Commissions force us to do many things. I don’t do realism well. Realism is why God made cameras. Art isn’t limited to realism. But there are people who love it. And need it. Truth to be told, l’m not good at it.
So my birds have purple and blue in them, and so do my frogs. It’s part shading, part colors building.
Dragonflies and roses detail l
I tend to make roses on spirals. It’s the way petals unfold.
Sometimes I let the tails spiral out. I like their motion. I’m told it’s not very realistic.
I have used rubbing plates for a more real rose. This is oil paint stick on hand dyed fabric. Outlined in metallic threads.
Lately I’ve tried roses with the points trimmed away or tucked in.
Will they be realistic enough? That remains to be seen. But they are probably as real as I can get.
Since Don gave me my studio, I’m there pretty much every day. This year, I had my last knee surgery in mid February and was back in the studio in April.
Working in a studio is sort of like gardening. You start something. Sometimes it simply grows on it’s own. Sometimes it grows in the dark. Sometimes you struggle with it. Sometimes it almost does itself.
But it’s a process. The art is a by product of learning and growth for every artist. The business of an artist is building their ability. The art happens by the way.
But this has been a good year, for a year when a fourth of it was spent recovering. I made over 50 quilts this year. I welcomed a new sewing machine. I learned some new tech. And I got to watch many of you stretch in your arts and lives as well. I am so grateful.
These aren’t all this year’s quilts. But here’s the highlights.
972 Shelter from the Storm971 Waterlily Pond
Whether I count it in work, learning, or new tools, it’s been a year I’m grateful for.
And I’m very grateful to Don, who is at the studio every day with me, ready when I need something lifted, or photoed, or looked at. He is the heart of my studio and I would be lost without him. He’s my heart too.
I hope this year brought you new tools. A new passion. Some time to make it happen. People who help you. And the grace to work with it, to work it out. Because if we don’t engage with our art, like a love, like a child like a pet, you can lose it.
Thank you all for the support you’ve given me. I hope I’ve supported you. We are all artists together, on our paths.
Two dimensional art is by nature static. It’s a flat image on a wall. So how do we make the image move? How do we make a two dimensional thing take flight?
There are several good tricks. Movement can be crafted in several small design decisions that convince our eye that the picture is in movement. This quilt I’ve been working on has a number of these features.
I was delighted when I saw a picture of a caterpillar perched on a fiddle head fern. I imagined a mob of caterpillars on the move, looking for lunch.
I started this quilt with some good movement in the fern heads themselves.
The Stems thrust upwards and the curved fern heads move at a spiral angle. Anything headed at an angle as if it’s falling is already in motion.
embroidery backembroidery front
I embroidered a number of caterpillars so I’d have some choices in color and shapes
I placed them several times, looking for the right flow.
This is the one I liked best. I went off the edge with my butterflies.
I like the flow, but it also works because of the interactions of the caterpillars. The angles of the bugs also suggest movement.
Finally I supplied lunch. It doesn’t really add that much to the movement, but the leaves with bites out of them makes me smile.
So to add movement to your art:
Put things at an angle
Go off the edge
Place elements where they interact together.
Put things into a path through the quilt.
The purpose of that movement is to send the eye through the journey of the visual path, to experience each part of the quilt through movement across it.
Some people spend a lot of time designing their art. They sketch. They plan. They build models. I’m so impressed. They can even tell you what it means.
I wish I could do that. I just can’t. It seems all of my art comes from random things, started but not finished, that I found later and made or put more random things on them. It sounds like a dreadfully chaotic way to make art. It is. It’s hellish for commissions. But it’s how I am. And if you want me to tell you what it’s about, you’ll need to wait several years until I get that straightened out. I am not in control of my art. All I can do is attend to it regularly, and do what it demands.
What is central to the process is the time stuff sticks around, on a photo wall before I commit to the next step. Is it right? Does it need to move three inches left? I’ve ruined many pieces by bulling through and finishing them without taking time to really look at them first.
