Paperquilts: A Practice of ArtMaking

I've been so busy working on my book the last year that I haven't spent a lot of time in the studio just making. I'm beginning to move back into it - spending time in the mornings and at least one full day a week. Fiddling with materials.


I've been sorting through old collage papers and these are bits and scraps that ended up in the recycling bin, too small for my student collage bins.


I took a tiny paper punch, less than one inch square, and began punching those bits of papers , making hundreds of tiny squares. It felt like going through old clothes and rags, cutting out the bits that might be salvageable for a quilt.



And so I began piecing the bits of paper together . . .


Building a paper quilt. Those little scraps and bits become something more than just recycling, something interesting. I have no idea where this will end up, but I've been keeping the recycling bin nearby.

Art and Healing: Part One

A little over a month ago, a friend of mine died.

It was sudden; she was relatively young and had seemed to be in good health. Just the week before, she had given a dance performance. Her death was a huge shock. It was incredibly painful. And most of March is just a blur.

One of the first things I did, a way of coping, of dealing with it, was to make art. In partnership with another good friend of mine, I decorated boxes to be given to her husband and her two daughters, boxes to hold mementos.

And I started working on a few other pieces. Some encaustics. A portrait of my friend and an image of a nest, the bird gone. The image of what's left behind.


Putting them together, they seem to tell a story. A story that helps. At least a little bit.

It's Been Like a Really Long Monday . . .

Earlier this month, Bitter Betty talked on her blog about how January can be a lot like a really long Monday . . . and boy, this one's been a doozy! You know, one of those Mondays where you start a new job and wind blows shingles off your roof and you're getting ready for Bargain Hunting 101 and you decide to reorganize your office . . . It's been exhilarating, overwhelming, and exhausting . . . and there just hasn't been much time for blogging.

In the midst of all of this madness, it's been wonderful to be teaching the Artmaking as Playful Prayer class - I've got a great group of women in the class this winter, and it's really rejuvenating for me to spend time making with them. The first night, we did intuitive collages:

We each pulled a bunch of images from old National Geographic magazines, just ripping out the ones that appealed to us in some way, and then sorted them into four groups . . . just to see what kinds of patterns emerged in the images. I encouraged people to make four distinct collages, one collage from each grouping of images. My groupings ended up focusing mostly around color - though there were certainly other patterns that emerged.

This one is brown and blue, and I like the repetition of the striding people and the curving shapes. It's fascinating to me how my mind will work and work to make a story out of it . . . to make meaning, not just connections. Yet, if I let the story get in the way, the piece becomes forced and it loses that spontaneity and spark. There doesn't have to be a story for the artmaking to be meaningful . . . the real meaning in the work comes from being mindful, from being fully in the moment and open to the intuitive impulses.

And that is something that is all too easy to forget on a 31-day Monday spent chasing down a to-do list.

Studio Day

Ah, the glory of (almost) an entire day spent in the studio . . . I really need that kind of concentrated art time . . . Today, I experimented with printing plates made from pieces of foam rug gripper and friendly foam and even foam weather stripping. In other words, if it's even vaguely foamy, I'm experimenting with making a stamp/printing plate from it and printing it on fabric.

The Artmaking as Playful Prayer class finished on Monday, and I've got a Memory Jewelry class that starts tomorrow. And I've been cleaning up from the Secret Society Sale last Sunday, and prepping for the Dinnergrrls Holiday Bazaar this coming Sunday . . . It's a miracle I got in the studio for any personal work! But I need that time . . . especially after a Playful Prayer class ends. I need time to digest what's happened. Time to incubate. I got some really wonderful and thoughtful feedback about the class, about creating more meaningful transition times. And I've been digesting that, considering different ways that I might meet that need without sacrificing the structural looseness. All while I print little houses and little birds with nests on fabric. So soothing.

