"Rose Study 2017 03"

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I painted this rose back lit. The simplicity makes rose look elegant.

Fantastic Fibers coming up

The entry deadline for Fantastic Fibers, the annual juried show at the Yeiser Art Center in Paducah KY, comes at the end of this week and if you're on the usual-suspect email lists you may be getting reminder messages.  I'm here to tell you why I'm not going to do an entry.

First off, what's good about FF.  Although Paducah is way off the beaten path of the art world, and the Yeiser is a small museum, the show runs during the huge AQS exhibit so lots of the 30,000 quilters making the Paducah pilgrimage will see your work.  And the awards are decent: $1,000, $500 and $250, and there's going to be a printed catalog.  There are no size limits, especially appealing if you love to work big as I do.

In recent years FF has succeeded in attracting excellent work from around the world; I particularly remember a fabulous piece by Eszter Bornemisza, the great fiber artist from Hungary, in the 2012 show. (Read more about it here.)

Eszter Bornemisza, Primitive Findings (detail below) -- in Fantastic Fibers 2012

So why am I not going to enter this year?  Money.

The entry fee is $25 per piece!  You can enter up to five pieces ($125), but even if you don't have that many wonderful creations lying around, we're talking way too much $$$$ for me.  On general principles, I am hostile toward shows that seem to regard the entry process as a revenue opportunity rather than a way to simply cover costs.

Since I never delete old emails I can report that the FF fee was $12 per entry in 2014, $15 per entry in 2015 and 2016 (25% increase), and now is up to $25 (66% increase).  That's pretty steep -- both the fee and the rate of increase -- for a small museum in an out-of-the-way town.  I think it's overreaching.

So I'm opting out, thank you.

"Rose Study 2017 02"

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Valentine's Day will come soon. I will try my best to provide a few floral paintings to you. I have been painting roses for many years, but still feel there are so many areas I need to improve. This is good opportunity, for both my business and art development. I hope you like my today's painting as well.

My favorite things 5

I am privileged to count as a friend Elmer Lucille Allen, who is quite a local celebrity, and not just in the art world.  She was the first African-American chemist to work for Brown-Forman, a huge liquor company, back when those "first" distinctions were hard to come by.  She loved art since childhood and became an accomplished ceramicist, getting her MA after she retired.  Wanting a more attractive way to display her teapots, boxes and other vessels, she perked up her ears when somebody suggested she drape fabric over the shelves -- and proceeded to learn and master shibori dyeing. I met her at our local fiber and textile art group.

Several years ago she had a show of her textiles and ceramics together.  I missed the opening and by the time I got to the show, all the beautiful pots had red dots on them, so the next time I saw her I whined that I wasn't able to buy anything.  She said she had boxes and boxes of ceramics all packed up for some reason, and she would be happy to bring them over to show me.

So we unwrapped all the things in my living room and these two cubes called out to me -- heck, why wouldn't they, since they have my initials on them!  (I know, most of the Ls are backward, but they're still Ls to me.)

The cubes have patterns on all six sides but are glazed, in a beautiful pale celadon, only on the top five sides.  My only regret: Elmer Lucille didn't sign them.

Prince of Egypt Columns

Rose study 2017 01

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Recently, I have been pondering my art journey, and find suddenly that I have been running art as a business for a decade. I started selling my paintings as a "daily painter" on eBay. That was January 2007. Ten years have passed. I made some progress. I am so grateful that so many people have been supporting me. Sometimes, I hallucinated that I have got there. I have been trying new things, painted larger paintings, and gradually moved away from my daily painting discipline. I have been not doing my small daily paintings for about two years. I have tried new market for my work, but the result was not that good. Now I want to re-activate my small painting exercises again and use online bidding to sell my paintings again. I did this rose study a few days ago. I hope you like it.

All the news that's unfit to print 2

In my continuing war against stupid, worthless, ridiculous factoids in the newspaper, this latest piece of evidence:

Do we really believe that 20% of the American public thinks that meeting new people is "harder than selling snow to a snowman"?  Maybe, if the question was phrased something like this:

I think meeting new people is harder than:  

A.  herding cats

B.  pulling teeth

C.  selling snow to a snowman

D.   pissing up a rope

E.   putting toothpaste back in the tube

You'd probably get about 20% response for each of the options.

I might mention that the sponsor of this "survey" is an app that lets you "get to know new people without the awkwardness of one-on-one meetups."  Well, at least that ought to cut down on date rape.

Prince of Egypt Color Key

Painting in China 2017

My dear artist friends, I am very excited to announce my 2017 "Painting in China" trip. We plan to meet in Beijing and travel to Yunnan Province. This trip will be two weeks long from September 10 to September 24. You are cordially invited to join me and paint plein air at a few quite exotic places in Southwest China. For detailed information, please visit my website: www.qh-art.com and click the "China 2017" tab. I am looking forward to meeting you and painting together with you.