I’m not helpless about this. And I’m not unskilled.It’s just the way it is. I suspect I’m not alone.
Art is a living thing, and a piece of art will tell you what it wants. And in the end, you didn’t so much make it as assist in it’s birth.
I laid out the background for this almost a year ago. Decided it needed white flowers on a pond edge. Didn’t know what else it needed. Lost it. Found it again. Lost it once more and then it resurfaced in the last cleaning. Somewhere in there I’d drawn a swimming frog in a batch of frogs. He didn’t get embroidered with the other batch, and I found him and thought, I really ought to finish him but I didn’t have a place to put him.
Then the piece of fabric surfaced. So I embroidered the frog, put in some water and rocks and a moon. Looked at it a while. HATED the moon. That almost never happens. But it just didn’t work.
When I was embroidering a batch of bugs and did three luna moths. One left over one just fluttered on to my quilt where the unfortunate moon was. White flowers and more water later it was done.
Did it take me two weeks? Or the two years to have the pieces fall together? Even I don’t know. I do know that fallow part of the process where you just stare at it, or lose it, or find it in a pile is an important part of the process, not to be missed or dissed.
I don’t know how to teach this kind of design. I can only show it in process. But I believe in it. I believe art grows like life, randomly, without sense, half by purpose but largely by accident, as it is. I can only stand back and watch.
Of all the techniques I do as an artist, nothing is harder than embroidered appliques. They’re images made completely from thread and zigzag stitch. They take more time and can distort easily. But there are times I insist on making them. Why? Because they’re amazing. They’re made from layer after layer of thread. The eye blends the colors into a whole, but since they are separately stitched, they retain their bright, clear colors.
They are the core of my art. My strongest clearest images, imagined in thread.
I’d started a bunch of bugs for this quilt. Of course I overdid. Actually, I meant to.
I’m pretty protective of these embroideries. They are the most ornamental part of my work and the most time intensive part of it. I always use the left overs on something else. But they are so usable. I’ve put them on denim jackets, and an ordinary jacket becomes an art statement. I once made elephant heads for the bottom of a gown someone wore for an award ceremony. They get around. They make ordinary things, extraordinary.
Last year I put some of these embroideries up separately on Etsy. They were so popular that I thought I’d offer them this year. You can order them either just as an applique, or as a pin or an ornament.
So here’s a sampling of them. They are all unique, none alike, but they’ll shine like a star anywhere you put them.
As I’ve been reviewing this years work I discovered that things had gone definitely froggy. How does that happen? I really can’t say.
But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the images that haunt us. Frogs and toads are images of movement for me. But they also catch me on the corner of my self image. I tend to see myself as a frog.
972 Shelter from the Storm
Not green really. Just awkward. A bit off. Always a bit unsure of myself.
971 Waterlily Pond
But never without a sense of joy. I love frogs and find them often just part of the imagery I need to explore. And it’s just as well.
I had someone I knew well recently ask me if I knew I was different. Well. Yes. Actually the hardest thing for me has been to connect with other ordinary people. My life has not followed ordinary patterns or currents. Sorry about that. I get most places other people go, but I’m not on the same schedule. I’m not particularly ordinary. It’s fairly embarassing.
I know, even past her irritation with me that that would only matter if there were any ordinary people.
There are people who say they aren’t artists. I don’t buy that. We are not artists by what we do. We are by our genome. We are artists because we are human and that’s part of our humanity. We may not choose to make art or need to make art, but our humanity makes us artists. It’s common to us but it’s not ordinary.
There are always artists who are better than who we are. More ability. More output. More glory. Sorry about that. They’re not ordinary either.
Perhaps the only thing we have to offer as artists is our viewpoint. Skill is something we learn over time. We develop all kinds of abilities, and they change our lives. They are a wheel that runs smooth or rough against the road of time. We gather skills, we drop what disinterests us, lose them as we age, change them as we grow.
Our vision is who we are. What we see, the images we must work with, those sometimes change, but they are personal. They are all we really have to offer. Talk about different! None of us are much like other people.
