'I make pictures by cleaning...'

Seeing how dirty a wall is by cleaning it in this way, kind of gets people immediately. - Paul "Moose" Curtis, The Reverse Grafitti Project

Thanks to Heather Dubreuil for the link.

Mozart's requiem will play, on tiny speakers made of clay...

I am so amazed at times, that I am actually alive.
- Andy Goldsworthy; [Interview][Digital Catalogue][Wikipedia][Google images]

Gender equality - still a work in progress

I was inspired by the artists who shared their stories in the film, Who does she think she is?, currently touring North America, which made me laugh and cry. As an afterthought, it still amazes me how, in so many ways, things have not changed radically for women since I was in my twenties. Gender equality is still a work in progress, perhaps even more so for artists than for many other professions. Good film.

New York, N.Y.

"Something began me...

53rd Street & 6th Avenue

and it had no beginning:

Florence Schoenborn Gallery - MoMA

something will end me...

Rustic Pavillion - Central Park

and it has no end."

Carousel - Central Park near 66th Street

-Verse from Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes 1936

We spent three wonderful days in New York City in celebration of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. The city was a beauty to behold. Although it was cool and wet, it did not rain, and at times mist hung low over the buildings. In Central Park the ginkgo trees dropped their magnificent leaves, blanketing everything in a flaming yellow carpet.

Each person has something to teach us

Red Oak Leaves
October 2008

"People do not arrive in our lives by mistake, even when we did not choose them to be in our lives. It is best to learn the lessons about ourselves and life that we can learn from this person. That we do not like this kind of person is not the lesson. This person is in our life as a teacher...to illuminate an area where we struggle and where we can grow."
-Lynn Fitz-Hugl, Tip#10 from 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking

A link to the article 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking arrived in my e-mailbox this morning from a friend who has struggled through a very difficult divorce over the past year. As I read through the article, the tip which I have quoted here really seemed to speak to me. It underlines the human connection that exists in all our relationships, including the troublesome ones, and affirms that growth and healing are possible outcomes even when we find ourselves at odds with another person. I also felt happy that a sense of resolve was returning to the life of someone I care about and who has had a long, rough year.

The audacity of hope

Congratulations U.S.A. on your historic election and on choosing a new President, House and Senate, and a new direction for your country by a landslide today. Something tells me that in Barack Obama, your confidence is well invested. We've heard the pundits spin the polls umpteen times over the past twenty-one months. Perhaps it comes down to this; Americans have chosen the person whom they believe is most likely to act in their best interest. My take: it's truly a good day for all of us.

Breaking open

Luskville Falls Trail, Quebec, Canada
October 2008

"In the process of grieving we break, but we break open so that we can include more of life. We get bigger in order to carry with us what we choose to continue loving."

-Deborah Morris Coryell in Good Grief

Perception beyond the tangible

Spring Water
Laura Cater-Woods

"I work in an abstract manner, I am not interested in depicting but in evoking. When the work succeeds, it speaks beyond itself."

- Laura Cater Woods

"Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes. Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind."

- Arshile Gorky [images][biography][wikipedia]

After taking a number of workshops with quilt artists over the past couple of years I consider Laura Cater-Woods to be one of the best teachers I've had. I had a fantastic experience with her and will take a course with her again if she teaches anywhere near me in the future. What did I like about her? She works with each person individually, she inspires original work, and she appears to deeply connect with the creative spirit in each participant. She has a great sense of humour and does not shy away from discussing any topic. Did I mention technical expertise? Great person, great teacher. She blogs here.

Image of the quilt 'Spring Water' used with permission.

Many sources for inspiration

Untitled
Commercial and hand dyed cottons
11 x 11"
Unfinished

This was begun in the class I took over the summer with Pamela Allen, a fabulous teacher who I can not recommend highly enough. Each student was given a small square cutout of a partial work by a well known artist and asked to create a small quilt around it. I was given the piece with a white vase and onions that you can see in the upper left hand quarter of the quilt. It was taken from a still life by Matisse called, 'The Red Onions' painted around 1906.

