A reader finds inspiration

It's always great when somebody out there not only reads your blog, but grabs an idea and does something lovely with it.  This time it was Jennifer Allen, who wrote me:

"I fell onto your blog while searching for ideas about working in series and I'm glad I fell.  I've been looking for a way to find some focus, to narrow parameters, to slow down and explore... just be more thoughtful in what I'm doing.  Here's a pic.

"Parameters: limited to the 5 wool swatches I had on hand for size (about 8 x 6) with no trimming allowed, each to use buttons already on hand (and long forgotten), some hand stitching (however primitive) on each one and other sources of fabric being one old hat, one old dress, and two remnants all on hand.  

"I'm so pleased with the Button Box series that I've hung them.  Very satisfying.  I'm looking for my next 'series' and thinking in place of buttons, button holes might be interesting.  

"Narrower parameters and small size seem to be key for me to gain some focus; a step in a good direction.  Buttonholes are now lodged in my imagination and I'm enjoying just thinking about the idea.  Enjoying is pretty good too."

Jennifer, you're welcome!  I'm so glad you stumbled on advice that obviously you were ready for, and able to make good use of.  The old saying: when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  

Note to all:  Good for Jennifer to set rules that worked, and double good for her to plan her next series on the shoulders of the first one.

 

Ideas from the blue

 

A long time ago I made a little doodle on the side of a larger piece of paper.  I think I was trying a large round pen nib to see what kind of line it would make, and drew the U-shaped curve.  Then at some later point I think I had another pen in hand, sketched the surrounding box and made a "stem" for the "wineglass."  The piece of paper nestled in with my piles of clippings, and I kept running across it every now and then.

Earlier this month I decided the little doodle was striking some kind of chord with me, because every time I came across it, I carefully put it back onto a pile instead of into the wastebasket.  So I did my daily calligraphy based on the doodle.  

And then I did it again, and again and again.  The "wineglass" changed shapes and orientations and colors, and occasionally morphed into a dumbbell with two curves in the box instead of one. The boxes escaped from the grid to stand alone. The pale washes that I had been using in other calligraphy appeared.  

It's hard for me to articulate why this little doodle makes me so happy.  And it's turning out to be hard to use it in a satisfying way on the large page of a sketchbook instead of the tiny one-off version that I've kept so long.

I don't know if I'm done with this motif or not.  I'm not even sure I like this series of experiments.  Are they losing their spontaneity as I do them over and over?

I've done this in the past, made something that seemed great the first time around but never as good again, no matter now many times I revisit it.  Maybe that's because I love to work improvisationally, without the safety net of sketching or a lot of planning ahead.  So when I come back and do the same motif again, it seems constrained and artificial rather than serendipitous.  What do you think?  Have you had a similar experience?

Ideas from others -- Marina Soria

This summer I got an email from Jan Milne, who reads my blog from Australia and wondered if I was familiar with the work of Marina Soria, a calligrapher from Argentina.  I wasn't, and immediately looked her up.  Among all the images I saw, one sent me straight to my sketchbook to emulate.

Marina Soria

Two ideas to play with: first, trapping the letters between horizontal lines, and second, filling in some of the negative spaces with pale washes of color.  Here's my version:

I worked with this idea for a while, then decided it would be interesting to use the wash-in-negative-space approach with other styles of lettering.  Here's what I came up with then:

I like to use washes -- about the only thing I can do with a brush that seems to look good (clearly need more practice....).  I've had fun with this technique (you can see all my daily calligraphy here on my Daily Art blog) and want to give many thanks to Jan for tipping me off to this new artist.  Almost every time you look at somebody else's work in the same ballpark as your own, you find ideas to test out and riff on.  Do they become a permanent part of your repertoire or just an experiment?  Only time will tell.

 

Great quilts on display

My dear friend and quilting pal Vickie Wheatley has a great show of her bright, intricate quilts at PYRO Gallery.  I have been working closely with Vickie for more than a year and it is a particular thrill to see pieces that we spent all day rearranging on the design wall finally on the gallery wall.  But I was most interested in the variety of small details in the many pieces on display, which so clearly show her trying out new things and progressing in her body of work.

For some time now Vickie has been exploring a design that starts with strips of random black and white piecing that make a "road" diagonally through the middle of her block.  Once that's in place, she fills out the corners of the block with colored strips.  When she sets the blocks in fours, you see a big diagonal grid of black-and-white roads, or maybe a bunch of colored squares or diamonds floating above a sea of black-and-white, depending on how you look at it.

Then she adds a twist: she sticks little miscellaneous bits and cuttings under the quilting thread.  And I do mean little -- some of the bits are only a quarter-inch wide.  The contrast between these wildly irregular bits and the meticulously pieced quilt top adds excitement and texture.

