"PAE 2017 7: Nocturn of Last Night" --- Sold

This is crazy for me. I did not realize that we need to paint plein air in the night during PAE. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did it anyway. I was not sure what color to use because I can't see. However, I looked the painting the day after, it looks better than I thought.

Life Paint Prep

The grammar queen is not amused

From the Associated Press today:

"Officials say a Spirit Airlines flight leaving Las Vegas was briefly delayed after a passenger removed all their clothes while boarding...."

OK, I do not condone, but I do understand, using "their" as a singular pronoun when you don't know the gender of the antecedent person.

I find it difficult to imagine that excuse applying in this situation.

More from QBL

After two days of Improvisational Strip Piecing, my workshoppers at Quilting By the Lake moved on to three days of Fine Line Piecing.  Although I've taught this technique in many different formats, ranging from one day to five, I'm always happiest with three or more days so people have the chance to explore both "large-to-small" and "small-to-large" approaches. And I was really proud of the work people did last week!

As usual, the last day of a longer workshop often is marked by people sewing as fast as they can, wishing they could finish up before it's time to pack up and go home.  Some people did finish attractive compositions, as shown below:

Others stopped in midstream and I'm hoping they'll (a) finish up their pieces when they get home and (b) send me pictures!

Digital Landscape Demo

My favorite things 31

My older son is a largely self-taught wizard of all things useful, and many of his talents have shown up as artwork, mostly of the Arte Povera genre.  Here's one of his earliest productions, dating back to his career as a beginning welder.

It's a pair of sculptures, made from coat hangers.  I have always been in awe of artists who can masterfully come up with the simplest line that perfectly depicts what they're trying to draw.  George Washington clearly qualifies in that regard.

The second sculpture is actually a mobile, because the spectacles are balanced on a notch on the support.  It's too heavy to move in the breeze, and besides there isn't much of a breeze on the lower level of my cocktail cart where these pieces live, but when you pick it up or touch it it will wobble endearingly but always regain its balance.

"PAE 2017 6 Dover Street Sunshine"

This small painting is the only one I did that didn't sell at the Plein Air Easton Festival. I gave the painting to my hosting family Richard Caroll to think him for supporting me by offering his lovely place for us to stay. I want to thank other volunteers who helped Plein Air Easton 2017 as well. Without all those people who generously provided their time and effort during the festival. Plein Air Easton will not be possible.

Pirate John in Gouache

"PAE 2017 5: Old Point" --- Sold

"Old Point" is the name of a boat being build at the St Michaels Maritime Museum. Many PAE artists painted this boat. It was a busy site. whole bunch of lumber piled up under the "Old Point". I thought it is very difficult to paint them, but the result was not bad.

Strip piecing at QBL

I'm teaching at Quilting By The Lake this week, two days of strip piecing and three of fine lines.  I was really pleased with the compositions that people did with strip piecing!

First, each person made six strip-pieced panels according to specified color recipes.

Then they cut up and reassembled the panels.  Some started at the edges and worked inward, while others went from the bottom up.

Some people cut their panels on the diagonal, some stuck to rectangles.  Two very different feelings.

Lots of good work!

"PAE 2017 3: Has Seen Better Days" --- Sold

During the Plein Air Easton Festival, I was so impressed with how some of artists worked. They arrived at the painting locations very early like 5 or 6 AM, and set up very large canvas. They were able to paint 3 or more paintings each day. they even painted after dark as well. The weather was brutal: 90s with almost 100% humidity, but so many artists still worked under the steamy sun. I was so unexperienced. I got up about 8, having coffee with my host family. When I arrived at the painting site. Quite a few artists have done their large pieces. Now I understood what it means by "painting seriously".

How to Train Your Dragon Set Design

Pixels and show entries

I had a back-and-forth the other day with somebody who was trying to get images onto a website, trying to clear up some confusion about how high the resolution needed to be.  After that question was settled, she wrote me back and talked about her frustration with trying to enter a juried show through CaFE.

"CaFE requires a pretty small file to be uploaded.  I don't remember the exact size, but I know that I was disappointed with how the photo looked when I tried to zoom in.  Of course, they also allow a detail shot.  Is this how things normally work when entering photos of artwork to be judged?  Why can't I send my 2 to 4 MB awesome photo for clarity and detail at the thread level?  Could you answer this or write a blog?"

