Daily painting -- setting a deadline

I started my daily painting project with several tubes of acrylic paint that I have owned for a long time.  They're low-end stuff, and when applied at full strength they're shiny rather than matte, which I don't particularly love, but the tubes are big and I appear to have a lifetime supply.  After a couple of days of using the paints with very little dilution, I decided I would be happier watering them down and doing washes.

I found myself doing landscapes with receding ranges of mountains and hills, working from the top down, intrigued by the way that a new layer of dilute wash would combine with the previous layer to make the next closest mountain range a little darker.  I also found myself making some of the landscapes in portrait orientation rather than landscape.  

In mid-January I showed my sketchbook to some friends, including the one who had been my drawing teacher a few years ago at the University of Louisville.  She thought I was shooting myself in the foot by using low-end paints and brushes (and didn't think much of my palette knives either).  She made me promise to buy some better brushes and suggested that I switch to gouache instead of acrylic for the time being.  So I obediently went out and bought a big bag of stuff.

But I wasn't ready to give up on the washy landscapes.  I told myself I would open up the gouache on February 1, but do what I could with the acrylics until then.  Which gave me a week and a half to experiment with some abstracts in addition to the landscapes.  

I was happy with how they came out, but a promise is a promise and at the end of the month I put the acrylics away.  I'll show you what I've been doing with the gouache soon. 

If you can't wait, you can see all of my daily art at my other blog.

The pandemic quilt is finished!

 A year ago I started working on a new project: memorializing the 2,662 coronavirus deaths in Kentucky in 2020.  I went to my stash of polka dot fabrics, the floating circles calling to mind the mysterious virus particles floating around in our air.  I made 2,660 tiny postage stamp quilts, each measuring approximately 1 3/4" by 1 1/4".  I counted them over and over as I bundled and packed them into cigar boxes, putting them away until I got around to stitching the whole thing into a huge grid.

I worked on other projects for the rest of the year, but brought the postage stamps back to be stitched together in November.  That turned out to be bad timing, because I had barely begun the process of sorting, counting and stitching than I realized I had to put them away and work on my annual Christmas ornaments.  

After the New Year I hauled the project out again, determined to finish.  To my dismay I realized that somewhere along the way, 70 bits had gone AWOL.  I know I counted them at least ten times along the way, but they were not there when it was time to get serious.  I looked on the floor.  I looked under things on my work table.  I looked on the shelves where the project had been stowed during the holidays.  No bits.  I cussed, I fretted.  Finally I sewed 70 new bits (thus ensuring that someday in the near future I will find the missing ones...) and finished the quilt.

Last night I triumphantly hauled the quilt up from the studio and spread it out on the living room floor to show my husband.  And could hardly  believe how huge the damn thing is!!!

What you see in the picture is not the full expanse -- many of the columns are folded back on top of others.  I realize that the full width, if the columns are pulled flat, will be something like ten feet.  That's a lot of quilt; I may have to buy a new hanging rod, because the brass rods I usually use for postage stamp quilts aren't that wide. 

Now the only step remaining is to sew loops across the top of the quilt, so it can be hung from the rod.  And to disassemble the work surface that I constructed for this project, an old vinyl tablecloth spread across my entire sewing machine surround so the bits didn't get caught in any tiny gaps between surfaces.  

Then I think I'm done with the sewing machine for a while.  Back to hand stitching.  I have lots of ideas that I need to get going on!

Daily paint -- how it's coming along

In my last post I told you about my new daily art project and why I am feeling quite scared and hesitant.  With ten more days under my belt, I've overcome a bit of the initial paralysis through that time-honored artistic method of stealing from somebody else.

I decided to copy from my four-year-old granddaughter, who brought her paint set along on our Christmas vacation and made two beautiful paintings in her sketchbook.  Since the sketchbook lives at my house, I have it on hand for inspiration.  I was taken by the total fearlessness and joy with which she goes at her art, and thought that if I copied her paintings I might be able to capture some of her mojo.

Her first painting

I copied it

I copied it again

I copied it three times

Her second painting

I copied it 

I copied it again

By this time I felt confident enough to strike out on my own, at least a little bit.  No more copying from the child.  In future if I want to steal another artist's ideas, I think I'll choose a grownup.

Daily art -- a new challenge for 2022

 Faithful readers know that I have been doing daily art for 20 years, revising my rules every January 1.  After three years of doing calligraphy, I feel overdue for something new, so I decided to leap into the deep end of the pool with something I'm terrified of -- paint.  I'm even having a hard time describing it as "painting" rather than just "paint," much as a long time ago I had to ease into calling myself an "artist," instead first saying "I make art."

Three years of daily calligraphy

This is not a new situation for me.  In 2013 I forced myself to learn to make collage by way of daily art (and did it for three years).  I came to love it, incorporate many aspects and techniques into my "serious art," and would happily do it again as a daily practice.  In 2016 I forced myself to overcome my dread of drawing, even joining a life-drawing group and enrolling in a beginning college art class, where I got an A+.  I learned to make better realistic renditions than I did at the start of the year, but I couldn't force myself to stick with realism.  I quit the drawing group and by the end of the year was filling my sketchbooks with maps, repetitive patterns, doodles and increasingly abstract line work.