I tend to see people as animals. It’s not a comment on their humanity. It’s just my vision. All those bugs and frogs and birds, they’re people I know. That especially includes myself.
I am not like other people. I don’t think anyone really is. Our uniqueness is a sign and a symbol of that. I can’t help but wonder if ordinary is a part of exhaustion. Of giving up. Of giving in. Of course it could always simply be that I’m not trying hard enough to blend. But if you have this confusion where you see yourself as a large frog, well, there you are.
I’ve worked on cleaning up the studio over the last two days. Finishing The Garth left me done in a lot of ways. It’s hard to change gears and start something new. Usually I fish around for what’s left over from something else to make something new. It’s kind of like stone soup. You start something out of pretty much nothing and throw things in. It works for me. It isn’t often I start something out of complete nothing. There’s something left over, and it needs it’s own place.
You can really measure time in objects. Certainly you can measure time in work you’ve done. I was thinking about how my work has changed over the years. I’ve been quilting since I was 21. I’m 68. I have had time to see the art quilt movement start, grow, boom, explode, and retreat a bit . But if I’m honest about it, much of what I did was about the fabrics that were available to me. So I thought I’d look back at some of my work, and show where it shifted for me. Please forgive some of these photos for their size and detail. Some of them are quite old and out of my hands.
Solid colors:
I made my first quilts as bed quilts. I made them. We used them. They died, as most bed quilts do.
After that I fell in love with Amish quilts. That kind of stitching can only show up on solids. They arrived on the quilt scene around in the beginning 1980’s . Of course I couldn’t hand stitch them either. I was a dreadful hand quilter always. I worked with a walking foot and quilting by counting four stitches over for each row.
Hand Dyed Cotton
I’d been dyeing fabric since I was ten. But it was a game changer when I started treating dyed fabric with sponge painting. It gave me a light source within the quilt that I didn’t need to piece.
Sheer Fabrics:
I discovered sheers and laces as applique for translucent things like water, air, fire and flower petals. It gave me a way of layering things objects. It’s a cool trick and I still use it.
Weird brocades:
I first came into fancy brocades at the textile discount outlet in Chicago. But I’ve hunted them ever since. They make magnificent bugs.
Hand Dyed Cheesecloth:
Hand dyed cheesecloth makes a marvelous sheer. And It acts just like cotton because it is cotton. Here I used it to make mountains, but I’ve used it for flowers, mushrooms, rocks, and all kinds of things. The texture is cool too.
Oil Stick Rubbed Fabric
Oil Rubbed Fabric.
For as much as I avoided prints and textures, I’ve now fallen in love with the textures I can create with paint stick rubbed fabrics.
As I was cleaning out my studio I found all of these things. Some of them I use constantly. Some of them I see as a thing I outgrew a while ago. But art is not measured by our products. It’s measured by learned skill, new ideas and inspiration in use.
I’ve been working on The Garth for a while now. A garth is an open air garden in a church. This one is my memory of Capestrano where there are roses and lizards throughout the garden.
I’ve gotten the lizard embroidered, used a rubbed piece of fabric that looks like mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, I added in roses.
It’s all well and good to plop an image in the center of a piece. But If you’re trying to build a visual path for the eye to travel, that won’t work. The eye needs a pathway. It needs to be led through the piece.
How do we do that? It helps that the lizard is off center. The roses are a start. But it helps that start to use small elements to build a path for the eye through your quilt.
I made a batch of butterflies to interview. I really couldn’t tell which ones were going to do what I wanted. I tried the green ones, the orange ones, and an orange one with small stones.
The pathway between the orange butterflies and the stones move this in a path I like alot.
I drew the path so you can see it. The lizard and the roses are very pretty, but the butterflies and stones build the path so your eye can take it all in.
I’m fascinated with the concept of the visual path, and I keep working towards building them within my works. It depends not only on the major imagery, but on the small details that place us on the path.
