What Was I Thinking?

People have said, “I’d like to see inside your head” or “I don’t know how you come up with these things” when they see my art.  Some have said, “I wish I could be that creative.”  The reality is, as far as I’m concerned, that everyone can be.

In trying to explain about my thinking or creative process, I must say the first thing is I don’t censor an idea.  The second is that I constantly look for inspiration.

If something inspires me, I dwell on the thought, let it percolate, conceive of iterations, build upon the idea.  I imagine.  I have lots and lots of ideas for things I’ll probably never get around to, but the mere act of not stopping the creative process or throwing up a roadblock of “I already have too many things to do” allows the flow of ideas to keep coming.  Even if I never get around to the specific project, the idea may evolve into something that really does spark my motivation.  As much as possible, I try to record the ideas in a sketchbook.

The second part of not censoring has to do with how I could possibly accomplish the idea.  I don’t let how be a roadblock.  Figuring it out is where the creativity really comes into play.  Those things that aren’t easily done and take some ingenuity to resolve are usually the ones that receive “Wow!” reviews.

I get inspiration from any number of sources.  Sometimes it’s exploring a new technique, or the work of a fellow artist, or flipping through quilting magazines, or more often than not browsing a magazine featuring a completely different media, such as beading, polymer clay, mixed media scrapbooking, or jewelry.  In looking at other media, I may find a new form, color combination, or surface design technique that will launch me into the “how” phase.

As much as anything, coming up with creative ideas is a matter of training your thinking.  If something inspires you and you’re motivated to create, do it (or file the idea away), then think about how you could improve upon that.  Your own work can be a source of inspiration.  Don’t automatically rule anything out, don’t censor your creativity and imagination, be willing to explore and figure out the “how”…and before you know it, you’ll have people wondering about the creative world inside your head!

You see things; and you say, “Why?”  But I dream things

that never were and I say, “Why not?”

George Bernard Shaw

Here are a couple pieces done several years ago.  The first was inspired by the structure of China’s Bird’s Nest Stadium featured in the Beijing Olympics.  Inspiration can be found most anywhere!

  

The above was a “how” challenge – how to assembly seven distinct and separated layers…and also an exploration of surface design.

Happy Holidays!

Of course my thing is the interconnectedness of creativity and happiness, so what more perfect time than the holidays to witness and enhance that connection.  After all, how happy our holidays are is largely dependent on what we “make” of them.  It’s about creating the fun times and memories.

What was so wonderful about Christmas when we were children (I use Christmas as an example since that’s my frame of reference)?  Wasn’t it that it was new, unexpected, a mystery, a surprise, the anticipation?  And why was that – probably because we were just children and someone else was making it that way for us.  Think of the parent or loved one seeking that special gift to thrill and delight.  Or all the behind-the-scenes work the teacher put into the Christmas pageant or classroom party.  Maybe it was someone close to us making the time for a special occasion together, or even just sharing a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows!

And what makes the holidays special when we’re grown – probably doing some of those same things, carrying them on as traditions…but it does take the effort to create those moments of happiness.  I’ve seen a year where I sat back and awaited “the magic”…and it didn’t automatically happen.  The family tree didn’t go up until the week of Christmas, and that’s because I jumped in and did it.  It took taking action and changing my outlook to turn that one around.

My family has many traditions, and those are the foundation of the holiday enjoyment.  Then there are the added things, the created moments or special events that make it really merry.  One year I came across a pickle ornament and learned of a German tradition of hiding the ornament on the tree with the person finding it receiving a special gift, so I hung the ornament and put the present under the tree.  There was a bit of intrigue after the presents had been opened and everyone wondered who the last, tagless gift was for…and so a fun moment was created as everyone began scouring the tree for the tiny pickle.  I did it again the next year, and with our family, once something has been done two years in a row, it becomes tradition.

Create fun, make a tradition, do something new, look for opportunities to innovate, inspire with imagination, and create happiness.  Create the moments, events, and memories that will make your holidays fun!

Season’s greetings!

Reindeer, 2012 - 20"x40"

Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been?

Well, I haven’t been to London to see the queen.  And, I didn’t even get there to see the Olympics, but I did take my first cruise!  That was to the western Caribbean aboard the Carnival Legend.  It was wonderful!  So many beautiful things to see, so much to do, so much inspiration.

I actually took this picture while snorkeling in Honduras!

Art quilt-wise I haven’t just been sitting around either  I wasn’t able to complete the major project I had planned for the Fair (but I got a great start on it), so I entered things I had already done.  The whole Fair thing may have run its course.  Very likely I won’t enter in 2013.  It will be nice to be a free agent with no creative obligation for the summer.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be creating, just that I won’t have a specific deadline or purpose.

