More Scribbles

Still working on 12"x12" blocks. I have been invited to show at the Jonal Gallery in Columbia, Pennsylvania this summer (June 22 through July 22) and have been working on these smaller sized pieces. The owner of the gallery told me that the top sales price is around $1,000. My big pieces come in significantly higher than that, but I will show some anyhow. Then everybody will think these smaller pieces are a real bargain and snap them up. I've mounted them on stretched canvas painted black so they are easy to hang (and don't look like place mats.)

Scribble #10

©2012

Scribble #11

©2012

Scribble #12

©2012

Scribble #13

©2012

Scribble #14

©2012

Scribble #8

©2012

Scribble #9

©2012

Destroying the Evidence

Sometimes there is just too much stuff. My studio, in particular my work table, accumulates stuff. And not all of it is related to quilting. Today I've been putting stuff in its proper place and I'm hoping I will be able to work without that claustrophobic feeling that results from too much stuff. I would like to be able to work in more than 2 square feet.

That brings up the question of what to do with pieces that just aren't quite up to standards. These are pieces that might have been experiments, trying out some new design or technique, or maybe finished pieces that should never see the light of day. I don't even want to give them away because I don't want them out in the world with my name on them. Today I took 5 small pieces that fit into this category and sliced them up with my rotary cutter.

Now some industrious people might do this and then attempt to make a silk purse out of these sows' ears by putting them back together. Maybe if I thought I could redeem these strips I would try that, but then I think why should I use up Valuable Quilting Time trying to fix something that really should just be thrown out. So out they will go. I have too many other things I would rather be doing than working with materials I already don't like.

I need to go through my closet galleries and pull out some really old work and see if it needs the same treatment. I know there are some pieces like that, but there are also some pieces that could be sold or donated. I might not like them any more, but that would be because I'm not working in that style now. 

Outside/Inside the Box

Continuing comments on the weekend in Philadelphia. The show at the Crane Building, Outside/Inside the Box, was most impressive and quite an expansion on the idea of fiber. Very few of the works would fit the definition of  "quilt". Materials used included aluminum mesh, wires, grommets, hemp, ropes, printed cloth, words written on vellum, leaves, fruit peels, ostrich shell beads, oxygen tubing, cable ties, florist card holders, plus things that immediately come to mind as fiber - linen, cotton, wool, thread, etc. I loved the knitted sock monkey suit, which you can see in the slide show, along with most of the other works. 

And I was thrilled to see my friend Linda Colsh's work hanging in this prestigious show. She is one of only a few artists who has 2 pieces in the show. Linda flew in from her home in Belgium for the conference, since she in on the SAQA Board of Directors. Since her family lives sort of near to me, we rode up together to Philly, and had a wonderful time gossiping talking about people we know, shows, her move back to the US in 2 years, and so on.

Defiant

©2011 Linda Colsh

Almost There

©2011 Linda Colsh

So now it's back home and time to get serious work done. It was truly inspiring to see all that artwork. And it was also very exciting to see 13 students from East Carolina University, where they are enrolled in the Textiles Program. It was inspiring to listen to them talk about their work and their enthusiasm was contagious. They are not the least bit constricted by the old traditions of quilts, and are pushing the boundaries in ways the rest of us haven't even thought of.

And for all the people who gave me grief about not posting, behold, 3 posts in one day.

Which one?

It's that time of the year again when SAQA asks its members to donate a small quilt for the Benefit Auction. I've contributed a piece in every previous auction and will do it again this year. I've been working on a graffiti-type theme and continued that series in these 12"x12" blocks. I will pick one of these to donate to SAQA, and right now I'm thinking about #6.

Scribble #1 

©2012

Scribble #2 

©2012

Scribble #3 

©2012

Scribble #4 

©2012

Scribble #5 

©2012

Scribble #6 

©2012

Scribble #7 

©2012

Fantastic weekend

I spent last weekend in Philadelphia at the SAQA / SDA conference and it was terrific. Got re-acquainted with lots of people and was able to put faces to names I know from the SAQA email list and also from Facebook. Was chastised for neglecting my blog. Spent a day trying to see as much of FiberPhiladelphia as my poor brain (and feet) could handle. Just had a plain old good time.