Famous in my little pond

Sometimes you can go for years without anybody noticing how great you are, and then sometimes the gods of fame smile on you.  Last week within a couple of days I got to be interviewed on the local arts radio program and then was featured in the daily arts blog, both sponsored by Louisville Visual Art.

I refuse to listen to myself on tape so I can't swear to the quality of this recording, but I do recall the conversation as being relaxed, serious and interesting.  You can listen here.  Do not be put off because the caption calls me "athleen."  At least they didn't call me "athy."

And here's the blog post, which includes great photos of some of my flag quilts.  This one got my name right and had a nice write-up of my work.

All in all, a lovely ego trip.  

Beard-n-Hat in Charcoal

"Demo at Ponte Vedra 2017 4" --- Sold

It has become more routine now that my last day of a 4-day workshop, all students wanted me to do landscape demo. So this was I did at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. My landscape painting is still in a developing stage. I am walking one step a time.

Palace from Puss in Boots and the Tres Diablos

Vickie makes a little book

When I wrote last fall about making a book of "newspaper poetry" and invited readers to copy the idea, Vickie Wheatley left a comment that she was going to make one herself.  Yesterday I was so happy to see her finished book, and it's wonderful!  She gave me permission to share it with you.

I had used early/late as the theme for my little book; Vickie used up/down, and found lots of raw material.  Since both "up" and "down" are parts of so many idioms, she had a lot more variety than I found with my theme.  Here are a few of her pages:

Just as I found when making my book, Vickie discovered that some of her pages strongly resembled poetry.  Best of all, her husband, who writes music, used some of the "poetry" as a basis for a new song!

Well, done, Vickie!  And thanks for sharing your work with us.

"Demo at Ponte Vedra 2017 3" --- Sold

The third demo at Ponte Vedra: high key flower painting.

My favorite things 4

My paternal grandmother played the harmonica, but she called it a "mouth organ."  As a kid I was terribly impressed that you could get tunes out of a tiny box (somehow I wasn't quite in awe of getting tunes out of the large box piano).  I'm sure she never had a music lesson in her life and I don't know where she learned to play the harmonica.  I don't think she had a very large repertoire; the only tune I recall her playing was "Home, Sweet Home."

But the harmonica was a part of our bedtime ritual (we lived with her until I was five), along with several songs in German.  The one best remembered is "Müde bin ich, geh zur Ruh," a traditional child's bedtime prayer ("I'm tired and going to rest...).  The way we pronounced it, the name of the song was "meedee beedee."

Although everybody in my grandmother's generation (all born in the US) was bilingual, they spoke German in the home and in the church.  But they largely abandoned it during World War I.  It was my father's first language, but he switched to English at age five when we entered the war and never was very fluent despite a lot of time spent in Germany in later life, as a soldier, teacher and tourist.

By the time I came along, German was used for bedtime songs, for talking about things that children shouldn't hear, and for the occasional curse.  When I got to college and took German I once asked my grandmother why she hadn't taught me German in infancy; it would have been so simple.  She said it never dawned on her that an American child should speak anything but English.

Her harmonica was made in Germany by the Hohner Company and was the "Unsere Lieblinge" model -- "Our Sweetheart."  The writing is faint, worn down by years of use.  I found several on eBay advertised as 80-90 years old but I'm sure this one is a lot older.  If you still have the original box you can get $75 or maybe even $95, but I'm not going to sell mine.

Sinbad Scenic Process

Think about this...

Lyndon Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

-- referenced in "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" by Nancy Isenberg (a great read, although long and a bit scholarly) 

"Demo at Ponte Vedra 2017 2" --- Sold

My second demo at Ponte Vedra.

An art experiment

My art book club (in which we don't actually read books) had an assignment this week to bring in a report on an artist that nobody else had ever heard of.  I have been consumed with activities surrounding my gallery show and left it till the last minute to prepare, so I had to go with an artist that I own a whole book about, H. N. Werkman.

Werkman was from the Netherlands, born in 1882 and died in 1945, executed by the Nazis just two days before Canadian troops liberated his town of Groningen.  He owned a printing business and used type to print artwork that looked quite avant garde and sometimes painterly, but it wasn't produced that way.  Here are two of his pieces:

I love his work and after I re-read the book I decided to try my hand at some Werkman-style art.  I found two capital Ls, two capital Os, a hyphen and an exclamation point in my type case and set to playing.  I inked the type with a foam brush and printed each character individually onto the paper, unlike Werkman's typical process of setting up his type face up on a flatbed press.  So my characters weren't as neatly lined up as his.  Also my hand-inking left blobs of paint around the edges of some of the characters.  But after the paint dried I decided both these irregularities added something to the effect.  Werkman often used the bottom of his type to produce plain rectangles rather than letterforms.  I did a little bit of that too in my experiments and liked it.

