of provides one paragraph's worth of "wisdom:"

How to Multitask
By Matthew Mellon

I find that I'm a much more efficient multitasker if I talk about the big picture and don't waste a lot of time on specifics.  People can be slow and too specific with detail.  I prefer to just lay down the footprint, then worry about the specifics.  Otherwise you just get too overwhelmed.

--------

Personally I find that it's more efficient if you never get to the specifics at all.  That's what your people are there for, right?

Sign of the week

Ultimate fine lines

For more than five years I have been making my quilts almost exclusively with pieced fine lines.  No matter what overall pattern or plan, I always separate bits of fabric with a pieced-in line.

Sometimes the overall pattern is a grid, at approximately right angles.

Sometimes I fracture the background with diagonal lines at random angles.

Sometimes the fine lines aren't all that fine; they vary in width.

I still have lots of permutations to work though, and don't plan to abandon these series (now at more than 30) any time soon.

But so far the very narrow lines have only served as separators.  So it seems inevitable that I would allow the lines to take center stage instead of merely working as supporting players.

Here's what I'm sewing this week -- a composition of fine lines sewed to each other.  In the detail shot, the gridlines on the design wall are an inch apart, so you can see how narrow the pieced lines are.

Turns out that the hardest part of this task is not the sewing but the pressing; the seam allowances don't always want to point in the direction I want them to.  Much work with the tweezers to flip the recalcitrant seams and press again.

I have an idea of how I plan to incorporate this piecing into an overall composition, but a lot of sewing (and pressing) to do first.  I'll keep you posted.


--------
Update: linking to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" -- check it out to see what other fiber artists are doing this week.

Photo suite 101 -- yellow hydrants

Art reader's digest

From "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color," by Philip Ball (which I wrote about last week):

But will anyone still be painting in ten or twenty years' time?  It is not a fashionable art.  Painters have become a relative novelty among the candidates for the much hyped Turner Prize, awarded annually in Britain for young artists.  The names of no new young painters are on everyone's lips (at least, not for longer than a few weeks).  We are still blessed with our Fran Auerbachs, our Howard Hodgkins, our Lucian Freuds, but do we have our Klees, our Goyas, our Raphaels?

...The truth is that we had more than enough greatness in twentieth-century painting, and what does it matter that the final years lost their sparkle?  Who now complains, for example, about the fallow time at the end of the seventeenth century when Vermeer, Velazquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt had passed on and no one had stepped up to take their place?

And so where will the next great colorists take us, and what will be on their palette?  Perhaps conventional pigmentation will indeed take second place as the metallic flakes and fluorescent splashes of Stella and the Pop Artists become supplemented with new possibilities: pearlescent colors... or pigments that change hue as we change our viewing angle.  Both are manufactured as automobile pigments.  Perhaps artists will use liquid crystals that change color with temperature or that offer an iridescent rainbow all at once.

Frank Stella, Kagu, mixed media on aluminum, 1979-80

Well, maybe.  Certainly, all these media will be used -- because that is the way of art, to find ways to take advantage of what technology offers.  That, I hope, is the one central message of this book: technology opens new doors for artists.  And of course technologists cannot then prescribe which portals the artists will go through or what they will do on the other side.  "The painter of the future," said van Gogh, "is a colorist such as has never been seen before."  I do hope so.  The delicious irony is that paint manufacturers, color theorists, and colormakers, practically inclined craftspeople, have traditionally been conventionally minded folk, offering up gleaming new tools into the hands of visionaries who go and do something crazy with them, break the mold, create a revolution.  Long may it last.

Sign of the week