Friday night was the opening of Art Quilt Elements at the Wayne Art Center. This is the 10th exhibition of this show and it has become one of the premier art quilt shows in this country. The venue is fantastic and the show committee pulls out all the stops and puts on a great show. I bought the catalog to help me remember what is in the show. It's a great record of the show, but unfortunately, the color is off. This seems to be a common problem in the printed renditions of art, and I guess AQE is no exception. But don't let that stop you from getting the catalog; use your imagination! I tried to find a place on their website where you can order the catalog, but it seems to be quite well hidden. I guess you will have to contact the Wayne Art Center directly if you want one. It's $20 plus shipping.

Saturday was the day that we spent touring FiberPhiladelphia. What a fantastic accomplishment this is. More than 20 exhibits, all related to fiber, is almost too much to handle. Actually, it is too much for just one day so it was necessary to pick and choose. First we hit the Snyderman/Works Gallery for the 8th International Fiber Biennial. I took some pictures but the ones on their website are far better. We also went to Bluestone Gallery, where Lisa Call is having a solo exhibit. While we were there, several of her small pieces were purchased. Let's hope that one of the big ones goes out the door, also.

The Highwire Gallery was another stop on our tour. More great fiber art, much of it by people I know personally. Must be coming up in the world. The highlight of the tour was the exhibit at the Crane Building gallery Outside/Inside the Box. I applied to this show and wasn't accepted and after seeing what was, I wasn't surprised. There were actually very few actual quilts in this show. It was fiber in all its manifestations and there are some very cool things hanging there.

Philadelphia has some old, worn out areas with buildings that are neglected and falling down. This, of course, makes them extraordinary photo ops.

Whaddya know! Stikman is here, too.

The Painted Bride Art Center is a piece of art in itself. Totally covered in tiles on three sides (the fourth side is a wall shared with the adjacent building). Can't even imagine how long that took. Wonder where they got all the tiles.

This post is long enough so I will continue in the next one. 

Excellent News!

Today the Maryland State Arts Council released the names of the Individual Artist Award Winners for 2012. I am thrilled to announce that I have won an award. I entered my work in the Crafts category which is described as "Functional and Non-Functional Crafts: Ceramics, Glass, Wood, Metal, Fiber, Textiles and Recycled
Materials". I know several of the other winners are fiber artists, but most of the names are unfamiliar. I will need to do some research.

This is Knots, one of the pieces I submitted for jurying. It's a small piece, about 24" x 24". Currently it's on display at the Ratner Museum in Bethesda. I wrote about this in my previous post.

Right now I'm sitting here with a patch over one eye, having had cataract surgery this morning. It's weird having an eye operated on and being awake while it's happening. They numbed up my eye so I couldn't see out of it and also couldn't feel anything. A very strange feeling, to be sure. I'll take the patch off soon and see the doctor tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed....

In a Collection

Last fall my SAQA auction quilt was purchased by Del Thomas for her collection. I was thrilled that she bought it because Del only buys the really good stuff. She has some very famous names in her collection. Right now there are 40 quilts from her collection on view at the Visions Art Museum in San Diego. The show will be up until April 22. On Del's blog you can see a picture of the display. If you are lucky enough to be in the area, I hope you have an opportunity to see this show, along with two other shows. One is Art Meets Science, a show of 35 quilts, which is sponsored by SAQA. The other is Magical Mystery Tour, inspired by a song, title, or movie by the Beatles.

Currently I have work on display at the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, Maryland. The show is up through February 27 and you can see the works of 7 fiber artists. The opening reception was on the 5th and we all brought food and wine. I looked at the heavily laden table and thought we had brought way too much. Wrong. Every drop of wine was drunk and the only food left was some forlorn pieces of broccoli. I think that there are a bunch of locals who come for every show opening, knowing there is free food and wine. There must be an assisted living facility nearby because I saw an inordinate number of walkers coming through the door.

I was assigned a corner for my work. On the left is 105 Degrees, followed by 4 small pieces from my Ventanas series (ventanas is Spanish for windows). Next is a 4-tych titled Four Square. I really love the effect of the graffiti line traveling through the different pieces.

