This year's daily art

In November I usually start thinking about daily art, and what I'm going to choose for my project in the coming year.  I had pretty much narrowed it down to some kind of collage, whether paper or fabric, but didn't have any details in mind.  Then when I went to the December retreat from my fiber art group, I was delighted to find that Santa Claus also came.

Santa aka Joanne Weis, who has been one of my closest art pals for more than two decades.  She has experimented with every conceivable method of surface design (dyeing, screenprinting, laminating,  painting, etc.) and every conceivable fiber (silk, hemp, linen, cotton, nylon, etc.).  She always does considerable testing to develop a palette before embarking on a new project, and often prepares a lot more fabric than she actually uses.  And for years, she stashed her unused fabrics in drawers.

Then last year she decided she needed the drawers, stuffed all the fabrics into big bags, and brought them to the retreat. 

I let others in the group go through the bags for more than an hour, cherry-picking pieces that called out to them, and when everybody else had enough, I packed up everything that was left.

Two huge bags worth.  And realized that clearly Santa wanted me to do fabric collage as my 2023 daily art.

I have defined the project as follows:  All fabric must come from Joanne's leftovers.  I can add hand- or machine-stitching of any kind, plus notions like beads, buttons or found objects.  Most days I will finish a collage, but occasionally I can hold it over to another day (or two) as long as it's documented at the end of each day.

This one took several days to finish (Day 1 here)

I haven't felt this exhilarated in a long time.  I find myself getting up in the morning and thinking about what I will do in the studio, and the daily stitching is usually the first thing I tackle when I get there.  (By contrast, toward the end of the year, my daily painting got to be a chore, done after dinner with the same enthusiasm as kids have for the last bit of homework before bed.)  Often I spend some time preparing fabrics for future days, cutting them into small pieces, maybe putting the pieces through the wash to fray the edges, maybe auditioning possible combinations. 

I haven't posted any of the collages on my daily art blog yet, but that's on my to-do list.  Meanwhile, here are a few of my favorites.  Obviously I'll be telling you a lot more about this project as the year goes on.

A long-overdue update -- part 1

At least one of my faithful blog readers has noticed that it's been a long time since I posted anything, and wrote to ask me whether something dire was going on.  Thanks for asking, Karen, and no, nothing awful has happened on my end, except that for some reason I have gotten out of the blog habit and will have to perform some brain surgery on myself to get back in.  So I will do a couple of posts to bring you up to date on what's been going on since last fall.

First, an update on my daily art.  After 365 paintings in 2022, I came to the conclusion that I love to paint, but I have no ideas that I want to express in that medium.  I love the paint on the palette, the paint on the brush, the feel of the brush on the paper.  I love mixing colors and watching the accidental effects of wet-into-wet.  But throughout the year I struggled with what to paint.  I would get an idea, usually by copying from somebody else, and paint it more than once to see if it might strike a chord and stay with me.

In the past, when a student in my workshop or a blog reader would ask me whether they had my permission to use a technique I have used or taught, I would say of course you may (nobody owns an idea).  And if you like the technique, make it three times and by then it will change enough that it will belong to you, not to me.  I tried to apply this rule of thumb to my painting.

I've posted about the faces I painted based on black-and-white photos in the paper.  I did that 52 times, and maybe10 of them were pretty good.  But they were getting repetitive, and I didn't think that they in any way belonged to me.  

I thought maybe if I put some stitching into the paintings it would resonate, since stitching is so integral to the rest of my artistic life.  I made several with hand stitching, and a few with machine stitching, and again, I liked them, but there was no surge of desire to keep on making them and after ten tries I stopped trying.

I had a nice long run at the end of the year with 15 paintings following the tutorials of Vanidas Mangathil on Instagram (he's also on YouTube).  I loved painting the little people and I highly recommend his instruction if you're into painting little people.  But after two weeks I didn't see any signs of them moving into my art space.

By the end of the year, I had decided that I was done with painting.  In fact, I even cut up a bunch of pages from my painting sketchbooks to make my Christmas ornaments.

Daily painting -- lots of faces

 

In my last post I showed you the very start of what has turned into a fairly long series of faces in my daily paint project.  I have been finding photos in the newspaper and using them as references to paint my own versions: all spaces heavily outlined, faces rendered in two different non-face-like colors against usually dark backgrounds.  I'll share some of the ones that I'm proud of (but you can see them all on my daily art blog). 

As you can see, I do better with men than women!  I have tried women but have never been happy with the results.  Maybe it's the hair -- and why so many of the ones I like feature bald guys or those in hats!

So far I've done 45 of these faces and am not sure what if anything I'm accomplishing.  As time passed, I started experimenting with different techniques, such as washy shading of the facial contours, and yet I worry about getting away from the flat, graphic quality that I liked from the start.  

When I go through the whole series I find that the ones I like best are those toward the beginning.  That doesn't seem like a good sign.  The more you work in a series, the better you're supposed to get, not the other way around.

