Art Process

Climbing Back into my Body: The Art of Living

| ellenanneeddy

I don’t normally blog about my life. But there are points of time when your life intercedes your art or your writing

Six months ago, I had my second knee surgery. All as planned.

The wonderful thing about having knee surgery is that you have a new knee. The horrible thing about knee surgery is that if you don’t work the muscles around it, it won’t help anything.

Of course, that’s true of any life gift. Any really valuable gift has to be worked with to gain any connection to it: a child, a love, a book, an education, a pet all have to be constantly engaged with if you want the heart of that gift, the miracle of change it brings.

So in April, after everything had healed, it still hurt pretty darn bad. I’m not a tiro about pain. I’ve been in constant pain since I was in my early thirties. My surgeon, Dr. Potaczek, is a benign tyrant and an excellent doctor. He’d told me up front that if I didn’t work it, it wouldn’t work.

So I went to  the Y in Galesburg and started range of motion water classes.

I expected to be in a room of old ladies walking around in the water. I was. Then I found out how astonishing those old ladies were. Some of them were in their 80s or more, beautiful, proportioned and able to go anywhere they wanted. They  have become my heros.

The teachers are astonishing. I was not expecting much. Galesburg is not a hub of learning, inspite of Knox where I went as a girl. But the teachers are compassionate and fighting the flight themselves. Graceously.

I’m finding myself changed. When I started, I was still using a walker for distances. The distance from the parking lot to the pool, counted as distance.

I forgot my cane in the other car a month ago and found I didn’t need it and it changed the way I walk.

I’m better. I know I’m a world better. But I have several takeaways from this.

  1. When I was a girl I learned to live strictly in my head and my hands, I lived with my thoughts and what I could make. Everything in between, like my body didn’t count. At 66 that’s not working. It’s lovely to climb out of my head and try living in my body. My body can be a good place if I graciously tend it.
  2. Does it hurt? Yep! Living hurts. And is warm and is hot and is cold. Pain is not necessarily bad. In this case, it’s a road to change.
  3. Am I creating anything? Yep. Me. I’m creating a me that can walk places, travel again, wander, swim, jog in water.
  4. How does all that feel? Astonishing. And stupid. You would think I would figure out I had to move to live. But you get things when you get things.
  5. What made this miracle? Access to health care. I finally, thanks first to my husband, Don, and secondly to medicare have access to blood pressure meds, and knee replacements. But also the ability to dream. I really had about given up. The love of the people around me changed that largely. Particularly my husband, Don.
  6. What have I learned? That I have to claim my body and work with it to live in it. And that it’s basically with all it’s flaws, worthy to live in. And that everyone should have the access to medical care. Without it we just crumble until someone sweeps us up and throws us away.

This is not a lecture blog. This is simply where I’ve been for a while. For a good month I came back from my classes and fell asleep in my chair after forgetting lunch. Before that, I was crumbling and I knew it. I’m grateful. I’m working it. Creation isn’t always art. It’s the art of living as well.

Mixed Media: Changing Art Forms

| ellenanneeddy

Artists are creatures of habit. We talk about developing a style and a look, but it becomes so much deeper than that. Eventually, we develop a way of thinking artistically that is our own.

So one of the strangest things to do as an artist is to change media. Because it inevitably changes the way we think about how we create.collage

Strangely enough, changing from fiber art to Photoshop was not as bad a stretch as I thought it would be. They’re both done in layers, and what matters is the order of the layers.

Why the change?

I’ve gone through some health passages lately. Last year I spent around 5 months in bed with leg and foot troubles. Wailing around with fabric was hopeless. Getting into the studio was hopeless too. I started working with art that could be in my bed with me.

Matisse paper cut-out

I’m certainly not the first. Matisse was bedridden for a while and did the most amazing art cut-outs of paper painted with gouache. The art doesn’t stop because you’re ill or unable. It’s like water flowing. It finds it’s own way.

 

 

Will I go back to fiber art? I hope so. But the collage has filled a fascinating place for me, and I’m still compelled by it. And dragging large quilts through the machine is physically tough.

one more once upon a time print final8-16_Page_01So in celebration of having made a lot of eye candy, I’ve made a little book of these things. One More Once Upon a Time is a collection of collages made from illustrations of Kay Nielsen, Tenniel, Denslow, Neill, and Grandville. This is a small gallery book of these that I hope you enjoy as much as I do. Available on Amazon and in my Etsy store ( should you want a signed copy.)

You can see more collages on my web page for that.

 

Off the Grid: Experimenting Because You Can

| ellenanneeddy
9026-28 Artifacts, Dragonfly 2

It’s felt very odd not to be teaching on the road. My health has not permitted it, my husband has not encouraged it, and the demand is mostly gone. For a long while, I think my body decided it was a good time to sleep.

So the drive to create went on vacation until I was able to get out of bed. And the physical strength to work on large tapestries will have to be built up again. It’s a physical activity. It takes muscle.