And around the corner is Knots, which looks like it could be an extension of Four Square, but was not intended to be. Other works in the show are silk paintings, more quilts, and embroidery work. If you are in the Baltimore/Washington area, it's worth your time to visit the Museum.

A Diversion

Sometimes you just need a break from the business of making art. It's work. Sometimes you just want to play with fabric and sew. I was presented with the perfect reason to take such a break - a new great niece was born three weeks ago. Time to make a baby quilt. At a sewing retreat I attended earlier this month someone showed some blocks she had made using a pattern that wasn't very difficult in itself, but when tiled with other similar blocks made a very cool design. I dusted off my template making skills, and they needed some serious dusting, along with several attempts to make them come out the way they were supposed to come out. And this is the result.

I really like how this came out, and almost want to make a bigger version. Almost, but not quite. It started out at 40"x40" but I have washed it and it has shrunk up a bit. I like that because it makes the quilting show up better. Click on the image for a larger view.

 

 I quilted the white sections with a heart and feather type design and I tried to photograph it so the quilting showed up. Not very successful, so I upped the contrast and downed the brightness in Photoshop Elements and this shows a bit of the quilting.

Tomorrow I'm headed down to Bethesda, outside of Washington, D.C. to install my portion of this show. There will be seven of us exhibiting (there are eight names on the card, but one has dropped out due to family issues). The location is at the Dennis and Phillip Ratner Museum on Old Georgetown Road, just outside of the Capital Beltway. The show runs February 1 through the 27th, and the artists' reception is Sunday, February 5 from 1:30 to 3:30. Super Bowl Sunday - might be a bit of a conflict.... For more information, visit the website.

Off to Dhaka

I had to look this up in Wikipedia. Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, which is in southeast Aisa, east of India, and at the top of the Bay of Bengal. My quilt is going there, not me. It has been selected for the Art in Embassies program and will be picked up tomorrow and shipped off.  It's fairly small, 40" x 33" and is a whole cloth piece, painted. The background is made up of gelatin plate prints of hosta leaves. The three large leaves are also hosta plants, but I enlarged the images and drew the outlines with an airpen, stitched along the lines, and then brushed white paint lightly across the top to highlight the leaf shape.

Three Leaves ©2009

Three Leaves (detail)

This is a companion piece to Fading Glory, also gelatin plate prints of hosta leaves. This piece is larger, 57"x42", but is also a whole cloth, at least the background. As I made each print on this piece and then removed the fabric, there was still paint on the gelatin plate. I used this remaining paint to do the images on Three Leaves. The appliqued yellow flower is an image of a dying coneflower, greatly enlarged. The lines were drawn with an airpen, then quilted. The back of this piece is pretty cool because I rubbed paint over where the coneflower quilting is, which almost makes this a two-sided quilt. 

Fading Glory ©2009

Fading Glory (detail)

This piece is also away at a show being held at the Muse Gallery in Longmont, Colorado. 

And the show at the Torpedo Factory opens this week. This is the show that I had to quickly substitute another piece because I forgot I sold the one that was supposed to be in the show. Happy New Year!

It's a Mystery

Once again I have let posting go by the wayside. It seems that everything else is getting in the way and I'm not really doing much art anyhow. Maybe it should be a new year's resolution to be more consistent. I think I've said that before, and look how well I've done.

So what's the mystery? I know this has happened to others. I went to the Closet Gallery to find a quilt that was going to go off to a show. It's a group show, not a juried show, and so I didn't send in any images. That would have really been awful.  The day before I'm supposed to deliver the quilt I go look for it. My quilts are stored rolled and in a bag and the bags are individually labeled with the name of the quilt. There are a lot of them, quite a pile. I go through the pile once, no quilt. I go through it again, more thoroughly. No quilt. Starting to sweat a bit here. I go to the secondary closet and search there - no quilt. I keep a database that tracks all my quilts, where they've been, and where they're supposed to go, and most of the time it works pretty well because I've never double booked anything. It doesn't add any new information. Then I go to my web site and look there and it's marked SOLD. This is a surprise because I for sure don't remember selling it, and it's not like I sell so many that I would lose track of that. Can't find any information in my Quicken records either. (I hate that program, btw.)  Luckily, I could substitute another piece but that surely doesn't solve the mystery of what happened to the quilt.