OK, I'll take a shot!  The disclaimer: I'm not a computer geek, so those who are may correct me on the details.  But I know I'm right on the overall concept.

First off, some definitions.  Resolution is a technical term that way predates the invention of digital images; it stems from the printing industry, where photographs were translated into tiny dots of ink instead of the continuous tone of the original photo paper.  Much like pixels in a computer.  The more dots or pixels, the crisper and clearer the image.

If you have a certain number of dot/pixels in your image, it may or may not be enough to give you good resolution -- that is, a nice crisp, clear image.  Here's a photo of adorable baby Vivian, sized to a relatively stingy 100 pixels across.  If we display/print it as a tiny thumbnail, it looks OK.

100 pixels wide

But if we stretch it out to huge, we lose the definition.

100 pixels wide

Printers would deal with this issue by talking about dots per inch.  Tiny Vivian's 100 pixels are spread over a bit more than an inch, yielding 80 dpi, while large Vivian's pixels have to go farther, only 17 per inch.

So dpi is not an absolute term; it's totally relative to the size at which you display or print the image.

Why then do a lot of show sponsors specify that an image needs to be so many dpi?  Because they don't really know what they're talking about. Point 1 about misunderstanding: don't think about dpi when you're preparing your images for submission or posting.  Think about pixels.

OK -- how many pixels are we talking about?  Your point-and-shoot digital camera probably produces images 3000 to 4000 pixels wide.  A cellphone camera might give you 4600 pixels.

So why don't we just submit those big, data-rich images to the show and let the jurors zoom in for close views as they wish?  Two reasons: one technical, one human.

First, because too much data takes longer to transmit (from you to the site, or from the site to the jurors) and bogs down the server. And if you're looking at an image on a computer screen, you probably can't tell the difference between a 4000-pixel photo and an 800-pixel photo, so why even collect all that extra data?  (Maybe your computer will let you zoom your view of the two photos below and see how big you have to go before the lower one gets a whole lot nicer than the upper one; I had to go to 250% before the 800-pixel image started to break apart.)

800 pixels wide

3024 pixels wide

Second, because jurors don't want to take the time to zoom in here and there and everywhere searching for something or other, and because they don't want the responsibility of choosing which part to zoom in on -- they want the artist to choose the detail that is most telling.

Side note:  as a longtime juror, I can testify that your choice of detail shot is extremely important in making your submission attractive.  We can talk more about that in another post if anybody is interested.

Sometimes show rules will specify two or three different measurements.  There's almost always a pixel rule:  the image must be 1800 pixels on its longest side, or it must be at least 1200 pixels, or it can be no more than 1800 pixels.   That's the rule I look at, and the rule by which I resize my photos.  I always submit the most pixels I can, on general principles, just in case the image is going to be projected on a big screen for jurors to look at.

Sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in MB.  But here's point 2 about misunderstanding: the size of your photo in MB has nothing to do with the resolution.  It is simply a measure of how much data is stuffed into the package.  For instance, if you have futzed with an image in Photoshop, perhaps to remove a stray thread in your detail shot or lose a distracting bit of the background wall, it may end up with more data than it started out with.  The only reason show sponsors would need to specify a maximum size in MB has to do with their system: too much data takes up too much space and time.  But my suspicion is that it's much like the dpi rule, sponsors who don't know what they're talking about, and specifying the size in pixels would accomplish almost exactly the same thing.

But if you see a MB rule, check the size of your image.  If it's too big, you can either resize the image to include fewer pixels, or if your photo editing program allows it, you can choose a lower degree of resolution.  Photoshop Elements, for instance, allows you to save a 3024 x 4032 image at 100 quality (4 MB) or at 75 quality (2.36 MB) or at 60 quality (1.82 MB), or any other number you type in.  Again, if I have to lose bytes, I'll work downward, trying different settings, until I'm just barely below the rule.

And finally, sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in dpi.  If they have already specified a pixel rule, just ignore anything they have to say about dpi.  Remember, pixels are absolute; dpi is totally dependent on the use to which the image is put.  People who ask for both don't know what they're talking about.  At best, such a rule is redundant; at worst it's confusing and contradictory.

I hope this explanation helps.  Ask more questions if you want and I'll do my best to answer them!

