Sunflowers are irrepressable. Last summer we had a sunflower field nearby. It’s one thing to see a sunflower in someone’s yard. But a whole field! Fabulous!
So I spent a good two weeks in color therapy making these sunflowers. These were made of organza and hand-painted lace fused to hand-dye, felt, and Stitch and Tear. They were stitched as whole flowers to go on the top, so I could cut away any distortion before I applied them. I used not just sunflower yellow, but the purples, and greens that make the shadows of a sunflower.
Color is a fine antidepressant, and these made me happy. All I need to do now is stitch them into the piece. I placed similar colored birds in and out of the petals. I think I’ll add ladybugs for a dash of red.
But there’s another good reason to add in purple and green. Classical art was always reaching toward realism. When photography was invented, we had all the realism we couldn’t attain as artists. I respect realism. But I know a losing battle when I see one. I can be more realistic, but it’s not my skill or my goal. I want to hold the moment in impossibly beautiful color.
Once I walk outside into the world, realism fails me. Because the sunflowers do have streaks of green and purple and everything is colored by the available light. If the light is purple, everything is somewhat purple. If I’m using a hand-dyed background, the light is defined by the color of the background, and everything fits within that. In blue light, a sunflower would be blue. I haven’t tried that. But now that I’ve thought it….
The light is also colored by my mood. I’m the artist. I can’t help but paint what I see.
Here’s some other sunflowers I’ve made over time. Vincent Van Gogh was right. You just can’t make too many sunflowers. It’s a good cure for the summertime blues.
While working on my very brown guinea hens, they began to develop personalities. Frankly, they remind me of church ladies: the old biddy crowd. I began to realize that they are basically chickens with dots.
So I started working their background. It’s basically a barn yard.
I know. Not appealing. Very, very brown.
So I thought of the flowers my neighbors grew in their back gardens and alleyways. One of my neighbors had hollyhocks. They’re not currently in style, I guess. They’re in the same classification as sunflowers. They’re tough, tall, and grow in miserable soil. And, unlike sunflowers, they come in a rainbow of colors.
I loved them then. I love them now. My friends and I made hollyhock dolls and played with them endlessly.
I don’t get to garden very much nowadays. I don’t bend that well. If it doesn’t work into my raised beds, it won’t happen. But my studio garden can grow anything I want under my machine. I wanted hollyhocks to brighten up the barnyard. So I made a batch.
These are cut from hand-painted lace. Most lace and organza nowadays is a test tube baby. It’s usually made of nylon or polyester. Either way, it won’t dye with regular dyes.
These laces fuse on with Steam A Seam 2. I’ve placed them on a sandwich of felt and Stitch and Tear to embroider them.
They add some brightness just as they are, but the stitching can take it right over the top. I used some of the most neon colors out of the Madeira neon line.
The leaves are veined simply.
These flowers should shine some light on the barnyard. If I can’t grow them in my garden, I can sew them instead. And the biddy crowd loves them.
There’s a lot of repetition in any form of art. There’s that moment of ignition, those moments of planning, and pretty soon, you come down to those hours of creation. And they’re full of repetition. Small tasks over and over.
If it sounds like purgatory of a sort, it is. It’s infinately better than the hell of an overactive imagination on a bad day. Repetitious art has saved my life more than once.
Part of it is that repetitious actions put us in a different mode and zone. It’s been called right brain thinking, but I think it needs the reinforcement of physical action, particularly action that doesn’t take a lot of thought.
It may be borking but like everything there is an upside. Art is about need. Need to express yourself, need to fill up space, need for stimulation all turns itself into artwork, given the right emphasis. How would I know? What do you think?’
I’ve kind of had a tough couple of months, but it’s been mostly about friends. We’re all in that just-turned-70 club. Paul Simon was right. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” It is. All of a sudden there are serious things wrong with all of us.v All of a sudden we’re old.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Time doesn’t stop. The warantee runs out. We’re all there, in a way. All we can do is to refuse to run away from each other, no matter how bad it gets.
I’m trying to figure out what I do with this. If you’re one of the people I’m talking about, you can know this. I won’t run and I won’t hide. We’re in this together.
Thank God for repetition. For mindless tasks that eventually build art. They also bring quiet, piece, peace and courage.
On the other side, enough blue, purple, orange and yellow is an excellent color therapy. Color really is an antidepressant.
My mother made sure I had a pink bedroom as a girl. But being herself and a sophisticat, she made it brown and that orangy pink that only the fifties could love. Between that and pink being a color for silly girls, I wrote pink off. Magenta, yes. Fuschia of course. But no baby pink ever!
When we were 5 my cousin Peggy and I decided that yellow was our enemy color. We would never wear yellow beause of that. We had a point. It didn’t flatter either of us. Yellow was the enemy.
Yellow is still unflattering, and I still won’t wear it. But I have come to a truce with it. The truth is, you can’t just cut yourself off from a color as an artist.The world is full of colors and they all need each other no matter how you feel about them. You need them all. Which brings me to my other enemy color, pink.
Except that you really can’t do that. Sooner or later there will be a reason for every color. And you’ll need it in your crayon box.
I could have never used pink if I hadn’t found roseated spoonbills.
I’ve been in love with dinosaurs all my life. When paleantologists started talking about birds coming directly in line from dinosaurs, I went on a bird binge. Particularly the big water birds that clearly are dinosaurs. I’m still there. I loved there odd legs and wings and bills.
I’d worked with herons before. And I still love them. But the roseated spoonbills were unabashedly pink. And clearly dinosaurs. They turned my world upside down enough to use baby pink.