And what else has held up my posting?  My computer has been out of commission.  A hard drive went bad or something.  The worst part was that my external backup went out just days before that, and I feared I had lost my entire portfolio and six years of family pictures!  Fortunately a computer friend was able to remove the hard drive and retrieve most everything.  Technology – wonderful when it works, terrible when it doesn’t.  Thank goodness for tech-savvy friends.

There really was a lull in creativity toward the end of the summer, but I’m certainly back in full swing now.  I also have a new computer, so here are the highlights from the last few months:

I was approached to teach an art quilt class.  I put together this piece that touches on some of the dimensional techniques I’ve been doing. I ended up teaching the class twice, once for my fellow members of LAFTA (Louisville Area Fiber & Textile Artists), and once for an area art/quilt shop, Making Ends Meet, so I now have two more versions of this leaf in various stages of completion.

  

When I showed the piece above to NoNaMe, the art quilt group, we decided the challenge for the following month (October) would simply be “Leaf” – no guidelines, just open interpretation.   Here’s what I came up with (both sides pictured).  It’s a nice size, about three feet long.  The orange side is raw-edge appliqued upholstery fabric painted with acrylic paints.

I joined an on-line blog group, Fast Friday Fabric Challenge (FFFC).  On the fourth Friday of each month they post a challenge.  Members have one week to create an art quilt and post a picture of the results.  The first challenge I participated in called for at least three loops (as in belt-type loops).  The challenge included a whimsical narrative about landing on a loopy aquatic planet, so I made this Wide-eyed Loopy-finned Stickleback – not an art quilt exactly, but the covering of the armature was quilted before being applied…so I say it counts.  I’ll be the first to admit I try to push the boundaries of art quilting.

Maybe it’s just because it’s fall, but I definitely drifted into a leaf theme for the last couple months.  The October FFFC challenge was to use buttons along with a tonal element.  I did this button plant.  The colorway was a little different for me as I tried to work in the tonal aspect.  Consequently, I didn’t think it had good contrast, so I went back and added the hand stitching with embroidery floss.  It’s okay.

The NoNaMe November challenge was Alternative Embellishments.  I used nuts, bolts, and washers.

I got inspired and made a second piece.  This one uses tile spacers (the X or plus sign shapes) painted gold with acrylic paints as the embellishments.  Again, I played in a slightly different colorway.  I almost always use red, but not JUST red.  I like how almost any shade of red can be combined with other reds and they still go together.

Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave…yes, there’s more!  LAFTA took on a collaborative project to create art inspired by the Serenity Prayer.  I did three pieces.  The inspiration words I chose were…

Wisdom – I see wisdom as making good choices in the gray areas, somewhere between black and white.  I also think we practice wisdom when our heads and hearts are in alignment.  To represent that, I chose the chakra colors for the head (purple) and heart (green) to reflect that alignment.

Serenity – I see serenity as a place of calm we turn to inside ourselves.  The spiral represents that turning within.  Serenity can be found in quiet, orderly places (represented on the left), but only lasts until that setting is disturbed, so the best thing is to cultivate an internal peace that can be carried with us wherever we go.  The right side represents the chaos, flash, and allure of the world that make serenity a challenge.

Courage – It takes a brave, energetic, and determined heart to show courage in a frequently jagged and high pressure world.  Be bold, be courageous of heart!

So now you’re all caught up!  I certainly can’t say I’m a good or consistent blogger, but you certainly got your money’s worth this time.  Oh yeah, this doesn’t cost anything!  Well, take the money and buy yourself something nice…or get a jump on that holiday shopping.  It’s just around the corner, you know.

Wishing you the best, lots of creativity, and happiness, as always!

What’s Faster than Fast Art*?

Fabric sketching?  Scrap scribbling?  After the previous timed and improvised Pollack-inspired piece [see Art Inspired entry below], I wanted to try something with larger structures, more composition, or possibly an image.  The June to July NoNaMé challenge was just such an opportunity.  We would each start with a standard 9”x12” sheet of craft felt.  Then, using a timer set for just 15 minutes, improvise by positioning and sewing down scraps of fabric.  When time has expired, after a moment to review, an additional ten minutes could be used to add more fabric or sewing on embellishments (such as couched yarn, etc.).  Finally, any hand embellishment was allowed with no time limit since beading, etc., is seldom a quick task.

For me, always on the lookout for the unusual finding that might be included as an embellishment in an art quilt, I came across an interesting piece of rusted metal on the sidewalk on my way to work one morning.  The small, crumpled object, I speculated to be the center of a desk fan grill, suggested a many-legged spider.  I collected it and started imagining a project, something web-like, for the NoNaMé challenge.

When I got around to the challenge, I started with a light blue piece of felt, not my usual colorway, but maybe it would look like sky.  The challenge was extra challenging since I was working on a friend’s sewing machine which I was unfamiliar with.  Unable to achieve the timely results I wanted, I switched to my portable machine right in the middle of the first 15 minutes.  As luck would have it, my machine was experiencing technical difficulties, so I switched back to my friend’s machine; let’s just say there were some stops and starts in that 15 minutes.

