Sign of the week

Turmoil and tranquility

In early November I decided to lift myself out of a funk by sewing, without much idea of what was going to happen to the sewed-up bits.  Here's what I had on the wall on November 13, and thought that I might do a composition where the black morphed into red.

I sewed a lot more bits and pieces and by the week before Christmas it looked like this below, with all the black part sewed together and most of the red part still in pieces.  Still thinking of a single quilt with two colors.  The line between black and red seemed pretty harsh so I figured I would need to make some transition blocks to get from one color to the next.

At some time after I had started sewing on the project, I decided that it would be an entry in SAQA's contest, Turmoil and Tranquility. The two themes are meant to be combined in a single show, but the deadlines are a month apart (January 31 for Tranquility, February 29 for Turmoil) and I thought I could get a quilt done in time for the Turmoil deadline.  And besides, I like turmoil a whole lot more than I like tranquility.

But after I looked at the red and black together on the wall, with the help of my art pal Marti, I had a thought -- what if this were two quilts instead of one?  I could submit the black part as tranquility and the red part as turmoil.

Since we didn't have much planned in the way of holiday festivities, I got to sew on Christmas Eve and a bit even on Christmas Day, and by this week I had the black one quilted!

I feel superstitious about showing finished work on the blog while a show entry is pending, so I'm not going to show you what it turned out to be.  I will show you the red bits up on the design wall.

The neat rectangles have been sliced into smaller bits and rearranged for maximum turmoil.  Way more interesting than they were in the first photo, don't you think?  Clearly a lot of work ahead before it turns into a finished quilt, but heck, I have until the end of February!

Christmas presents

Several years ago we made a policy decision to abandon Christmas presents within our family.  Obviously Ken and I, like any decades-married old couple, have all the stuff we'll ever need and then some, so it was hard for our children to come up with any new stuff that would be well received.  And as the children became adults, it was hard for us to come up with anything that they would appreciate.  We guessed at one another's reading or music preferences and usually missed the mark; we gave sweaters or shirts that didn't really fit or sing.  So we gave up, and in retrospect, both generations agree it was one of the best family decisions ever.

This year, though, I had an idea.  I own too many things and am looking for opportunities to divest myself.  So at Christmas dinner I approached the two daughters-in-law and one granddaughter and gave them their choice of a whole lot of jewelry that sits unused in my drawers.  Much of what I put out for grabs came from my mother, who had a huge collection of fabulous jewelry, most of which I find way too heavy to wear myself.  But the one Zoe chose was a beautiful tiny opal necklace, which Ken gave me many years ago.

Here's Stephanie with an enameled fish that came from my mother; it's articulated so it wiggles around on its chain.

Here's Kristin with a massive gold chain that also was my mother's.  It goes so well with her white turtleneck that I hope she will always wear the two together.

I haven't worn any of these pieces in years, if ever, and it felt great to send them off with new owners who I hope will wear and love them.

Photo suite 208 -- best of collage

As the year ends, so does my three-year daily collage project.  Here are some of my favorites from 2015.  (check them all out here)

Happy Holidays!!

Hope you've had a great Christmas!
This is a color key I did for the Shrek Christmas special.

Christmas ornaments 2015

Everybody who's getting an ornament this year should have already opened it, so I should be safe in showing you what they look like.  After a couple of years of textiles I had the urge to do a new material this time and chose wood.  The construction process was a learning experience, some of which I will share with you.

Lesson 1:  if you're trying out a new material that might possibly break, bend, melt, split or otherwise lose its structural integrity while you work on it, buy some extras.  A lot of extras.

Lesson 2:  if you need to make 50 ornaments and they have only 42 blank whatevers in the store, do not buy them and figure you will come back later to get more.

After a lot of cussing and fussing I decided to call this the year of wabi sabi ornaments, referencing the grand Japanese tradition of mending, using and treasuring objects that are beat up and hard worn.  The plan was to emboss people's names onto the ornaments by whapping in my steel letter punches.  That worked great except for the ones that split (see Lesson 1).  At first I threw away the ones that split.  Later I decided I had to mend them and use them anyway, since I was unable to buy more blanks (see Lesson 2).