PAE 2017 2 and 4 --- Sold

Plein Air Easton 2017 ended yesterday. I painted 10 paintings and sold 9 of them. I did not get any awards. That is all right. I surely enjoyed very much this 9 days festival. These are two 12" x 24" I painted at Oxford and St. Michaels. This was my first time painting large paintings live at the sites. It was quite challenging. I have stepped into many unknown zones of plein air painting. I have learned a lot from many experienced plein air painters this time.

Form Not Function 2 -- Best in Show

For the second year in a row, Best in Show at Form, Not Function went to Niraja Lorenz.

Niraja Lorenz, Strange Attractor #20 (details below)

If you look back at her winning quilt from 2016, you'll see that she's still very much in the same ballpark, but she's also been adding some twists to the basic recipe of extremely complex piecing.

What immediately struck my eye was that last year the large shapes were almost all hexagons, but this year she has lots of rectangles and a few pentagons as well.



Still lots of areas that remind me of my own "crazed" piecing pattern, like the beige-and-gray gridwork in the upper left corner of the detail shot below.

This is one of those quilts that you can stand and look at for a long time, always finding new little areas to engross you for a while.  The piecing is impeccable (all those areas that might have been cut from commercial striped fabrics by lazy quilters like me have actually been pieced!), the quilting is dense without detracting from the overall design, and it makes me hope that Niraja will stick with this series for a long time, even though she's already at #20.

I have to confess that I'm usually a bit disappointed when somebody takes home the big prize two years in a row -- kind of like "let somebody else have a chance already!" -- but I can't quarrel with the judge on this decision.  It's a fabulous quilt.

Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie continues at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in new Albany IN, just across the river from Louisville, through September 16, so there's plenty of time to plan a trip -- maybe on your way to see the eclipse?

My favorite things 30

One Christmas many years ago, I opened this gift from my mother:

A bunch of aprons that had been accumulating in her house for decades, many of them made by the same person (I suspect it was my Aunt Freda) and probably multi-gifted to me and my sister.  I was thrilled!  What a madeleine of remembrance of time past!  Time when people wore fancy half-aprons to cover up a nice dress (although these aren't fancy enough for a REALLY nice dress)!  Time when people wore nice dresses while cooking and serving dinner!  Time when gingham was 100% cotton!

With the exception of the no-frills pink apron at left, all of the others show quite a bit of clever handwork and design -- the trim element also was functional.

The two print aprons are made in gores, and each gore is faced with the solid pink, with the facing turned to the front and hemmed -- finish and trim all in one step!  And if you're of a certain age, you will remember when "hot pink" was the trendiest, daring-est color you could wear.  (It was my favorite color for a long time.)

The two made with the small-scale gingham feature cross stitch as, again, both trim and finish.  The row of stitching up from the hem also held the hem in place.  On the red apron, the stitching on the waistband also secured the pleats.

The ones made with the large-scale gingham were cut on the bias, and the cross stitches at the waist acted as smocking to release fullness.  And after you turned your narrow hem to the front, a row of rickrack, secured with hand stitching, also sewed the hem in place.

The red apron shows the most signs of wear -- the black stitches on the pocket are worn away in many places.  This was my mother's apron, and I remember her wearing it a lot.  The ones that I think belonged to me and my sister are in much better shape.  I don't think we ever shirked our kitchen chores, but we are of the generation that started shirking the aprons.  Today I'd be amazed to meet women under 35 with aprons in their regular clothes rotation, and I'd bet real money that if there were any, their aprons wouldn't be cross-stitched gingham.

Form Not Function 1 -- Political commentary

"Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie" opened last night, and I'll be writing several posts about it.  It's maybe the best show in FNF's 13-year history, with not a single weak sister in the room.  I'm glad I only had to choose one award, and didn't have the responsibility of deciding on best in show!

Every year I give an award for political and social commentary at FNF.  Last year there were no quilts there thinking about politics and we reluctantly decided to make no award, but this year there were plenty of candidates.  I chose this piece because it's timely, its imagery is striking, and there's certainly no doubt where the maker stands.

Jennifer Reis, Portrait of a Young Man: Trump in Drag (details below)

There's a lot going on in a relatively small space: presidents both off and on large bills, a Carmen-Miranda headdress of costume jewelry, little pompoms as an inner border, a flag, a motto, and a bazillion sequins and beads, all hand-stitched.  Impeccably crafted and presented on a stretched foundation.

I liked it a lot!

The show will be open at the Carnegie Center for art and History in New Albany IN through September 16.  Well worth a detour, although the museum is only five blocks off I-64.