So I’ve taken to playing with little things. I’m working on a project with Irish crochet in yarn. I’ll show you that later.

I’ve also been playing with oil stick rubbing.

 

866 Arabesque Rose

I know. I know. It’s not in vogue anymore. And it’s stinky. I know. I still think the look is amazing. I’ve been trying to incorporate it into quilts and have loved the look of it. It’s something structured in my very non-structured head.

I did a curtain of nothing but scraps of oil rubbed fabric. Then I started to think about what a small work would look like if that were the start.

 

 

 

 

920 Artifacts: Dragonfly 4

I stitched them with metallic thread to give them sparkle. They were beautiful but subtle. I don’t ordinarily do subtle.

So I added some neat brass findings, silk roses and novelty yarn. They were still subtle.

I worried about that for about three minutes and decided subtle might not be a bad thing.

919-18 Butterfly 2

So here they are. I’ve called the Artifacts, because I see them as found work rather than original embroidery. They’re sort of a collage in oil rubbing and stitching.

So let me know. What do you think? Every time you start an experiment, you have no idea where it might go.

These quilts are on sale in my etsy shop.

Transformation in Process: Verbal Expression vs. Visual

| ellenanneeddy
MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Floral Arrangement 26

Many of you have followed me as an artist and teacher for the 35 years of my career. I thank you for that. I’ve so enjoyed the ebb and flow of teaching and learning that the quilting community has given me. I’ve loved exploring my art as I’ve had the opportunity of offering you all kinds of new techniques to explore in your own.

But nothing is forever. The world changes and we change in response.

Several years ago, the teaching positions began to dry up.  I really can’t pin precisely when this happened. It was in response to everyone’s tightened monetary conditions. Guilds felt they couldn’t afford a teacher every month. Or a national teacher more than once a year. The gigs trickled down from twelve gigs per year to two or three. It was no one’s fault. The profession I’d followed for thirty-five years was over. I was unable to make the switch that would have perhaps helped me continue. I needed to acknowledge that in a world where I was my own employer, I’d lost my job.

the-problem-with-princes
Problem with Princes

My art started years ago as an obsessive hobby and then became a career. But a career wound down does not return to an obsessive hobby. It flows into something else that fits better with the changes of the time. For one thing, I don’t have the strength I used to have at the machine. Or the need to create in the same way. The need for creation never goes away. But it does shift in focus and in substance.

So I found myself writing. I’ve always been a story teller. It’s a family legacy, that run’s through my mother’s side all the way back to Ireland. We tell stories.

Now before that, the bulk of my creativity has gone into visual expression. I’ve spoken in color and creatures, telling human stories in visual ways. Right brain stuff.

In my teaching, I got very familiar with identifying right brain people from left brain people. They needed different things. Right brain people needed stimulation and permission. Left brained people needed a formula they could follow. I worked hard at providing both because I’ve always believed a good teacher teaches everyone, not just the students like herself.

So it’s been a total journey to finally just express things in words. My left brain is pretty lame. But I’ve forced it around the track enough to try to master stories strictly in words.

My family has never been known for written stories. That has been the puzzle I’ve been unlocking for the last three years. How to tell a story that makes someone howl with laughter or shiver with fear. Or simply feel the connection of how we all react to the crazy bits of our worlds.

In my irresponsible tweens I spent time in Boston telling fortunes as a tea leaf reader in a tea room. It was a crazy time full of impossibly odd people and weird stories. It was completely formative. I learned things I’ll never do again. But in the way of all story tellers, I feel a need to share the stories just for the wacky reality of it.

I have not written a memoir. These are fantasized and sanitized for everyone’s protection. But it was not a safe journey or a time of stability. It was a wild unbalanced experience of people who were truly different and also in chaos. At the time, I felt that my reading helped them. Now I know better. But it is the journeys that build us, not by coming to a destination, but by enduring the stress of the journey itself.

So forty-nine stories later I have three books ready to publish. They are the loosely told story of my youth, going into a place of possibly and danger possibly to help those around me, but mostly to find out who I really was. I could not have become either the artist I was or the teacher I was without this journey. They both were formed in the steps towards the world of the psychics and the pathway away from that later.
gifted wSince these stories are all about tea leaf reading, I’ve included a tea cup with each of them. It’s not necessarily what someone would see reading, but just to give you an idea of how it feels.

So, will you join me in my remembrance of this journey?

Sight Unseen what the parrot saidwys My first story What the Parrot Said is available on Amazon for .99. There are other stories ready for you to read on my website, Sightunseen2016.wordpress.com.

 

 

tea room tales wI hope to have the first book, Tea Room Tales, available on Amazon very soon.

If you are kind enough to read my stories, please tell me what you think. A review is always welcome and the stories are in the long run, there for you. So I need to know how you feel about them.

It’s my transformation, from visual to verbal, from art to stories. Will you come along for the ride?