So with one success and one failure in my past, I'm trying again.  I've always avoided anything that you could describe as "painting," although I have used plenty of paint in the last decade.  Why the terror, considering that I love to have paintings by other people all around me?  I can think of several possible reasons.

For one, I've always rankled at the concept that painting is "real art," whereas fiber is some kind of second-tier impostor medium that is only grudgingly allowed into museums and galleries.  So if that's the way they feel about it, to hell with painting, I'll do anything but.  A childish opinion, which doesn't even hold up very well under cross-examination, but there it is.

For another, I have never felt comfortable using a brush to lay down color.  In three years of calligraphy I've tried many different writing implements, falling in love with many of them.  But brushes are not in that group.  Every time I try to write with a brush I think the result looks awkward and weak.  So unless I conduct my paint career exclusively with palette knives (not that there's anything wrong with that) I have a big hurdle to overcome.

Just doesn't look that good to me....

Most important, I've always relished the freedom that fiber art, especially quilting, offers in terms of  design.  You make a little motif or sewed-together area and put it up on the design wall, and then add some more areas.  And eventually you can rearrange them till you get a pleasing composition.  If you think this red part should be closer to the bottom edge, cut off the extra stuff.  If you think it should be closer to the center, make some more piecing and add it onto the side.  If you think the two red bits should be farther apart, add something else in between.  By contrast, when you paint, you need a sound preliminary idea of where your elements are going to fall on the canvas before you start putting red things down.

This is how I like to work!!

I have developed a pretty good sense of composition over the years but I almost always do it on the design wall, moving things around and auditioning and trying this and trying that before deciding on the final result.  I'm afraid that if I can't rearrange I will either end up with crappy compositions or be forced to (gasp! horrors!) make advance sketches.  And advance planning is NOT the way I like to work!  I like to think by doing.  But I have no idea how that's going to work with painting.

I've done one painting so far.  I am using an interesting technique to make myself overcome terror and paralysis, which I'll tell you about soon.  

Meanwhile, you can check out all my daily art on my daily art blog.

Daily art -- the end of a streak

Two weeks from tomorrow will be my last daily calligraphy.  After three years on this streak, it's time to stop.  I have accomplished a lot with this practice, although not what I intended to do when I started.  At that time I had just seen and fallen in love with the work of an Iranian artist, Golnaz Fathi, who used calligraphy, or maybe I should say marks that resembled calligraphy -- especially this painting:

Golnaz Fathi

I thought that in a year of writing I could figure out how to achieve a similar effect, that it was just a case of finding the right ink/paint and the right brush/pen and developing a personal style of making letters.  Turns out that in three years I have not yet achieved that goal, although I think I have come close a few times.

I have learned many things in those three years.  First, that I am much more comfortable using a pen than using a brush.  I keep buying new pen nibs to add to my already huge collection, jump-started with a whole lot of pens inherited from my father.  But while he went for bold pens with wide or ball-shaped tips, I have been going smaller and smaller, in search of pens that are very flexible, going from narrow to wide in a single stroke as you add pressure.  I love the old-fashioned look that you get from plain old script written with a small pen.

Second, that it's harder than you think to do asemic writing, the fancy-pants term for writing that doesn't have any meaning.  To do this well you need a repertoire of symbols that look like actual letters but aren't.  In three years I did a pretty good job of developing my own personal asemic script, which is also nicely suited to the thick-and-thin flexible pen.

Third, despite the literal meaning of "calligraphy" -- beautiful writing -- I have become quite enamored of crude, non-beautiful writing.  It helps to have a pen or other writing tool that will produce irregular lines, maybe also some spatters, and that's not always easy.  My favorite beer-can pen got old and died last year, and a couple of new ones haven't given the same effect.  

Finally, the closest I have been able to come to the pictorial quality of Fathi's work has been by writing wet-into-wet.  This technique will serve me well for next year's daily art: painting.  I'll tell you more in later posts. 

On the Road with Marti

One last post about my friend Marti Plager, who died last month.  She and I loved to take road trips together -- to Houston for the big quilt festival three or four times, to Quilt National four or five times, to Pittsburgh for Fiberart International, to Philadelphia for the international SAQA conference,  to Paducah several times for the quilt show, and to a whole lot of workshops, museums and galleries.  

Fifteen years ago I wanted for some reason to enter an art show at the Kerouac Center in Lowell MA.  The artwork was supposed to  have something to do with Jack Kerouac, and I really didn't know or care much about him, so I figured I needed a gimmick.

I did some research and found that when Kerouac sat down to write his famous "On the Road," he had a roll of newsprint wide enough to fit in his typewriter and very, very long.  He started writing at the top of the roll and just kept going.  So I thought I could come up with a roll of Kerouac-style writing too and get into the show. 

I called my piece "On the Road with Marti" and it is a lot of stream-of-consciousness-type reminiscence of some of the many road trips that we took together.  It's too bad the manuscript ends in 2006, because there were many, many more trips that didn't get documented.

I used a typewriter font, printed the manuscript onto rusted muslin, added cross-outs and edits by hand (as writers did in the olden days of typewriters) and quilted it into a scroll.  I don't know what Kerouac lubricated his road trips with, but Marti and I always used red wine, so there's a wine stain too.  And it got into the show.