Even as the timer went off, things weren’t looking great.  I wasn’t getting the web effect I was looking for, and the fabric choices weren’t good.  I decided to add more scraps and couch pink yarn for the web.  Before I knew it, 10 minutes was up.  Not good.

Oil pastels, acrylic inks, and metallic dimensional paints were to enhance the piece and increase the contrast, but it still wasn’t successful, in my opinion.  Here’s that first piece.

Time for another try.  For this round I wanted to create an image.  Timer started, I grabbed and roughly cut fabrics into the shape of a face, then nose, eyes, mouth, and a shock of bright green hair!  A young female began to emerge.  Switching to the free-motion foot and dropping the feed dogs allowed me to zip all over the surface to secure the scraps.  My friend, who was working alongside me, said the girl looked like she belonged in the Highlands, our local pseudo-Bohemian area that boast an eclectic mix of people.  Thus the piece would later be titled “Highlands Girl.”  After a long break, I came back to the piece and finished it up with more hair, a shoulder she’s glancing over, and other scraps for her clothes and back.  Ding!  Ten minutes was up.  She was finished out with oil pastels and colored pencils for shading.  Here she is.

Things seemed to be going better, so why not a third try….  The focus was on creating the overall shape.  This one went the most smoothly and had very little embellishment after the combined 25 minutes.  It’s almost full circle to the Pollack-inspired, overall piece, but the composition suggests some larger movement/shape.

One point of the challenge was to test our intuition for color, form, composition, etc.  Another was to loosen up and see where things would go, or possibly to be inspired to a more involved idea based on an improvisation.  Since the first “web” wasn’t a suitable home, I decided to create a more intentional piece as a home for spidey.  Here it is.  Note spidey was painted with acrylic paints -- sometimes rusty just isn’t the way to go.

I borrowed an idea from a fellow NoNaMé member for the web.  That is, I put #5 pearl cotton in the bobbin and sewed the thin lines of the web from the back of the piece (prior to addition of batting and backing).  Before I was able to do that, I first marked where I would sew by sewing the web from the front with black thread in the bobbin.  Then, when flipped over, the black bobbin thread served as my sewing guide as the pearl cotton, via the bobbin, was being applied to the front.  Batting, backing, sew, flip, close, minimal quilting, beads, crystals, done.  I’m happy with spidey, and I think he’s happy in his upgraded home!

*“Fast Art” is simply placing raw-edge fabric on a background, pinning all pieces, possibly securing the smallest ones with a dot of glue, then securing everything with free-motion stitching.  One option is Noriko Endo’s technique of covering the whole surface with fine netting and stitching over it.  Lately I prefer to skip the netting since it does bring down the overall color and character of the fabric surface.  Plus, the final quilting is another opportunity to secure the surface design fabric pieces.  I call this “fast art” as opposed to more constructed and planned works that typically take much longer to complete.  The Route 66 cactus piece below is an example.

Root 66

Pod #4 is now complete.  It has received such reviews as, “What is that? A demented beet?” or “Is that some kind of crazy turnip?”  No one has mentioned “radish” yet, but that’s surely next.  Really, it’s not meant to be anything in particular, besides Pod #4, but the “leaf” structure and general shape do suggest a root vegetable, even though the surface design is nothing less than exotic and not root-like at all.

The curious thing is that people tend to want art to be something, or mean something, or have a bigger meaning.  I guess that’s just natural as we strive to connect, understand, and find meaning in our everyday lives.  And, I’m sure that’s why art is subjective, meaning one thing to one person based on how they see it and their personal experiences, and something different to another person with their own frame of reference.  Ah, a root by any other name…could just be a pod….

May also saw the completion of the Route 66 piece done in my “fast art” style.  I didn’t work from a picture, so I’m hoping there’s some similarity to the landscape of Arizona (having never been there myself).  I did research the lizard, which is a collared lizard, and learned they live in eastern Arizona, although I’m not sure Saguaro cacti live in that part of the state…we’ll just call that “artistic license.”

There are plenty of other ideas up in the air and lots of recent inspiration.  Even I am curious as to what my next project will be.  Let’s see, there’s an art-inspired sculpture, or the evolution of a  larger “signature color” piece for NoNaMé, or the collaborative LAFTA pieces…or maybe I should just stay rooted in Route 66 with the additional ideas I have for that.  So many options, so many possibilities…couldn’t be happier!

Art Inspired

At the April LAFTA (Louisville Area Fiber & Textile Artists) meeting we had a presentation on multiple ways of finding inspiration in the art of well-known artists.  Project ideas almost immediately came to mind as the presentation included images of art.  I’m fortunate to very seldom find myself without some form of inspiration or another, and in fact, often I have too many ideas, so much so that I’m sure I’ll never be able to start or complete them.  Still, it’s a good place to be in!