And yesterday's teaser? Old appliqued quilt blocks (from yet another quilt that is not to be) that I'm turning into pillows to sell at the Dinnergrrl's Holiday Bazaar this weekend . . .

Sock Monsters! (aka Stuffed Misfits from the Eyes Aflame Frankenstuffed Studio)

The Sweetie and I went to Powell's this weekend, and I spotted a book. Well, actually a book and a kit. Now, normally, I resist "kits." But the book in this one was really good . . . and the pictures were really adorable . . . and The Sweetie, who could see I was waffling on the edge, pushed me right over.

And so I bought "Stupid Sock Creatures: Making Lovable, Quirky Figures from Cast-Off Socks" by John Murphy. Correction: I bought the book with the kit. Here is his website. I think he may be a genius.

I have been wanting to make Glove Monsters or some other sort of stuffed misfits since I saw Toby. Then the Glove Monster instructions from Sister Diane at Craftypod (another genius) came out and then there was Glove Monster day over at Church of Craft (which birthed Gregory, Toby's friend). Sadly, I couldn't make that event - perhaps this is why The Sweetie encouraged me to take the plunge and get the kit.

So, I have happily madly spent the last several nights working on Stupid Sock Creatures (with some Glove Monster elements). Here are some candid shots of Jane and Clawdaddy - the first two Stuffed Misfits to emerge from the Eyes Aflame Frankenstuffed Studio.



Jane's head and rabbit-like ears are made from a sock, while her stout body is made from a stretchy glove . . . her little dress and sweatband are also stretchy glove parts. Jane is slightly, er, paranoid . . . a bit stressed and obsessive. Clawdaddy, on the other, er, hand, is a lot more laid back and fun loving. He's got a full-on sock body, with sock/glove hybrid claw arms and a sturdy sock-part tail. His tongue is the finger of a glove - and his little fingerless gloves are, well, the fingers of gloves. He is trying to reassure Jane that it will all be ok after a little snuggle by the fire. Jane's not buying it.

Loose Ends . . .

I thought I'd share how a couple of pieces have progressed . . . one was the mandala that I started the first night of Artmaking as Playful Prayer . . . I started working on it, then photographed my own hands, my own lips, and my own vegetables to incorporate into it . . . I also photographed some of my own lipsticks . . . The orange and lemon slices are plastic fruit that I bought and made photocopies of! Anything I can do to build my own library of images . . .


And here's the four-part self-portrait that I started at Traci Bunkers class at Art and Soul . . . I changed up some of the collage, and added a few color washes, and it definitely feels more unified. Can't say I'm crazy about it, but it feels resolved - and I learned a lot from doing it. Incubation is your friend.

And whether a piece is "likable" or not is probably one of the least important things about it.

Time to Incubate . . .

Ok, after four classes at Art & Soul I hit total overwhelm . . . I needed a little time to absorb it all and let it marinate . . . My last class on Sunday was with Traci Bunkers. It was a very cool self-portrait class. We took a photograph of ourselves, cut it into four pieces, blew it up on a copier, and then used it essentially as an underpainting and built up layers of color, collage, and texture on top of it. The idea is to work on each piece of the image separately and then integrate them into a unified piece. I like fragmenting images, and I've used photocopies as underpainting before (I can get really lazy about drawing and love this kind of shorcut!). I used a fun, kind of sexy-sassy picture that my friend Michael Burton took of me (he also did the shot of me on this blog).
And while I like elements of each fragment, I ended up not liking the way the fragments come together . . . . Part of it is that I ended up working very opaque with acrylics and collage materials when I think a little more transparency would have served me well. I also didn't do much to integrate the pieces.



And I can be pretty stubborn - meaning I plan to work the piece until it comes to some kind of resolution.

And part of that for me is setting it down in my studio or somewhere else where I'll walk by it several times a day and keep my subconscious working on it. I may eventually just let it go - decide the piece itself isn't really interesting, and just take the idea and do other things with it. Or it may be like the painting I started ten years ago and still haven't finished. It's sitting there, and yet it's still engaging me. Come to think of it, that painting is also a portrait, and it's fragmented to a certain extent . . . themes.