Masters: Art Quilts

Have you seen the new book Masters: Art Quilts: Major Works by Leading Artists?
I was captivated by the quilts included in it. Among other artists, it was great to see more works by German quilt artist Inge Hueber, whose quilts I first saw in Robert Shaw's book The Art Quilt. She has developed a unique style using visible seams and layering, to depict texture and depth. Of her work she states:

"My quilts have developed into a kind of visual diary. I cannot plan changes - they occur when they are due, just as in real life. Making quilts has given me a key to my own life, a key to open doors that would have been locked otherwise."

Another artist's work that I instantly fell in love with and whose work I had never seen before, was U.S. quilter Joan Schulze. She creates collages of hand-dyed fabrics in somber or muted colours in combination with gray scale digital images transferred onto cloth. Her work has a surreal, dreamlike quality which is both serene and jarring at the same time. Of her work she says,

"Erasure, fragments, and layering are my primary processes...I find things are more interesting to me if they are elusive and poetic."

There are truly many breathtaking quilts in the book and the diversity of inspiration, design, and construction techniques is impressive. The book is an international compendium and includes artists from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, South Korea, South Africa and the United States. I highly recommend it.

Ruth Asawa

"An artist makes use of ordinary things and makes them extraordinary" -Ruth Asawa

Last month Glennis Dolce left me a comment here in which she mentioned a favourite artist, Ruth Asawa. I had never heard of Ruth Asawa but soon discovered a great deal of information including video clips , podcasts and articles (see below), about this amazing artist and her life's work. Born in 1926 in Southern California, USA, she is perhaps best known for her tied and crocheted wire sculptures.

Organics
Crocheted wire sculpture
by Ruth Asawa
Photo by Aqui-ali

Among other works, are hundreds of masks that she has made over the past forty-five years of family and friends, documented in this short film by her son Laurence Cuneo. About the masks she said, "When I cast a face I know I’m just capturing a minute of a person...I don’t care about making that a technique. But I like the idea of stopping the moment of time" [link].




If you're interested in reading more about Ruth Asawa, the Oakland museum of California has posted this article on its website entitled Ruth Asawa: Completing the Circle. Leonardo Digital Reviews has an excellent online review by Amy Ione of the book "The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air" by Daniell Cornell, Director of Contemporary Art Projects at the deYoung Museum in San Fransisco and curator of the Ruth Asawa retrospective of the same name. There are also several good blog write-ups about her life including one by quilt artist Pam Rupert on Ragged Cloth Cafe and another by jewelry artist Louise Hill on Louise Hill Designs.

Thanks to Glennis for telling me about this artist.

April TIF - Part II

In my last TIF post I mentioned an unbidden image which came up for me when I read Sharon B's April TIF concept. I said I would incorporate that image into my April TIF challenge piece.The image was of myself as a baby in a crib. I've heard some stories over the years from various family members about those early days. Not all of them very happy ones. I have the sense that a lot of us may have been asked to spend quite a bit more time our cribs than was actually necessary. Just a guess. Probably for that reason, I'm not a big fan of cribs. Both my daughters slept with my husband and I for the first few months after which we moved them to a futon on the floor of their own bedroom. It was much easier to change the baby, put her down to sleep and easier to deal with her when she woke up crying in the night; we would just go in and lay down for a while on the bed. It worked for us. I thought about the crib image for a while, not sure how it might inspire a small quilt or piece of textile art. After awhile I came up with the idea of a repeat block based on the bars of a baby crib. Below left is an image cropped from a photograph of a crib. Below right is a quilt block based on the image.

Here is the block repeated four across, three down.


I added some colour, and an orb (below left),to suggest the sun rising, thereby representing the passage of time which I also said that I would incorporate into this piece. Then I shifted the orb to the right side of the piece (below right),


and simplified the whole thing somewhat by removing half of the blocks for a total of six blocks instead of twelve. I also flipped over some of the blocks to break up the patterning a bit. The sun then became a much bigger part of the overall composition.


I wasn't sure what kind of a time commitment this would turn out to be but the next step was to take it to fabric, which would represent the element of positive transformation that I also wanted to convey in the work. The idea of positive transformation is also addressed by taking a somewhat heavy memory and injecting it with colour and movement.