But let's don't focus on the difficulties.  After the punched letters turned out to be not as legible as I had planned, I decided to cover them up with jewelry.  The part with the beads and the wire curlicues was a lot easier and a lot more fun than the part with the wood, so I ended up my project happy.

Merry Chistmas to everybodyl!

Another kid learns to sew

Isaac, who just turned 5, was visiting last week.  He seemed to be independently absorbed in Curious George and a jelly sandwich, so I went into the studio to do some sewing.  I'm starting to get nervous over two looming deadlines and am seizing upon every opportunity to sew in between the various holiday social events.

I did get some sewing done before he came down to visit, but then he hovered over my shoulder, watching intently as I finished a seam.  "When can I do that?" he wondered.

I thought about it for a bit.  I have previously told him that he has to be 6 before he can use a sharp knife (that seemed sufficiently far away at the time I said so) and I thought maybe 6 would be a good age to start sewing.  But then I thought what the heck and said "you can do that right now."

So we found a box high enough to bring the foot pedal within his reach, and cut a piece of denim from my "old jeans for mending" box.  Grabbed a bag of other people's leftovers from the Crow Barn last fall and had him choose some strips.  Had him arrange a composition on the denim background, set the sewing speed to the lowest end of the scale, and told him to step on the gas.

And so he did!  I showed him how to lift the presser foot and pivot the fabric when he got to the end of the line.  He quickly realized that if he forgot to put the presser foot down again the machine would beep at him and not sew (thank you, Bernina).

He chose some striped strips from my working pile on the table and added them to the composition.  Finally we sewed a sleeve on the back and inserted a chopstick as a hanging rod.  This was supposed to be his Christmas present to his mother, but he couldn't wait that long to give it to her and made her open it yesterday.

I was really proud of him, and he was proud of himself.  He informed me that sewing is a lot of fun and now he has to make some more.  Fine with me!

I realize that I am getting way more laid-back as a sewing instructor than I was with my own kids and then with Zoe 10 years ago.  Rather than start with choosing an artistically cohesive palette, we just grabbed whatever piece of fabric he laid eyes on.  Rather than teach seams, we did raw-edge applique.  Rather than sew the resulting composition into a pillow or a little quilt, we just put on a sleeve and declared it finished.

Rather than tell him where to sew, I would ask him, when he stopped, "Where are you going to sew next?  What's your plan?"  He would decide, and then we would sew that way.  Some strips got stitched down more than others, but that's fine.  Some strips extended over the edge of the denim base, but that's fine too.

I flash back to my own grandmother teaching me to sew.  She wanted me to learn traditional seamstress skills -- no raw-edge applique in Tawas City, thank you very much.  If I sewed a crooked seam I ripped it out and did it right.  That approach worked fine for me, the classic goody-goody overachieving child, but decades later I don't want to use that approach for my own grandchildren; I want them to figure out their own plans.  And in the 10 years between Zoe and Isaac I have loosened up even more.

When I taught Zoe how to sew I sat next to her and "helped" her hold the fabric so the seam would be straight.  (That hidden right hand was grabbing the fabric and tugging it straight.)  But with Isaac I pretty much kept my hands to myself, and you know what?  His sewing turned out just fine.

Jungle Waterfall

Jungle waterfalls are the most fun to paint! Here's a waterfall color study I did for the animated movie Rio 2. 

Calicos redux

Several days ago there was a cry for help on the Quiltart email list.  Somebody wrote:  "I'm looking for some older (1980's) calico-type fabric to complete a quilt I started back them.  I have looked around now and some fabrics seem to almost fit the mark, but they are in colors more suited to the Modern Quilt movement and don't really fit into what I was working on.  If you have any older calico-type fabric....."

Here's a photo of her old blocks, newly unearthed and not even ironed yet:

Well, she was calling my name.  I even recognized a couple of the fabrics in her blocks as ones that I still own.  I guess that in the 1980s I was buying those same calico prints, and despite periodic efforts to clean out my stash I still have a bunch of them occupying space. (I suspect they breed in the dark.)

