I saw my new cardiologist yesterday. Nothing has really changed. I still have a moderate leaky valve. I still have an aneurysm. I still have a blocked artery.
But none of them are actively causing me pain or difficulty. None of them are acute or active. They’re just there. And they’re not quite bad enough for surgery.
So for the moment, I’m off the hook. They’ll monitor. I shouldn’t lift anything heavy or strain, or lean over very much. That’s a very moderate group of limits, considering. I’m afraid I can’t help anyone move at this time.
Is it coming someday? Inevitably, I suppose. But not today. Today we make quilts!
And a Dutch baby for breakfast.
Thank you for your care, your prayers, your concern and your love. You’ve always held me up. I hope I can always do that for you in return.
Yesterday we had the Pop Up Sale at the Galesburg Art Center. The center is a grand old historic building with much of it’s history in evidence, but the people are warm real artists with wide minds and smiles. It’s been a long time for me.
In your studio, your art is whatever you think it is. Good or bad. Honest or ludicrous. I’ve found those judgements change in a heart beat according to mood and blood sugar. Once you put a piece out where people can see it, there’s a whole other evaluation outside yourself.
I’ve lived a lot of my life out in public. You don’t travel and teach the way I did in a box. There’s a value in that, and a value in sacred space that no one intrudes in such as a studio. The real value is in the balance between.
Thank you everyone who came yesterday to visit! Thank you, Tuesday, for inviting me to show there. And thank you Don for your endless patience and support.
I was talking with a dear friend this week, over the holidays and we discussed all of our new work. I’ve been unable to leave the visual/vertical paths alone this year. She told me she had been working on smaller things. We’re both of an age. Wailing a huge quilt through a sewing machine is past aerobic. But it occurred to me: We only make bed size art quilts because we still think of them as quilts. Shows define them as bed coverings/ linens. We make them as art. But we are still restrained when we show them to think in terms of bed sizes.
That’s simply awkward. What I make warms from the wall visually. It’s not made to be lain on. Metallic thread will vigorously defend itself from anyone who wants to use it on a blanket. So will organza, or stabilizer, or angelina fiber. When I make a quilt, it’s made for someone to snuggle into. It’s pretty. But it’s made to be a bed linen. When I make a tapestry, it’s made to glorify the wall.
Just practically, it’s sort of hard to find a queen size wall to hang an art quilt on. The standard bed sizes are made for beds. I see nothing wrong with that. But I look forward to the day when we understand that excellence is not measured in size, that standard size only works for some things, and that a piece of art always is measured by it’s impact, not by following size requirements. And that normal is a setting strictly on the drier.
We may have come to that, one by one as art quilters , fiber artists, and contemporary quilters. I’ve always skirted the world as a quilter. I work in, three layers ( at least) sewn together, so I fit under that description.
Art is not about practicality. It is about seeing and building the beauty in our lives. Sometimes our lives are our art. We build our lives in ways that make us whole, make us sound, make others happy, make us strong, whole, and joyous. Sometimes our art is our life: those moments where we live and breathe in what we can make visual out of imagination and the things around us. But either way, they are our birthright. We are artists just by way of being human. We do art, as we can when we can. But we are artists because we live and breathe in a world we impact with what we see, what we dream and what we do.
For this next year, I wish your art to kindle the fire of hope, creation, joy, passion and warmth. Without needing to fit any standard size or expected purpose. I hope you art shines just as it is, just as you are. Just as we all are. In Imagine Dei.
This is a reblog from around ten years ago, but I still think it holds true. How do we gather the courage to do art? And the courage to show it and let it into our lives like a strange wild cat? T
I’ve been teaching now for almost 30 years, so it’s not uncommon to find people who’d had class with me teaching, writing, creating amazing art and winning awards. Students in the quilt world are not like students in other places. They’re often experts in their own right. They’re there in class to pick your brain, but they’ve already got amazing skills. So it’s not like that student owes you very much. They’re another traveler, perhaps out ahead, perhaps a step or two behind. But you’ve showed them a cool trick or two and they may well have showed you as well. It’s more like meeting a pilgrim on a similar path.
