April quilt date report

Last month’s quilt date was a technique for piecing very thin lines. Here’s what Sandy Ciolino did with this technique, in a quilt called Fractures #2. I like the double meaning of the title: not only has she fractured the ground and put it together with skinny piecing, but she has further fractured the finished piece.

Sandy asked me whether I felt her work was too obviously derivative of mine. I told her that at this point yes, her work seems clearly related to mine, but she should keep at it and in a short time she will no doubt start developing her own twist on the technique. After all, what’s proprietary about cutting apart some fabric and sewing it back together?

Already Sandy is doing something different in how she has cut apart and reassembled the pieced sections of her quilt, and I hope she sticks with the series and continues to explore new ideas.

And stay tuned -- I'll introduce you to the May quilt date later today.

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?

Art-A-Day

May 2 -- high water

May 3 -- 1954 Plymouth

May 4 -- tiki light

May 5 -- night flag

May 6 -- immediate seating

May 7 -- green

May 8 -- windy

Text in art

As with anything that’s entwined with your whole life and soul, I have a certain ambivalence about text in art. That is, pictures with words in them.

I spent my career writing for a living and when I decided, upon retirement, to be an artist, I struggled with how to express myself in images rather than words. This was foreign territory to me. For several years, in fact, I made quilts using letters of the alphabet as kind of a compromise.

The alphabet, of course, lives somewhere in between word and image. It’s indispensable to making words, but it is not the same thing as words. Other alphabets may use ideographs, where you have a symbol for “ox,” but ours has evolved over the millenia and the symbol for ox has long since become A. Working in this halfway place allowed me to walk for some time with one foot on each side of the street, learning to work with images without entirely abandoning the old familiar words.

I had a solo show in 2005 with a quilt for every letter of the alphabet. When the show was over, I decided I was done with the alphabet, at least for the time being, and since then have become more confident in using images alone to say what I want to say. I like to give a little clue in the title, but let the viewer figure the rest out (or not).

Black I

Gray G
















Similarly, I tend to be wary of text in other people’s work. I think that in many cases, people use words as labels or signs to convey meaning they can’t do in images. To my eye, these labels often seem heavy-handed. And I think I see them far more frequently in fiber art than in other mediums.

I’m especially annoyed at the cheesy signs that you can buy at the craft store ready to affix to your “art” – you know, the little metal doodads that say “inspiration” or “love” or “friends.” Don’t like using faux scrabble tiles or old typewriter keys to spell out “sisters.” Don’t like using rubber stamps that say “Paris” or “Casablanca.” But I digress. That stuff isn’t art, it’s middle-aged ladies playing at art using other people’s ideas.

On the other hand…

I like letterforms. I like writing. I like words. I like printing. I like type. They are very important things in my life. And if there were a way to incorporate them into my art without being heavy-handed and cheesy, I might like to do so.

Having given this a lot of thought, I now wonder if one way to avoid the HH&C effect is to use found writing. I am happy using printed materials in my paper collage works, because the words are incidental. The words may be readable, but they‘re not there because of what they say.

Found writing is to deliberate writing as unposed photos are to portraits – and maybe not just unposed photos, but photos taken without the subjects even knowing they were being photographed. There is a place for portraits, but the unposed, even surreptitious snapshot often reveals far more and is far more interesting.

Jeanne Beck, whose blog I follow and from whom I had the pleasure of taking a workshop several years ago, has embarked on a new project where she’s collecting handwriting from as many different people as possible. If you’d like to participate, here’s what she wants. I’m very interested to see what she will do with it!

Grab bags -- good or bad?

My sister visited me recently and we spent lots of time in my studio making baby quilts for her two grandsons, whom I’ve written about recently. Since my studio is organized on the “in plain sight” plan, this also provided lots of opportunity for her to look at a wide variety of stuff that is piled here and there waiting for art to occur.

She said she would like to do some fiber art when she got home, but had no idea what kind. She was envious of all my miscellaneous stuff and thought that if I would send her a grab bag every now and then, that would fuel her imagination and encourage her to make some fiber art.

I said I would, but I did so with trepidation. Much as I love working with other people’s discards and leftovers, I think it’s hard to get from that point to substantive art. The problem with grab bag inspiration is that the work is usually one-off, and you know my opinion that substantive art is generally achieved by working in series.

True, sometimes artists come upon grab bag troves, for free or at the flea market, that contain enough goodies to sustain a series. We’ve all heard stories about finding a whole carton of old gloves, or thousands of buttons, or a suitcase full of old photos. You can do a lot with dozens of something, exploring new ideas and refining them into a coherent body of work.

My large fiber art group has a grab bag every month and arguably that’s the most popular aspect of our organization, maybe even outranking the programs and workshops. Several years ago I suggested that we should have a grab bag challenge to encourage people to make art with the stuff they brought home, rather than just have it take up residence in a new basement. I like to make a challenge piece every year, since it was my idea, but to me the challenge is how to incorporate grab bag finds into pre-existing bodies of work.

It so happens that I have a flea market trove of old photos that are available for art, and I have used these photos to make three grab bag challenge pieces. The jury is still out on whether this series is substantive or just sentimental, but I think it has potential, and will probably keep it up, if only once a year for the grab bag challenge.