I think I'll try more of this technique in the future.  I might even decide that this qualifies as "text" and thus can count as my daily art.

"Demo at Ponte Vedra 2017 1" --- Sold

I am in Ponte Vedra Beach Florida and just completed a 4-day workshop here. I want to thank the Cultural Center at Ponte Vedra Beach for organizing this workshop, and thanks to all the artists who attended this workshop. I am very happy the turn out of this one. This is my first demo.

What is this stuff?

Cleaning out my studio I'm finding a lot of mystery stuff.  A lot of it I realize that I don't want or need, and put it in the grab bag bag.  At least I know what it is.  But I am totally in the dark about this big bag.

Think dozens and dozens of absorbent sheets, kind of like disposable diapers, maybe a half-inch thick, of a shape and size that must be suited for something but I can't imagine it.  Somebody must have given them to me thinking that they would be useful for some phase of fiber art, and I must have agreed, but ??????

Does anybody out there know what these things are?  How would one use them in fiber art?  How would one use them in non-fiber art?  If I wanted to give them away, who would use them?

All suggestions gratefully accepted.

My favorite things 3

Starting in the late 1950s my father went to Canada frequently on business, and he liked to bring home souvenirs.  Not tacky refrigerator magnets, but Inuit soapstone sculptures, an art form that he discovered early on.

At the time I thought this was a traditional folk art, but have learned more recently that the first peoples hardly ever carved in stone until 1949.  At that time the Canadian government decided to encourage the production of artwork among natives who no longer followed the old subsistence lifestyle.  While they had traditionally carved ivory, bone and antlers, now they were steered toward soapstone, which was found in the Arctic.  (Interestingly, some of the Inuit artists are importing their soapstone from Brazil.)

Dad bought sculptures of varying sizes, the largest being about the size of a shoebox, but mostly little things that would happily sit in your palm. Three of the pieces that I was given at the time or subsequently inherited are faces or masks, but most are animals of one sort or another.

Carvings done before 1990 are now called "vintage," so I guess my little trove might even be valuable if I ever needed to part with it.  Meanwhile, they live on a little glass shelf within reach of my place at the dining room table.  Isaac likes to rearrange and play with them and I like to think of them keeping me company while I sit and eat or read.

Jungle Waterfall!

"Plein air at Anderson Mill"

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I did this plein air painting as a warmup before my Cedar Park Workshop. To guarantee a high quality for my workshop teaching, I spent quite amount of time to prepare. After the Christmas holidays, I thought I have forgotten how to paint. So I went to Anderson Mill by myself, and did this study.

All my flags flying

Here are the "installation views" of three of my flags on display at Pyro Gallery through February 18.  I thought I had taken a picture of the fourth one but can't find it.  I'll do that the next time I'm there.

We'll be having a gallery talk at 12:30 on Saturday, January 14.  If you're in the vicinity, drop in and visit!

Memorial Day 

at left, More Equal Than Others; at right, Fading

"Demo at Cedar Park 2017 4"

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My last demo was a street scene. I showed a few reference photos and let my students decide which scene I should use. This one is from one of my photo I took at Xidi China. It was quite a challenge. There is too much information. I painted abstractly.  It was a new experience for me.

"Demo at Cedar Park 2017 3"

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Recently, my paintings are so grey. It must be reflecting my current mood. So for the third demo I decided to put in more color. This is what I had.

Amy's quilt

I wrote yesterday about Amy Pabst, who has been corresponding with me for some time about her fine-line quilt in progress.  Shortly before Christmas she wrote to say she had made a bunch of modules, and to ask for advice about how to join them.  I gave her a couple of hints, and decided that it might be a good idea to write a more extensive tutorial to share with everybody.

I mainly thought this might be a help to Amy, but I moved too slowly.  Once this woman decides to sew, stand back!

Here's what her design wall looked like on December 3:

On December 16:

And here's her quilt top, finished on December 22:

Although it's not apparent in the full view, all of her white fabrics are striped (some are white-on-white).  The full quilt measures 63 x 70 inches.

I think this is a beautiful quilt!  It reminds me of a couple of my own quilts, which isn't surprising because Amy used them as models.  And I think I own and have used several of the same red stripe fabrics.

After she finished, Amy wrote:  "I was very surprised at how well everything fit together. I had to do a little fiddling, adding and trimming here and there, but for the most part everything ended up a good fit by what seemed like pure chance.....  I love working with small pieces, but normally I paper piece and plan and calculate everything to exact measurements. The free style construction of this quilt was brand new to me and very refreshing after all the rigid perfection of paper piecing."

Amy, I'm so glad that you made this quilt, and that you like the improvisational approach. Yes, it is a very different way to work, with very little advance planning and certainly no exact measurements, and yes, it is refreshing!  Thanks so much for sharing your photos, and I hope we'll get another look when it's all quilted.