As the series progresses, you can see her experimenting.  In #1, the black-and-white strips are cut to a strict 45 degree angle, but in #5 they're wonky.  In #4 she has put so many bits and cuttings on top that you can barely see the underlying pattern of the blocks. 

Anxieties #1: Imperfections

Anxieties #4: The River Lethe

In #3 and #4 she adds sashing between the blocks, and cuts some of the square blocks into rectangles before sashing.

Anxieties #3: Breakdown

As you can imagine, when you sew strips together and then cut triangles from them to make the corners of your blocks, you end up with a lot of leftovers.  Vickie sewed more than a dozen small quilts from the leftovers, and it was fun to see how she varied their colors and personalities, even though she was working from the same huge scrap pile.

In the next post I'll show you the many different ways Vickie finished her small pieces for display at the gallery. 

Meanwhile, the show is up at PYRO Gallery through March 21.  Well worth a detour if you're anywhere near Louisville!

Last week on Art With a Needle

A couple of days ago I wrote about my struggle to make some art for my co-op gallery's theme show about "home," and how the little stitched house didn't seem to be good enough.  Shannon left a comment that snapped things into focus for me:  "As for your houses, I actually think the little pyramids seem pretty house-y and home-y in a non-cutesy way.... you might consider making more tetrahedra, since they seem to come together better and at least IMO would fit the theme."

Thanks Shannon, I needed to hear that -- you're right.  And I'm better off in terms of art quality sticking with something that succeeded in the past and already has a to-do list for further expansion than stretching the concept too far into the cute-o-sphere.  So here's what I started yesterday, and stitched all afternoon while listening to the opera (obviously not assembled into a pyramid yet):

And thanks to Marian in Amsterdam, who said she has not commented much in the past because English is not her native language, but is now doing it more.  Marian, I love hearing from people in faraway places.  I think this proves that art and craft can transcend boundaries (and perhaps can even transcend boundaries within our own countries).  Thank you for reading, and thank you for commenting.

After I wrote about Isaac's fabric collage, Martha asked whether we have ever used a handcrank sewing machine, which many kids find fascinating.  No, we haven't, but I wonder whether a handcrank is going to have much appeal to a boy who is already asking whether the machine can't go faster.  How ya gonna keep em down on the farm after they've put pedal to the metal?

You may have noticed the reappearance of Found Poetry in the blog this week.  I used to do one every week but decided at the end of the year to cut back.  Too much time was being spent on this task, and it was starting to feel like more of a job than a joy.  But I had this poem about the new year almost found, and the concept was getting old as the days ticked past, so I decided to finish it before the end of January.  From now on I'll try to do found poetry at least once a month, but without committing to a specific schedule.

Finally, here's my favorite miniature of the week:

You can check out all my daily miniatures, and my daily calligraphy, here.

Drawing progress report 8 -- the roads become tangles

Previously on Art With a Needle....

My daily art drawings started to organize themselves into series as I deliberately explored various styles of abstract, doodle-like approaches.  I realized that I love to work in ink, and fastened on the finest Micron pen as my tool of choice.  I realized that "roads" made of two closely spaced lines were a favorite and recurring motif.

I had been making maplike drawings with lots of details such as rivers, beaches, mountain ranges and variously textured fields.  But one night I drew just roads, and they started to tangle up in the middle of the page.



Clearly a direction that I had to pursue! On subsequent days, the tangles started to fill more of the page and become more complicated.  And when one road met another, it would go over or under it like a freeway, not make a grade-crossing intersection.



If you draw a road across the entire page, then fill in with more and more roads, the first one will always appear "on top" because later roads will have to stop and "go underneath" to cross the first one.  So to make a more tangled-together or woven effect, you need to leave spaces in your early roads for subsequent roads to "go over."  Here's what a drawing looks like in the earliest stages:

I wasn't thinking of these as roads any more; now they looked more like threads or yarns.  How many times in my long career as a sewist have I had to untangle piles of thread or yarn that look just like this!



You can check out all my daily drawings at my daily art blog HERE and see what has happened with this approach in the last month.  The only problem was that I discovered that it was taking me two or three hours to make these very detailed tangles, and that's a lot more time than I am willing to invest in daily art.  So I decided I had to ration myself: tangles on days when I could draw while visiting with other people or watching TV, less detailed drawings (or smaller tangles) on days when I was working alone.  I had a blissful week of tangles recently during a family vacation, and could sit overlooking the lake, draw and talk all day!

And now that I've brought you up to date, I promise to write about fiber art for a while, not drawing.

Drawing progress report 7 -- maps

Continuing with the combination of thin wash with fine ink lines, I started drawing maps.  Sometimes the wide wash made roads, other times rivers and lakes.  I would outline the wash areas with lines, then enjoyed putting in more details with the pen.  Always experimenting with different kinds of shapes and different kinds of marks to fill in the shapes.