On a weekend subsequent to the LAFTA meeting, there was an article in the paper about Jackson Pollock in recognition of what would have been his 100^th birthday.  I’ve always liked Pollock’s work and frequently drew on his technique when I was painting, having been known to splash a bit of paint around here and there.

Since my focus has been on fiber/art quilting for several years, I wondered how I might mimic Pollack’s fluidity and overall surface design in fabric.

Obviously fabric isn’t as instant or unstructured as paint, so I set parameters to keep myself from over thinking and planning it out too much and to encourage a more free, improvisational approach.  I ironed a randomly cut piece of red felt, approximately 7” x 10”, given a ragged, pointed edge here and a curved corner there.  I set a timer for ten minutes and quickly grabbed fabric scraps from the bin where they accumulate beside my sewing table.  I positioned the pieces, including overlapping, to generally cover the surface of the felt, then zip, zip, zip, sewed them down.  Fortunately all the scraps in the bin generally go together since they are bits and snippets of earlier projects in my usual bright, color-saturated colorway.  There wasn’t time and I wasn’t allowing myself to selectively choose and place colors.  If they came out a certain way, it was due to intuition.

Two sparse bobbins (because I was using whatever leftover bobbins were on hand and they ran out!) and a couple of quick thread changes later for variety, the timer expired.  I allowed myself another ten minutes of zigzagging to add fabric strips and embellish with yarn and other items.

Beading for embellishment isn’t a quick process, even with just a few beads, so no time limit was put on that.  I created polymer clay embellishments and attached them along with seed beads and sequins.  The next day, after a quick visit to the art store to find an interesting background, the whole thing was stitched to a piece of charcoal paper.  Here are the results.

It came out well enough and works as a surface, but next time I think I’ll try for some larger elements to create an actual composition.  This was a freeing experience and great way to jumpstart the creative process.  I recommend it for anyone between projects, or maybe you’ll want to set your own parameters that don’t involve time limits, etc.  The small size is great since it doesn’t require a major commitment…if it doesn’t work out, no big deal…but if it sparks an idea for something bigger and better, yea!  Be inspired!

In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb – The Month In Review

Ah, March!  You know the old saying, “In like a lion…” but in this case, it’s no reference to the weather, although the weather has been nothing short of bizarre.  No, for me, the month started off with a flurry of activity, yes like a lion, hear me roar…and ended in a lull, baaaa.

There was the NoNaMé meeting at the beginning of the month where we continued discussion of the Route 66 project.  We also had show-n-tell results from our “Sketch to Art Quilt” challenge.  I had one piece created from the sketch of another group member (Tree of Life, below), and one from my own sketch.  I submitted the second to Quilting Arts Magazine (which inspired the group challenge) and was accepted as a finalist!  The piece has been mailed off and will be considered for publication in the magazine, exhibited in a quilt show, or possibly featured on their website.  The second time is just as fun as the first!



Tree of Life, Sketch to Art Quilt

I also brought Pod #3 for show-n-tell, which I finished toward the end of February.  At last, now that I have three of them, I can call them a “series.”  And, there are more to come, just to make it official, if nothing else.



Pod #3

Mid-March there was Quilters’ Day Out, a fun gathering of the area quilting guilds, along with a few vendors and speakers.  I gave a presentation, essentially a PowerPoint trunk show, of my art quilts.  The emphasis this time was on “Imagination at Work.”  Feedback from those who attended was positive.

The Kentucky Artisan Center’s “About Face” exhibit also opened in March.  My “Pavel Deciding” piece is in that show, so I went for the opening.  It was a fun event with those artists in attendance speaking a little bit about their works, then there was mingling.  It was great to see the diversity of media and art from around the state, plus getting to interact with other artists.  It can be too easy sometimes to find yourself cocooned in your own media or circle of artists.  Speaking of March weather, it was one of those beautiful days with a clear blue sky, so the drive was very nice.

One weekend, a few NoNaMé members got together to review ideas and processes for the Route 66 project.  Mostly we just visited and then went out for a nice lunch.  And then came the lamb, I suppose; my art quilt creativity just sort of came to a lull, baaaa.  Sure, I’ve filled the time with fabric and yarn dying, and creating a new silk screen, but no sewing.  It’s not as if the ideas haven’t been coming to me, and it’s not that I’ve been so busy with too many other things.  Maybe it’s just an early spring break, who knows…or, maybe it really is about the weather.  We’ve moved from bizarre (cold mornings, too-warm nights, overnight snow that quickly melted by noon, tornado warnings, and thunderstorms) to truly spring-like.  If the weather is going to be a distraction, at least it’s a wonderful one!  The motivation will come along soon enough.



Snow...and Blue Skies!