I still don't know what I'm going to do next.  In two days I start a new, much smaller sketchbook and a new series, because we're heading off on a long trip and I don't want to carry a huge paint kit.  What will I put in the new sketchbook?  Will I return to the faces when we get home?  

I think that December 31 will be my last daily painting.  Several times in the past I have kept the same daily art theme for multiple years when I was having fun and felt there was still more to explore.  I know there's still a whole universe of painting out there that I have yet to learn, but I'm drawn more to another stitching project for next year.  I'll keep you posted, of course!

My good deed for the future

I learned to sew at my grandmothers' knees, when I was 5 or 6 years old.  Since then I have probably sewed on a thousand buttons and mended hundreds of pairs of pants.  Every time I repeat myself with these mundane but so-satisfying chores I think of all the people who don't have those skills, and wonder who should have taught them.  

This summer my son got involved with a new venture, the Louisville Tool Library, a non-profit that owns lots and lots of tools of every sort that Library members can check our for their various maintenance and improvement projects.  At first they were thinking along the lines of shovels, saws, screwdrivers, drills, all kinds of building and fixing equipment.  But then people started donating sewing machines and I perked up my ears.  My son has made himself the guy in charge of workshops, and I volunteered to teach one for total sewing beginners -- today.

With practicality in mind, I decided to teach how to sew on buttons and how to patch holes in pants, both by hand.  We started with threading a needle (my students did great -- everybody succeeded on the first try) and putting a knot at the end.  Then they sewed on some little four-hole shirt buttons.  They could choose whether to sew plus signs or equal signs through the four holes.

After a couple of shirt buttons, we moved on to pants buttons, which of course required a stalk or shank.  They switched to sturdier needles and button-and-carpet thread.  We spent time on how to tie off the thread at the end of the task, and how to bury the ends between the layers of fabric (one of the students thought this was the cleverest thing she'd ever seen...).

Then we put patches on pants holes -- just plain old holes near the knees, no blown-out seams or holes in difficult places like pockets.  They cut patches from drapery-weight fabric, pinned them underneath the holes, and did rows and rows of running stitches to secure the patches.  

I had only three students this afternoon, after some who had signed up for the workshop were no-shows.  At first I was annoyed, but after we got started I was glad to have so few people -- especially the guy who had never held a needle in his life.  I could give individual instruction, attention and encouragement.  So future workshops will be just as small.

I came home exhilarated -- all three of the students said they wanted to come back for more lessons, and the Tool Library people want to have me come back as often as I can.  I want to keep teaching these basics, and one of the students asked if I could teach "visible mending."  I'd also like to hold a mending clinic in which people could bring in their own garments that need help, and we could talk first about whether the problem can actually be repaired, and how to go about it.  I am less excited about teaching newbies how to use sewing machines but I suppose I could suck it up and do it.  Supposedly the Tool Library people have tested out every tool before putting it out on the floor, so the machines ought to all work (even if they're not Berninas...  I am so spoiled... ).

My objective here is not exactly what I shoot for in teaching quilting or other fiber arts.  In those classes I wish that nobody will ever have to use other people's patterns again.  In these, the bar is much lower: that nobody will ever have to throw out a garment because it has a hole or a blown seam or a missing button.  Call it Survival Skills 101 -- with a side benefit of helping save the planet.  A good day all around!

Daily painting update

As July turned into August I started feeling blah every day when I brought out my sketchbook for daily painting.  My intentions when I decided to do painting as my daily art for 2022 were to learn how to use paint and brushes, and with any luck, to develop some kind of personal style or voice that felt good.  I even thought maybe I could eventually come up with small paintings good enough to be torn out of the sketchbook and displayed in the gallery.

But none of these things had happened at mid-year.  I had learned that I loved gouache, especially when watered down a bit so I could use wet-into-wet techniques.  But my default composition of three horizontal segments, stacked one over the other, was feeling stale.  Some days I liked what I did, other days not, and I was definitely in a rut.

My sketchbook ran out of pages toward the end of August and I waited until the last possible day to make a run to the art supply store -- where to my dismay, there were no more 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 sketchbooks on the shelves.  I had to buy the next size up, 7 x 10.  That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's actually 50% larger and the expanse of untouched white looked orders of magnitude more daunting.  

So, time for a life-changing experience -- I painted a person.

I was thinking of Rouault's people, crudely outlined in black, usually dark against dark, not photorealistic by a mile but also not cute or cartoony.  

Georges Rouault, The Old King

Here's my first such guy:

I liked him, but what to do the next day?  I was less happy with the second guy, getting too much toward the cute/cartoon side:

Then an idea: what if I copied my guy from a photo in the newspaper instead of drawing him?  Here's the third guy:

 

I was much happier -- without having to worry about the outline, I could still do my own thing with the painting, and the two-color face approach was very satisfying.  I'm now two weeks in to the newspaper photo series and feeling pretty good about it.  

I'll show you more of these new faces in another post.