Working in series felt good, as I discarded approaches that didn't work so well and continued to practice approaches that did.



But no matter what else ended up on the page, I almost always had "roads" made of two closely spaced pen lines.  That seemed to be a style that I did naturally.  I like the way the road isn't always of uniform width, because the lines aren't perfectly straight and the bumps don't always correspond.

I found myself going into zen state when I would draw the roads.  Sometimes I would deliberately hold the pen way up at its top end to introduce some uncontrolled jitters into the line.  I almost always finished my daily map drawing with a tinge of regret because I didn't want to stop drawing those roads.

Fortunately I realized what was going on and decided to let the roads keep going on and on.  Tomorrow I'll show you what happened then.

Drawing progress report 5 -- doodle buildings

My second sketchbook for the daily art project had brown paper, and I quickly learned that pencil didn't show up very well.  So I started using either a Sharpie or a fat Micron pen.  During a boring meeting in early April I found myself doodling buildings or blocks with distorted perspective and slots or holes cut into the sides.  After a while I realized that I should be working in my sketchbook instead of on the edge of my agenda.

I drew buildings for a couple of weeks, realizing that I liked going back to the same concept over and over.  Each day's drawing seemed to come naturally from the previous day's; I tweaked the concept, experimented with different methods and densities of shading, came up with new ways to draw holes and slots in the buildings, tried different vantage points.  Some days the perspective was very distorted, other days it was more realistic.

I got the same familiar buzz out of working in series that I have always felt when my quilts are in a groove. And most important, I felt for the first time that I was working from my own imagination, finding my own voice and refining my style by drawing the same subjects over and over.

Then I ran out of pages in my brown-paper sketchbook and stopped doing doodle buildings.  With a new white sketchbook I thought it would be exhilarating to go back to pencil and try something different.  But I floundered.

---

Update: linking this post to Nina-Marie's blog -- check it out to see what other fiber artists have been up to this week.

Making myself clearer 2

When I wrote about two pieced quilts in the Form, Not Function show, Sandy left a comment:  "I am not quite sure what you mean by some statements."  I had described Sandra Ciolino's work as "a classic 'motif' quilt, using a simple block over and over in different shapes, sizes and configurations to make a complex overall pattern."  Sandy said, "Not being a piecer/patchworker, perhaps I am not really seeing the classic in this?"

So let me walk that statement back and explain it in a little more detail.

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Precaria #4: Kinetics

Perhaps it's just those of us who have studied with Nancy Crow, and the next generation of those who have studied with those who studied with Nancy, who are intimately familiar with the concept of working with a motif.  In this approach, you start with a simple sketch of one or two shapes in a box.

Here's Sandra's basic motif, a five-sided shape just touching a four-sided shape:

She turns it in different directions:

She stretches it out:

She stretches it out in the other direction:

She makes blocks with just the four-sided shape:

Or just the five-sided shape:

The size and shape of the motifs varies, the orientation varies, and most important, the colors vary to give you a whole lot of tension and complexity.  Figures become ground and vice versa.  I have seen people use their motif in dozens of quilts, each one subtly different; it's a technique that allows you to explore many different aspects of composition and design and understand how all the moving parts work together.

I infer from the title of Sandra's quilt, Precaria #4, that she's been using this motif for a while.  It would be interesting to see other works in this series!

Making myself clearer 1

After I posted about two pieced quilts that I liked at FNF, Sandy left a comment:  Not being a piecer/patchworker I am not quite sure what you mean by some statements.  For Maria Shell's work, " (By the way, it may make you jealous to hear that each of the nine blocks in this quilt was also the subject of its very own nine-block quilt.)" 

Sandy, you're right -- I was kind of speaking in code.  Let me try again and see if I can describe more clearly what I was trying to say.

I happen to know a lot about this quilt and its provenance, because I had the privilege of making a presentation to the SAQA conference last month about artists who work in series, and Maria was one of them.  So I can not only tell you some of the back story, but show pictures.  For several years Maria has been working with the traditional Crossed Square block.

She makes a complex pieced block like this small one-block quilt:

Maria Shell, Way to Grace's

...and then multiplies it to make a larger quilt.

Maria Shell, Tribe

When she started working with print fabrics instead of solids, her quilts were looking like this (and I was wrong in saying that they were nine-block quilts -- they had four blocks, plus sashing):

Maria Shell, Solstice

Maria Shell, Deep Blue Sea

Eventually she made nine such quilts, and didn't they make a striking display all hung together?

(And you can see they were pretty big!)

Finally, she combined one block from each of the nine quilts and put them together into the nine-block quilt in the show.

Maria Shell, Wall of Sound