Wilhelmina's Memories

grab bag finds included the green sheer dress with pink carnations embroidered on the hem, the cardboard bottom of a spool of thread, and a lace square

Connections

grab bag finds included snap tape, two kinds of loop tape, tape with buttonholes and the buttonhole end of a lace collar

So back to my sister. I promised to send her a grab bag, and I will, but I don’t want to be an enabler of junk art – one-off craft projects that don’t lead anywhere. My sister can do better! I also promised her to write up some distance-learning projects that she could use to explore different aspects of fiber art and see if she can find something that she wants to pursue.

I’ve sent her first learning project, which has to do with stitching. So I’m going to make her a grab bag of threads and base fabrics she can use in this project. Plus some other goodies that I hope won't send her down the road to junk art perdition.  Sure, it might be more flashy to send her a packet of angelina fibers, except that wouldn’t push her in the direction of serious art, and besides, I don’t own any angelinas to begin with, thank heaven. (Talk about junk art!!!) (Apologies to those who make serious art with angelinas, if such folks exist.)

I’ll post soon about the learning project; maybe you’ll find something interesting there too.

Accomplishment du jour

Having written for a living for decades, I will testify that one of the iconic parts of any writer’s life is that moment when you first see what you wrote in print. When I was a newspaper reporter, it was the moment they brought the papers up from the printshop, and everybody immediately grabbed a copy and checked out their own stories. When I did corporate communication, I usually had to okay the proofs, so I got to see my own work at an early stage of production, but I still liked to sit down and read my stuff when it came back from the printer. Whenever I write a magazine article or even have an artist statement in a show catalog, I feel an adrenaline rush the first time I read it in print.

This morning I wasn’t expecting to have one of those moments. The Kentucky State Fair catalog came in the mail yesterday and I thought I would look it over with my cup of tea to see when the deadlines were and start thinking whether I could fit it into my schedule this summer.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the State Fair. I’ve entered many times, won a lot of ribbons, and even got the Quilt Sweepstakes one year for the most points in all quilt categories. But I’ve also been mad to the point of boycott when I thought the judges were mired in the 19th century. I haven’t entered the quilt and textile categories in years, but I do sometimes put things in the fine arts and crafts department. Yet I always read the premium book avidly, underlining and circling and parsing how the criteria change from year to year, much as Sovietologists used to scrutinize who stood where on the May Day parade reviewing stand.

When I opened my premium book to the fine art section, I suddenly realized that I was reading my own writing!

Wait, you have to sit through the back story before you get the punchline.

There have always been four or five categories of “Creative Textiles” in the fine arts and crafts department. The criteria showed signs of having accreted for many years, with this or that stuck on by somebody for some purpose, but no overall structure.

In general, you can categorize textile art in three ways: by technique, by materials and by form. The State Fair did it each way. There were categories defined by technique (printed), by materials (“painting on silk”) and by form (wearable). But that led to overlaps (where would you enter a painted and screenprinted silk dress?) as well as holes, where a given textile art work might not fit comfortably into any category.

Although there are plenty of accomplished fiber artists in this part of the country, and the State Fair’s fine arts show has always had good participation from painters and photographers, the “creative textiles” categories were relatively sparse.

But something good happened last year. The superintendent of the fine art and craft department at the Fair decided it was time to overhaul the categories, and asked a fiber art group to make suggestions. I got to be on that committee, and after we hashed it over, I got to write up the notes. We knew that any changes would have to be approved by higher-ups in the Fair hierarchy, involving a journey into the 19th century, and wondered how our suggestions would be received.

The answer came this morning when I flipped to the creative textiles page and recognized my own writing. They adopted every one of our suggestions, practically verbatim, pausing only to add a few more examples to the lists we had provided. I am so pleased, because the new categories better reflect the wide variety of work being done in fiber art and should allow any artist to find the perfect category.

Many artists scorn the State Fair as plebeian, low-rent and tacky. The $25 prize for a blue ribbon is puny, and yes, your work is displayed in the same building as the homebrew beer and the flower arrangements. But for many people, entering the State Fair is an easy way to enter an art show. You don’t have to photograph your work, burn images to a CD, wait for jurying, risk rejection, write an artist statement or do any of the other bureaucratic tasks that make entering other shows more daunting. And it is nice to know that thousands and thousands of people see your work.

I hope the new categories and criteria will encourage more fiber artists to enter the Fair. PS – you don’t have to live in Kentucky to enter.

Here are the new criteria:

Stitched fabric construction – art made by stitching onto fabric or by stitching fabric together, by hand or machine, such as threaded needle embroidery, piece work, quilting, applique and embellishment, fabric collage, etc. Art must be generally flat and designed for wall display. May include non-fabric materials as an incidental part of the construction.

Manipulated fiber construction – art made with traditional fiber techniques such as any form of weaving, knitting, crochet, lace, felting, knotting, folding and looping, braiding and plaiting, basting, twining, rug hooking, etc. Art must be generally flat and designed for wall display. May include non-fabric materials as an incidental part of the construction.

Surface design – art incorporating a pattern or image applied onto fabric by dyeing, direct painting, printing (stencil, silkscreen or block), discharge, ikat and shibori (tied, wax or resist paste) batik, direct phototransfer, etc. Art must be generally flat and designed for wall display.

Three-dimensional – any freestanding or scultural work of textile art using any materials and techniques described in (classes above), in three-dimensional form. Art may be freestanding or displayed on the wall.

Traditional textile techniques, non-textile materials – innovtive art forms using any techniques described in (classes above), made from non-fabric materials such as metal, wire, non-toxic industrial material, wood, paper, etc. May include fabric materials as an incidental part of the construction.