Quilting as a metaphor

"[In] my 'Secret Garden' series [link]...I take as a starting point, old memories of gardens of my childhood with their combination of water paths and foliage. This also becomes a metaphor for deeply embedded old memories that rise unbidden in our consciousness; sometimes clear and structured, sometimes vague and formless. Quilt-making with its multiple layers seems an ideal medium for exploring these ideas." - Rosalie Dace

I have an opportunity to take a one week class with Rosalie Dace who is teaching at Quilting by the Lake this year. I have looked at her work on line [link][link] and read about her on a handful of websites and blogs. Her quilts are absolutely sumptuous and appeal to me directly. As well, she appears to be a process person; no patterns or kits provided. On her website she states that her interest is in helping students to bring out what is personal to them in their work, and to encourage them to stretch beyond what they think is possible for them. Great! I am hesitating to proceed though, because I attended a class at the same conference last year and had a very mixed experience, largely because the class I took was poorly organized and, I thought, did not deliver what had been advertised. I would hate to set aside this kind of time and financial resource again for a repeat experience. However, all things in life present certain risk, along with the concomitant possibility of benefit or great gain. So, I'll ponder on it for a few more days and think about the benefits that this experience has to offer. It has long been personal challenge for me to let go of preconceived expectations about how things should or shouldn't be, a challenge which requires a heightened trust in life and in people, and a willingness to allow things to unfold as they may.

Wrap, Stitch & Burn

If you're in Toronto in May, textile artists Nieves Carrasco and Valerie Knapp will exhibit at the *new* gallery in Toronto. "A monochromatic palette captures the unique qualities of resist-dyed Japanese paper" says Nieves Carrasco about her work.

April TIF - Part I

This month's Take it Further challenge concept is this question from SharonB:

How do you see change?

I related fairly strongly to something that she said in her post,

"It amuses me when people say we have to learn to live with change as change has always been part of life. As soon as we are born we start to grow in other words we start to change."

The first thing that came to mind when I read this was an image related to the first year of my own life, not that I remember anything from that period, I guess that's the point. But the image was there, nevertheless. So, my challenge piece will somehow relate to that image.

How do I see change? Change may bring new opportunities or great joy, as in the birth of a child. It can also bring loss, regret, sadness or pain, such as in the death of a person we love. And it may bring both. The loss of a job may bring with it the discovery of a previously unimagined and inspiring new career path. In the case of difficult change (the positive sort is easy; you celebrate!) I rather try to approach change in terms of the hidden potential for personal growth, no matter how it may appear at the outset. Work with it, as one would with clay, steadily remolding it into something that will hopefully give rise to a positive transformation.

For me, the inevitability of change is also (obviously) inextricably linked with the passage of time. So for this month's piece I'll begin working with these three ideas; (1) An unbidden image relating to the first twelve months of life (2) The passage of time, and (3) Positive transformation. Sound cryptic? It does to me too.

Colourful Inspiration

Brenda Smith of Serendipity Patchwork and Quilting posted last week about an opportunity to win a painting by artist Abie Loy Kemarre by filling out an online survey and subscribing to the newsletter of the gallery, Central Art Aboriginal Art Store. After doing so, I soon found myself on another site called Aboriginal Art Directory viewing slideshows of some really amazing artwork there. Have a look at these Aboriginal Artists Slideshows for some colourful inspiration.

Flickr artists are another great source of inspiration for me. Some time ago I stumbled across the excellent photo collage work of Roger Kellison aka Rogerio, who kindly gave his permission to post his work here and to use it as a source of inspiration for a quilted textile collage.

collage287
Roger Kellison

He explains the process he uses to create his collages this way:

"it is largely trial and error of layering pics until I find something I like...and then enhancing the resulting image. Usually this is done by darkening and cropping the collage. [I] often will turn one or other image on it's side or even upside down. Just playing around you could say."

collage106
Roger Kellison

Roger also introduced me to flickrleech, a very cool online tool that allows you to view any flickr user's account 200 photos at a time, because, as the flickrleech developer so eloquently states, paging sucks. You can view Roger's work on flickrleech here.

Walk on Queen's Street -- Loop Gallery

Self portrait with paintings
March 2008

This photograph shows the window of the Loop gallery in Toronto earlier this month which, at the time, was exhibiting works by Canadian painter John Abrams. The gallery was closed that day, probably because of the snowy weather. I like the way the vivid colours and images in the paintings shine through the reflection of the mostly black and white Toronto street scene outside. There's more info about John Abrams here.

TIF March 2008

My TIF challenge piece this month uses SharonB's concept and colour scheme (well, OK, I swapped a couple of colours). She writes,

Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This month's challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger.