Perhaps a decade ago I was making what I called "good-bye quilts" to use up all those fabrics that I knew I would never use again for anything important.  I sewed up all those horrible earthtones and gave the quilts away, to people who either had never moved beyond earthtones or might have been colorblind. I have segregated many of the calicos into a separate box that I offer to new quilters who want to practice their skills, and have given away a lot.  But I still have plenty.  So yesterday it wasn't hard to come up with a big shoebox full to send away.

How do you like those teeny-weeny little flowers?  Those washed-out and grayed colors?  Oh, so '80s!!  As you can tell by the size of the little bundles, most of them have been used, neatly re-folded and stashed in their drawer or bag or whatever.  

I confess that I didn't send off all my old calicos.  Some were so beautiful that I couldn't part with them; some were remnants from past sewing projects that I loved.  Some were way older than the 80s -- think 60s -- and have achieved the status of vintage.  It's surprising how some of those old-favorite fabrics have appeared in dozens of my quilts, a little bit here, a little bit there, and I'm not ready to close the door on that potential.

Here are some close-ups of the classic 80s prints.  Don't they make you want to go do some tedious precision piecing and recapture the glories of your youth?

My internet pal wrote me as we corresponded over addresses:  "I started this quilt in the 1980s when our daughter was about 4 or 5, and now she is 36 with two kids of her own!  I think it is time I got 'her' quilt done!"   She promised to send me a photo of the quilt when it's finished.  I'm just glad to send my fabrics on their way and anticipate their being used and loved.

My Provence France Workshop in 2016

Happy Holidays to all my art friends. I want to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Meanwhile I would like to announce one of my new adventures in 2016: I will teach a plein air workshop in Provence, France on April 29 to May 6. Please check my Provence Workshop webpage for information and signing up.  We will stay in a beautiful mansion near the Roman Arena in Arles and paint there and around the area. There is video on the page showing you some of the places we will visit. This is my first workshop in Europe, and looking forward to meeting new friends, and re-uniting with old friends in such a wonderful place. Je vous remercie.

Photo suite 207 -- Christmas south of the border

Several of our travels have found us in Latin America at Christmas season.  The impulse to decorate seems to be universal, even if the weather is sultry.

Recife, Brasil

Ushuaia, Argentina

Nassau, Bahamas

Manaus, Brasil

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Printshop holiday 2

On the second day of our workshop, each of us cut our own linoleum block to illustrate the poem we had typeset.  Here's one version:

I thought it was unfortunate that the poem chosen for the exercise was about a horse.  Not that I have anything against horses, but I don't know how to draw them, don't particularly want to learn, and had no interest in putzing around making some lame horse picture that would look like third-grade drawing.  So I decided (alone among my co-participants) to do an abstract design.

I focused on the last line of the poem -- I want out -- and went back to my all-time default imagery of a spiral and an eye.  Those two motifs became indispensable during my three years of daily collage and one year of daily hand stitching, and I thought they combined to say "I want out."

Here's what I came up with for the linocut:

I love everything about it except one minuscule overcut -- the ray in the iris pointing toward 5 o'clock, which went a hair too far.  I could have gone back and carved a bit more out to its right, but realized the problem too late.  But on the whole, I thought that for a lifetime first try at block cutting, it wasn't too bad.

Here's Gray Zeitz getting my block set up on the press.  His meticulous fussing with the type's positioning and height made the printed sheets look wonderful.  It turned out that our linoleum blanks were a shade less than type-high (the standard height of all type and presses in the U.S.) so he had to raise the block a bit by putting some pieces of paper underneath.

Here's what the finished broadsides looked like:

We ended up with an edition of 15 prints: three different typefaces, and five different blocks.  And five extremely happy participants, who had the chance to play in the printshop for two days.  What could be more fun?

Printshop holiday!

Our local Portland Museum has been doing a series of exhibits on books and printing and as a grand finale, got a grant for a two-day workshop where a small group of us got to do our own printing.  When I heard about it I jumped at the opportunity to hand-set some type and put it on the press.