I used to give everyone three scraps of fabric: A red badge of courage, a green lunatic fringe and a purple heart, because if you’re doing brave things, of course they’re shooting at you. At some point, in the four thousand things that have to get done before class, I stopped.
I also always used to wear a badge. At one point someone gave me the most wonderful bug pin. I put it on my badge and it was part of it. At another point, I lost it. No one seemed to miss it. My old student asked me if I was still giving badges. I think I had him in class 15 years ago. It still mattered to him.
Every so often, someone would stop me and tell me they lost their badge. I gave them explicit permission to make another for yourself or for someone else.
Perhaps the badges need to come back. Am I as brave as I need to be? Are my students? Are any of us?
The wizard of oz behind the curtain
A sacrament is an outside sign of an inward grace. A symbol can be one too. Can an ordinary person can stand behind a curtain, make a great deal of noise and convince people to be brave and have a heart simply by giving them one? Yes, perhaps. Symbols do work
Should I start making badges again? Do we need the lunatic fringe rampant? Would you stand in the lunatic fringe?
10 years later, I’m no longer teaching. But I am struggling for my own courage, my own celebration of my wounds, and my understanding that of course I’m out in the fringe. I ask you how you hold your courage to create? What badge, pledge or thought holds you straight and strong at your art? And if I made you a badge at some time, would you let me know if it worked?
Being an artist is like being the odd kid in an ordinary classroom. It’s not like you aren’t trying or you didn’t have good ideas. It’s that you put a purple gardenia in your hair and are wearing different unmatched socks to boot. It’s more like you’ve scared your teacher and everyone else, just by doing what comes naturally.
It’s the questions artists ask. It’s the things we have to do. It’s the things we are compelled to do while we figure things out.
One of the hardest things for me is to follow other people’s proscriptions and prescriptions. You would like me to make a what? I should be quilting dogs and cats? It needs to be a particular size? Or shape?
That’s how I ended up making this huge ass dragonfly quilt. I was asked, by the Indiana State Museum to make a star quilt of a particular size. I tried. Bless me, I tried. I pieced up samples, played with star imagery. Did not work. Finally I ended up giving them a star. He really is a star, but you could see from their faces that they weren’t expecting anything like that. They weren’t unhappy, but it was clearly the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. It did end up printed in the newspaper, just for oddness, I believe.
Lettuce and Roses
Stag Party
Mother Toad
Lately I haven’t been able to leave alone these elongated shapes. I Need to fill the shapes and make them dance across the surface. I’ve called them visual paths, because it’s a matter of making the eye travel across the surface of the quilt.
So people want these quilts? Historically, they have. They fill a huge space with a little foot print. Which is always useful. And a neat trick.
Can you put them in a show? Probably not. I tried to put two of them in a project for some folk lately only to have them rejected. They were good quilts. But they were an aggressively odd shape.
Can I make myself fit expectations? Sometimes. On a good day. If I wear my looser big girl panties and stick my tongue out when the going gets tough.
Swoopdive 2
The truth is, I simply have to, to some extent, work on my own obsessions. If I walk too far away from what compels me, I have to fight too hard to do what I do. It’s a good exercise to push against it. But it grinds the art out of me. If we only fit in minimally around the edges, perhaps we fill in the spaces only we can fill.
Do you finish everything you start? Star in your crown! Good for you! If it works for you I have no arguments to offer you against your virtue and your tenacity. But for those of us who don’t, I get you. I’m one of you. And I refuse to blame or shame anyone, especially myself about having things that just didn’t get finished.