In Toronto last week I walked by this window display at the Mokuba ribbon shop at 575 Queen Street West, a bit hard to see in this photo due to the glare on the window, but it gives you an idea.

These three simple, yet beautiful hangings, made of coloured ribbons, inspired me to create something that would capture this small detail of a walk in the city; a colourful window display on a snowy, white winter day. This is the little thing that got me started on my March TIF piece.

First I played around with a couple of strips of paper painted with acrylic, twisting them in different ways to see what kind of patterns I might get.Above is an example of something I liked.	Then I painted some brown packing paper in several colours, the purple, green and gold are from Sharon's colour scheme, though they darkened up considerably when they dried.
Dried and fused the paper and cut it into strips.	Starting to play...
...going somewhere...	...adding the last strips of twisted paper ribbon.

Et, voila...

Ribbons on Queen Street
Acrylic, paper, raw canvas
fused
16 x 19"
March 2008

detail

Visible time

Hand stitching is slow. It's one stitch at a time. It's thoughtful. It's a repeated caress. It’s visible time. - Judith Martin

I have done some hand-quilting on each of the quilts that I have made since I picked up quilting again in 2006. While I have challenged myself to become a better free-motion machine quilter I am also in love with the soft, ephemeral quality of hand quilting and am determined to do more of it.

I have been reading Judy Martin's blog for some time now and it's one of my favourite places to visit. Rich with images, her posts are usually brief but potent. A Canadian artist living on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada, Judy writes, among other things, about being an artist, teacher, mother and daughter. Two summers ago, I met a young woman who was working in an art gallery in Haliburton, Ontario. We got talking about the Textile Surface Design Certificate offered at the Haliburton School of the Arts, where Judy Martin has taught. The woman, whose name escapes me, told me that if I ever get the opportunity to study with Judy, to jump. Hopefully, someday I will.

TIF January 2008 - Part I

SharonB has posted the key concept for the January 2008 Take if Further Challenge:

"The key concept for January is a feeling we have all had, the feeling of admiration for another. Ask yourself who do you look up to and admire? Why? What is it you admire about them? This is the first Take it Further challenge in 2008. Take the idea, develop it into a resolved design during that month and apply it to fiber or paper."

The person I have chosen is not someone I know personally but whose diaries I read shortly after they were published in 1983 in a book entitled An interrupted life : the diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. There is a short biography about her life here on the Etty Hillesum Research Centre website. What I most admire about the way she lived was her absolutely steadfast determination to embrace life even under the harshest conditions. I'll use the following words she wrote to get me started working on the piece:

Let this be the goal of meditation: to become like a wide-open space, without that sneaky brushwood taking away your vista. That something like 'God' can enter, just like there is something of 'God' in the Ninth of Beethoven. (June 8 1941)

In the sketch above I have tried to capture an image of what she describes in the quote: "A wide-open space" beyond "the sneaky brushwood". I've drawn some thorny brambles to represent bitterness, hardship and pain, things which were certainly part of her experience. Beyond these I'll represent open windows, to symbolize the mystery of what may lie beyond the human or physical realm of existence, and birds flying in the distance to symbolize the spiritual freedom that she speaks of when she says that her goal is "to become like a wide-open space...that something like 'God' can enter."



I chose this fabric as the background, as there is already a feeling of wide-openness in the upper right-hand half of it and a feeling of underbrush along the bottom edge (hand-dyed cotton by Elaine Quehl). I'll probably reverse appliqué patchwork windows into it and then paint or stencil silhouettes of birds flying across the open green area. I'll add more brushwood to the piece using dark shades of gray acrylic paint, on top of which I'll add large, dark, thorny brambles sewn in shades of gray and black fabric, probably reverse appliquéd, then hand and machine quilt the finished top.

I have two goals for this quilt. First, to capture something of the essence of the words cited above. And secondly, to create the feeling of three-dimensional space, so that the viewer has the impression of looking up through the underbrush, into the opening beyond, from a dark, enclosed space into a light, open one.

Now, I don't really like talking this much about what I intend to do and why. Call it superstition. Robert Genn talks about it here. However, I think I'll do it for the purpose of experimentation, as I believe a big part of what Sharon wants to do is have people share the development of a design from a simple key concept. We'll see where it goes.