Rising Sun

I will keep looking for it and checking through my financial records because it really bugs me that I have total non-recollection of a sale event. A real mystery.

Update - I am not going crazy. I found the receipt. The quilt was sold through The ArtFul Home in July of 2009. Good. I feel much better now.

I got a new camera

Testing out my new camera on a walk in my neighborhood.

Getting back to work

Now that the remodeling is finished, I have no more excuses for not being in the studio working. But I sure am out of the habit, in addition to feeling very un-creative.  So I thought I would prime the pump by doing some fabric painting. Several weeks ago I bought a Gelli plate from Gelli Arts. This is a substitute for a gelatin plate except it doesn't deteriorate nor does it need refrigeration. I thought it has a lot of positives, first off being that you don't have to plan ahead to mix up the gelatin. So I got mine out and began to play with it. The first thing I noticed is that it is much firmer than gelatin. When I tried putting leaves and other stuff on it to make an impression, they tended to slide around a bit. Also, I often put too much paint on and so ended up with a very blotchy print. I haven't quite decided if I'm in love with this or not - I think it needs more practice.

Next I watched Kerr Grabowski's Adventures in Surface Design I've taken classes from Kerr and also have her Deconstructed Screen Printing DVD, and both are fabulous. This new DVD focuses on paint, instead of thickened dye as in DSP. She does some screen printing with torn paper stencils and also works with water soluble crayons and oil pastels. These would be some fun techniques to add to my gel printed fabrics.

 

On this piece I tried to use her technique of doing a repeat design. I didn't line my screen up very well so the prints are a bit offset, but it's not a big deal. The green layer is from the gel prints. And I also used a curved tip syringe to do some scribbling.

On this piece I drew on the screen with the oil pastels, and then pulled the transparent paint base to transfer the colors to the fabric.

This is a torn paper stencil along with brush strokes. I think this piece of fabric will look a whole lot better when it's cut up.

I used the fabric crayons to do a rubbing from a sink mat onto the fabric, and then screened it with yellow paint.

For this piece I did a rubbing onto the screen, and then pulled it with yellow paint. This works a bit like deconstructed screen printing since the crayon slowly transfers to the fabric and you get color outlines.

For this one I drew directly on the screen with the crayon. It was a grid with random x-es. The x marks deconstructed and lasted a lot longer than the grid. By the fourth pull, the grid was pretty much gone.

I suspended this piece of fabric, filled a syringe with watered down paint and then drew lines, letting the paint drip down the fabric. The paint was pretty dilute and it mostly just spread out. It would be really cool if the paint would form drip marks and not be absorbed into the fabric, but I don't have a clue how that would be accomplished.

Random brush marks, then dip the fabric in very dilute paint, wrinkle it up, then let dry. The dilute paint migrates and makes interesting effects.

Here again I drew on the screen, filled circles and scribble lines. I love the outlines around the circles and lines as the crayon dissolves from the screen onto the fabric. One major difference between working with paints and working with thickened dyes is that the paint cannot be allowed to dry on the screen. If it's not washed immediately, it dries and the screen is ruined. Thickened dye can be allowed to dry on the screen and then it becomes part of the next design also. These little remnants of color really spark up the fabric. I guess I will have to get out the dyes....

Post remodel observation: Since the kitchen level is now insulated to nearly an R-15 and the rest of the house has no insulation we are finding that the kitchen is the warmest room in the house. Used to be the coldest, and in the dead of winter I always had a space heater running under the table to keep me warm. But now we have a dilemma. The thermostat is on the kitchen level. When it's set at 68 degrees, it's fine for that room, but the rest of the house is at least 2 degrees colder, and it's noticeable.  If we jack the thermostat up to make the rest of the house 68 degrees, it's almost too warm in the kitchen. Insulating the rest of the house is not an option, so we're going to have to think of some other method of redistributing the warm air. It's tough in a split level house to get good airflow. And it's supposed to snow tonight. There have only been 4 recorded snows in Baltimore in October. With leaves still on the trees, branches will fall. Bummer.