Acrylic Study

"Boat House at Fox Harbor Farm (Plein Air Easton 2017 1)" --- Sold

My very first Plein Air Festival - Plein Air Easton started. I am so happy to gain new painting experience at this new event. I was shocked that most of participating artists started painting in very early hours, and keep on paining after dark. They can crank multiple paintings per day. The weather is not cooperating. It is hot and humid. But artists working hard under the sun. The event is very well organized. I feel very fortunate to get in. This is my first painting. I started around 4 PM finished about 7 PM. framed (with the only frame I brought) and displayed on my easel. Collectors came. The painting sold pretty quickly.

Sketchbook Ink Rough

My birthday present

My sons took me out last week for a birthday celebration, perfectly calibrated to the things I love to do, and none of the things I don't.  First off, sushi for lunch.

Next, two store visits, in which  the guys would buy me anything I wanted -- the restaurant supply store and Harbor Freight, that cheap-crap extravaganza where you can buy the low-end Chinese version of any tool you might ever want.  Ah yes, they know me well -- I don't do well in fancy stores but show me stuff for $1.99 and I am happy.

In each of the stores we walked every one of the aisles, discussing all the things for sale -- what you might use them for, what makes them so expensive (or so cheap).  Stories of kitchen and shop mishaps of the past abounded.  A few legitimate needs were answered, plus a bunch of impulse buys, but of course the conversation and the companionship were the best parts of the afternoon.

Here are some of my new toys:

a sheath for my good Wusthof knife

an array of clamps, magnets, wire brushes and a little tape measure with a carabiner to hook onto your belt

and best of all, a little pull saw.  For years I've been working with a little electric saw that cuts nice and clean until the last 1/16th of an inch, at which point the wood breaks off in a splinter (lots of sandpaper used in my shop).  And for years I've been bemoaning the lack of a decent vise to hold the wood while I cut it.

The new saw solves both problems.  Because it cuts on the pull stroke, you don't need a vise, just a piece of wood clamped to the bench.  Nestle your dowel or whatever against the lip, hold the saw horizontally and saw against the edge of the wood till the teeth just graze the surface of the bench.  Just a bit of guidance from your left hand to hold the other end of the dowel against the wood lip, while the action of the saw holds the business end firmly in place with each stroke.

A wonderful birthday celebration!  We sure raised a couple of great kids.

DreamWorks Dragon Cave Design

My favorite things 29

My parents were great travelers in their later years, just as happy on a cargo ship as on an ocean liner or driving across the Canadian plains.  But as they hit the high 80s they realized that their usual intrepid travel M.O was getting more difficult.  So Ken and I decided to help them out with one last hurrah.  The four of us went to Norway in 1999 to take the famous Hurtigruten cruise, originally the route of the mail boats that carried mail, cargo and passengers along the coast, serving communities that might not have road connections to the rest of the country.

Today the ships still leave Bergen every afternoon, headed for Kirkenes at the Russian border, and take 13 days on the round trip, stopping at 26 ports along the way.  In the big town of Trondheim the stop is six hours; in some of the tiny places it might be ten minutes, perhaps in the middle of the night.  The ships still carry cargo -- our favorite was the one-meter-cubes of salted cod, shrinkwrapped on pallets and left on the dock to be loaded on the next vessel -- but there are as many tourists as locals on the voyage.

Ken and I humped the baggage -- eight big bags among the four of us -- on and off planes, trains, buses, cabs and ships, while Mom and Dad enjoyed the trip.  It was their last big expedition.

I bought only one souvenir on the trip: a reindeer horn which I bought at an outdoor market at one of the towns in Lapland.  Others in my family didn't think much of this purchase, unwieldy to pack in a suitcase, and besides, what did I need with a reindeer horn?  They were right on both counts, but it called to me.  Not only was it unwieldy to bring home, but it has been unwieldy for 18 years.  It currently lives in my office, hooked over the window crank handle.  Inconvenient when I want to open the window, but it still calls to me, saying "I'm so glad you brought me here."

On the way home we changed planes in Reykjavik and Mom bought me these three little ceramic pieces at the airport gift shop.  They're small, the hallmark of a great souvenir, and adorable.  The church is 2 1/2 inches tall, and they're all about 3/4 inch deep and a bit wonky.  Something about the simple but jaunty structures always reminds me of that trip, a glimpse of a calmer, less complex time and place.