When I was in journalism school in the 60s we were required to hand-set type in a fabulous shop that held the personal type collection of Frederic Goudy, the master type designer who bequeathed all his stuff to Syracuse University.  I am heartbroken to report that the University subsequently threw most of it away.  Perhaps you have run into some of Goudy's typefaces in your travels; the standard Word array includes Goudy Old Style, a classic Roman face.  But I digress.

I loved to set type and during that class I pretty well memorized the layout of the California job case, just as typists memorize the QWERTY keyboard.  I can't say that I remembered anything of the layout when I got back in the printshop last week, but I did remember how to hold the stick, load the type and proofread the line (you hold it upside-down and read left to right). And after a few minutes at the case the layout was easy to use.  When we weren't using the press I spent my waiting minutes cleaning up the job case -- finding lots of letters in the wrong place and putting them back where they belong.

Our workshop leader was Gray Zeitz, who runs the Larkspur Press, a fine printing operation just up the road from us.  Here he is setting type and operating the Vandercook press.

The first day, we typeset and printed a poem.  I'll tell you about the second day tomorrow.

"Demo at Ada 2015 3" --- Sold

The third demo is about flowers. You know sometime when I paint, I have this odd feeling. We use all of those pretty bad stuff, such as cadmium and lead, to create those sweet and charming illusions like apples and roses. Is that symbolic? It so weird.

The perfect Christmas gift?

I bet you know somebody who really needs to receive my new book as a present.  Let me describe her (although it could also be a him):  She makes quilts, or wants to make quilts, and therefore goes out searching for a pattern.  If you were to suggest that maybe she could make a quilt without finding somebody else's pattern, she would look at you askance.  Either she thinks that devising her own pattern would be way too hard, or she's afraid that if she did it the quilt might look awful.  Or maybe it never even dawned on her that there's an alternative to Other People's Patterns.

Well, this friend of yours needs my book.  And if you ordered a copy HERE it would probably get to her in time for Christmas.  Or at least New Year's.

Read more about the book HERE.

"Demo at Ada 2015 2"

This is my second demo at Ada. It is rather mechanical and engineering looking. That was my intention as a matter of fact. On my workshops, we use more left brain. I establish quite a few very rigid rules. I think artists do have left brains. Why not using it? a good art should show balance.

Art on retreat

I wrote last week about the clipping, sorting and filing that I did on my retreat, but it would have been a dreary week if that had been all I did.  Fortunately I also found time to start catching up on my art review haikus.

A few years ago I started to look in the New York Times art section for reviews that included a small picture of one of the artworks.  When I found one, I would cut out the picture, paste it in my little book and then make a haiku from the text of the review.  My rule was that the haiku had to fairly represent the sense of the review -- for instance, if the reviewer loved the show, I couldn't cherry-pick negative phrases, out of context, for the haiku.

This process is more time-consuming than you might think.  I have worked on these haikus on previous retreats and enjoyed the ability to concentrate on the poetry, so I've gotten into the habit of stashing the Friday art sections from the Times and saving them for the retreat.  This may not be a good idea, as the Fridays come faster than the retreats and I still have two file boxes full of reviews that haven't yet been dealt with.

But I did get 32 haikus finished last week, a substantial accomplishment.  And resolved that I need to keep working on this project at home, not just wait till the next retreat.

"Demo at Ada 2015 1"

Left Dallas, I drove another 3 hours and arrived at Ada, Oklahoma. Yesterday I have started my last workshop of the year (No. 22) at the East Central University. Thanks to all artist friends for coming. It was so wonderful meeting new friends and re-uniting with old friends. This is my first demonstration. I guess I should feel OK now if a painting has achieved good quality, even my composition and style is predictable. I believe my art will be getting better for sure if I keep on going.

Out the Office Window

These are studies of the view out of my office window from DreamWorks back in our traditional painting days. I did something like 70 of these over the course of a year, they're painted in acrylics.

I've posted some of these before and now here are all the ones I have handy in one group.