What happened
I sold two fish this week. Just the fish. The lady getting them is thrilled. She wants to use them in her own work. I trust her not to use them for anything commercial. I find myself a bit lost. I had plans for them. I’d kept the drawings for around 6 years. I found them again, and embroidered them. Somehow I thought my plan for them would work out. Not meant to be. They’re now on to another person, another journey that they, as little fish get to take.
It’s not the first time I haven’t finished a quilt. There are some I will never finish. Some were purchased or given unfinished. Some that people have stolen from me. Some that got lost in odd ways. Some that I didn’t have the right technique for yet. Some that just went wrong.
These quilts were all my teachers. They gave me good information, good help, good company. Some just didn’t need to be finished. I’d learned enough. Sometimes someone else needed them for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they disappeared into the clutter, never to be found again.
My goal is not completion. I’m not a human doing. I am in the process, the continual process of learning my art. My finished quilts are not product, really. They’re a byproduct of learning.
To finish or not to finish?
Do you need it for a show, a space or for a client or yourself?
Do you feel a need for it?
Are you getting learning or enjoyment out of it?
Is it tech you don’t want to explore anymore?
Does it have problems that you can’t fix?
Does it make you feel unhappy/unconfortable, crushingly bored or bad?
Life is short and time is not ever as long as we would like. Ideas are everywhere. and they don’t always stay fresh. New ideas need to be embraced. Petted, fetted, watered, trimmed and sometimes finished. Sometimes not. Sometimes let go of an idea that isn’t working the way you want is better than letting the finishing grind you to a halt.
I challenge you to use your studio/art time to do things that teach you, uplift you, train you, entertain you and help you grow. Finishing everything doesn’t do that for me. What does is the flexibility to follow my art where it needs to go.
We didn’t really do Christmas this year. We didn’t have money for presents. A tree seemed like far too much work, given that walking from the chair to the kitchen is a five minute trial. Dear friends will need to understand some packages will arrive possibly later than Epiphany. They know about that.
Don is fixing my old computer to be my new computer with some new parts and that frees up a new computer for him. It sounds much worse than it is. Both of us lack nothing for stuff. Merry Christmas!
Sarah and Donna Hinman sent me calamity ware mugs and a teapot that have me over the moon. They have dinosaurs, monsters, Sasquash, and zombie poodles! Merry Christmas indeed!
936 Swoop Dive
All of the really big gifts in our lives, a love, a job, a passion, a pet, a child, a studio, are invitations to be something different ourselves. A love teaches you how to be a lover. A pet or a child teaches you how to love someone or something past it’s problems and messes. A studio, well a studio teaches you how to dance with your creation.
For those of you who don’t know, Don gave me his house as my studio last year. I have never had a gift like a studio. The space to do what we do without interruption or criticism is a place to practice art. And with art, we never really do anything but practice, one phase into another. Art is a byproduct. What we create in a studio is skill and vision. Thank you, Don! Merry Christmas!
Real gifts change us. And I have been give some of the best. Here is a bit of what I did this year, in my studio.
Very Brave Little Bugs
Roses and Lettuce
Fly Delight
Lady Mantis 3
Leafy Ladybug
In the Reeds 2
934 Lily Rising
931 Stag Party https://www.ellenanneeddy.art/portfolio/931-20-stag-party-2/
Jump at the Sun
Sunflower Ladybug
910 Hummingbird
On Ancient Wings
Lady bug Dance
Moth Mandella
911 Damask Rose
I hope Christmas brought you gifts that change you, help you grow, help you see your world differently. And make us all so much richer in ability, in who we are and what we have to give.
I’ve been recovering from a number of changes these last couple of years. Change is neither good nor bad, I suspect, except how it works out in the end. I suspect also that the definition of that is where you put the end.
This last month, for perhaps the first time in my life, I’ve been over political. I’ve had strong opinions and I’ve posted them broadly and widely. In truth, I’ve felt like I was fighting for our lives. As it works out, I think we all lost a lot in this election but time will tell.