Pink or not, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it’s the bill. Or the long stalky legs. Or the idea that something very old is still marvelous and wonderful, and part of our world. I can relate.
If it makes something that wonderful I’ll use baby pink and coral pink, seashell pink, flesh pink. For a roseated spoonbill, anything.
Do you have a color you just don’t like? Be brave. Embrace it. It maybe the only thing that makes what you want come to life. Mix it in with other things and watch it show you where it’s place in the world is.
Remember when I said I needed to calm down the mockingbird quilt I’ve been working on? The background was pretty wild. I don’t quite know what to do with deserts. so I don’t know when I’ve gone over the top.
But I do know how to put out a visual firestorm. You go for the complementary color. The eye gets excited by all that contrast, but it cools off all that flaming color blaze.
With all that red, the complement is green. Which means cactus.
I’m not a cactus person. I’m not a desert person. So I’ve spent a week looking at pictures and identifying how I want to make cactus. It’s all about the texture, so it’s all about the stitchery, which means it’s all about the angle of the stitch.
We’ve talked about stitch angles a lot. The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book has an explanation of that you might find helpful. Moving straight through the machine gets us a hard thick line. Moving out from side to side creates shading. Moving through with an angle gets us a curved line. Here is a link to the blog about Zigzag Stitching.
Straight stitching in spirals creates textures on paddle cactus. The outside is shaded with an outline on the angle, stitching side to side to shade, and some straight-through smoothing.
I used a spikey shading headed upwards to give the feel of rough texture, and used straight stitch for the spines.
I sat down yesterday and mixed the colors for dyeing. It felt like I was sitting in a circle of old friends. Scarlet, sitting next to Fuschia who had just made friends with a new color Dragonfruit, and was waving across the color wheel to the Lemon/lime.
I’m dyeing fabric today in preparation for surgery. If I’m going to have to go through heart surgery, there better be a really big pony after all the poop. So a pile of fresh fabric waiting for me is sensible. It fills the time while I’m waiting and it leaves me with a lovely pile of fabric to dream about until I can sew again. It’s good preparation I think. And a good way to fill the waiting time.
I started dyeing fabric at thirteen. I found a book in the library that blew me out of the water, with it’s papercut illustrations. The Emperor and the Kite, by Jane Yoland used paper in variegated colors that resembled the hand dye I still do. I wanted to work with the technique and it never occured to me to dye or paint paper. I dyed fabric with Rit.
This all happened in the kitchen sink and my father who was the major cook in the house had opinions about it. My father was almost non-verbal, but he looked like I’d kicked his puppy when he saw the kitchen after I was done. He unblocked the sink, scrubbed it down and said nothing. He always understood the passion around projects. He had his own, and he often helped with mine.
But it set something in me. I don’t really want colors that stand apart from each other .I want them to mingle and to dance within the fabric itself. I’ve been dyeing fabric in some form ever since.
Colors are about relationships. They have relationships with each other that depend on how they are formulated. I am not a dye master. Or someone who can responsibly measure dye and mix it reliably. I dump dye into a cup. I buy a bevy of colors and use them knowing how they relate to each other.
“Knowing the definition of a word is a pinpoint on a map. It tells you where you are. It doesn’t tell you how to get where you want to go. It’s the rawest of beginnings.
In the same way, color theory feels like the the dreariest driest subject in the catalog of art education. We look at the wheel and say the canticle, red and blue make purple, red and yellow make orange…. It feels like a recitation from kindergarten. And sadder still, it’s not always true. We’ve all mixed yellow and blue to get the most grizzly browns. It feels like finding out about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. A nice story for children but not really true.
Part of what we’re missing with that is the reality that it’s a theory. It works, simply when it does work and when it doesn’t, we need to explore why. Color theory doesn’t account for imperfect color. Color me surprised. Another thing that is imperfect in a imperfect world.
The most interesting distinction with mixing color for me is the contrast in thermal energy. Each color in its imperfections leans a bit towards the yellow sunny side, or the greenish shady side. If you mix all sun colors or a shade colors, the combinations are clear and bright. If you mix sun and shade, you get earth colors.
So if I place Lavender and Orchid together, as sun colors they blend into each other. If I add Lilac, a shade color, the combination browns out a bit. Still light purple but with a browned quality. If I add a sun color like Clear yellow, it will stay clear. Lemon yellow with its shade qualities will brown it out.
The real question is not where we are on the map but where can we go. What color theory really describes is the relationships between colors. Within the color wheel, the spots within that wheel define the same kinds of relationships between different colors. Those relationships go back to that primary list of monochromatic, complementary, and analogous color themes that seem so very dull. Because they define the tension between colors.
For dyeing, you have to know the name and know the color. They all lean one direction or another. There are no perfect primaries, secondaries or tertiaries. If you know which way they lean, you can predict the effect. But you never know exactly what the dye on fabric will do. And it’s never the same. Each piece of fabric is unique.
The distance between colors, creates the pull across the wheel. The closer they are to each other, the least pull. The least tension. The least excitement.
The farthest distance any color combination has is directly across from each other, as complements. Those are combinations that tug and pull and electrify us. Colors right on top of each other are smooth and slide into each other.
It’s not one combination. It’s a circle of combinations that create the same feeling. We can move the circle endlessly and get the same energetic result.”
Which is why it’s such a good thing I know these colors as my friends. I know who the mix with and who they fight with and what it will look like after they have a party together.
I’m spending two days dancing with color to pour myself into that joy, instead of the apprehension about the surgery. After all, color is really an antidepressant. And I’ll have a lovely pile of new fabric to play with after I’m back and healed.