Be that as it may, I am sure you’re opinion probably hasn’t changed. Neither has mine. I think I still will point out happenings that make me nervous and convince me something bad is happening. I’ll do my best to run them through snopes so it’s not nonsense. I hope you can do something similar.
But I’m tired of asking folk why they’ve made the choices they have and I don’t want to debate candidates anymore. Mostly I’m exhaustably tired of nasty angry men heads on my Facebook page. Yuck.
I wrote earlier about the flip and my high school reunion. It turned out to be pretty prophetic. I did have a pleasant time. Part of that was due to a choice on my part to offer an unspoken amnesty to people who hurt me in high school. If I can’t get over it in 45 years, I’m doing something wrong.
The election did stimulate that for me. The idea of ANYONE in a corner berated, battered, hounded, hated brought me right back home. But this time my fear was that I too would be standing in the crowd whistling dixey and be afraid to stop it. I’m afraid of becoming one of the people who permitted the abuses I’ve lived through.
What stops this kind of abuse? I’m not sure, but we’re going to have to figure it out or live with it. I think it may simply be the witness of people who actively don’t approve or permit it.
Years ago, when the Bosnian community moved into Chicago, I worked with a family there. One of the boys ran off to play ball with his friends. That, in that part of Chicago wasn’t great, but the park had a reputation for drug dealers and junkies. I went rushing off looking for him. I found him in the park, with a number of Bosnian children and adults ( by the way, these people are Muslim. And lovey, I might add). watching to keep everyone safe. Not a drug dealer in sight. Honest people who disapproved of them had moved in and taken the space.
So that being said, My studio is up. My web page is back up. I am back doing art. I forgive you if you said some smug, crude thing to me for not thinking the way you do. I hope you can forgive me for whatever I might have said that hurt you.
I would rather, in the end, be able to say you were right than I am. I’m not sure we’re going to survive this political clime as a democracy. I don’t know what will be left after the rapine that seems promised by our president’s elects’ choices.
So what else is left? Do art. Take care of the people in front of you. Write the best truth you can.
Within a week or two I’ll be going to my 45th high school reunion.
I’m told I don’t have the right attitude about my high school memories. I’m sure there are people for whom high school was a happy magical place of growth and possibilities. I don’t know any of them, but I think I know people who would say that anyway. I often wonder what they do remember. And what they need to forget to make themselves whole.
Do they remember the day someone threw me into the bleachers during a dance class? Or the day I was beaten with books by 5 classmates in a hall room? Or the young Christian girl who observed that even people like me were of some value? Or being celebrated as the queen of Saturnalia (fools) for a Latin club event? As you can imagine, I have some mixed feelings about the memories.
Bless us, I suppose there’s a part of that these people who probably define all this as high spirits and a lack of humor on my part.
Did I have friends? I did. They were dear and they were rare. I hope I recognize them.
I believe that what forms who we are most is the stories we tell about ourselves. We define ourselves as legends in our own minds. Perhaps that’s normal. Who else can best tell your story but you?
Had I been braver, tougher, tighter, smarter, and prettier, I might have had a different experience. There was a lord of the flies quality to high school that I’m still trying to get over. How did they define me? Was I a victim? A snot assed scholar? A mental bully? An antisocial art princess? A writer with several books under her belt? There’s no going back, to change what was. I’m waiting for the stories to flip.
I’m waiting on my perception to change. Perhaps I can see how afraid they were they might have been lumped in with me as a person to focus on. Perhaps they were afraid all the time too. Perhaps I made them feel less able or valuable. Perhaps there’s a space where we can see each other differently. Perhaps the stories can flip.
So I am going hoping to see these folk in a different light. I’m hoping to see me in a different light. I’m hoping for our stories to flip.
I’ll be in a wheel chair for some of this. I’m not exactly crippled, but I don’t do distance standing and walking. Try not to add it to my story. It’s not how I define myself. It’s just the mileage.