Gettin' My Art on with the Big Wigs

I took two classes yesterday at Art and Soul - a 3-D polaroid collage construction class with Michael DeMeng and a bird nest jewelry class with Stephanie Lee.

I'm going to admit right here and now that I had never heard of Michael DeMeng before I took this class. About half-way through the class, though, I realized that there were people at this retreat wearing Michael DeMeng aprons and that his color knowledge and paint mixing techniques provoke "wow's" from the students (along with a line of color mixing cards - though he's the first to admit you don't need them if you take good notes). I'm also going to admit right here and now that his stuff was pretty darn cool. I got a lot out of the class: I was reminded of some color theory I'd forgotten, and picked up a few new tricks that I swear I never learned. I also got some great practical tips on how to create texture and 3-D compositions. And I ditched the polaroid concept and the tunnel effect most of the other students went for (and who did some AMAZING things! So bummed I didn't get photos . . .) Here's the piece I worked on - using color photo-copies of a series of photos I did about 10 years ago mixed with lotteria cards - from the side, and from the top.




It was all going well until I learned that he does a critique at the end of the class. My heart rate went up and I got a little queasy. My competitive streak reared it's ugly head. What if people poo-pooed what I did for not being DeMeng enough? Too flat? Not using his palette? Keeping it too visually simple? Not incorporating enough rusty found objects? What if he doesn't like it? What if he does? What if my piece was really the best because it was so different? What if someone else had a piece more different than mine and theirs was really the best? What if I could get my head to shut up and just work on the #@*! piece?

I finally managed the latter. And I shouldn't have worried. He gave the artists a chance to talk about their work, and then he found something unique and valuable and intriguing about every single piece and talked about it. You could see what others had done successfully, and ponder whether or not you might want to incorporate it into your work and how you might adjust your own piece.

And I still don't think I'll be incorporating critiques into any of my classes. Logically, I know that competition can be non-violent, that it can be used in a positive way to inspire and push people beyond their self-imposed boundaries. Yes, I see wonderful beautiful things in every piece of art my students make. And I just hate the way that urge comes up in me - and in some of my students - and tries to turn the artmaking into a hierarchy. "Better than." "Worse than." "More talent." "Less talent." "Right way." "Wrong way." I want each student to listen to their own voice when it comes to their art - not mine. And I want those students to be free from the need to please. To dive into making for the experience, for what they might learn, not what they might earn in the way of praise. Maybe I'm projecting too many of my needs onto my students - maybe I need to find a way to give feedback full of juicy possibilities to those students who want it.

More food for thought.

Art and Soul

I love Portland. I've lived here for 15 years, and it still surprises and delights me. Art and Soul is a cool mixed media arts retreat that's been held in Portland for 5 years now - finally, this year, I got to go! I took a class today from Diane Downs today on how to alter a canvas by adding niches to it - one of those things that I'd read about, but really needed to see hands-on to "get." I had made some paper by arranging and color photocopying recipe cards from a box of old family recipes that my mom gave me - things in my mom's handwriting, my dad's, my grandmother's - even old ones my mom had typed! I used the paper as a cover for the foam core that formed the niche, and for the background of the canvas.


And then somehow the heart just seemed right, along with the white picket fence and the dollhouse window (a gift from Diane - I love it!) Later, I added some matches to one of the niches and have my eye on some etchings of cutlery and my artmaking neighbor from Texas, Ann Webb, gave me some skulls that may need to find a home here . . . there's a strange death and domesticity theme popping up - again.
A friend recently asked me "why shrines"? I think it's largely because I was turned off by modern art and art that was only about deconstructing and challenging the aesthetic ideals of other artists. This happened during art school. I think it happens to a lot of artists. We lose the soul, and get caught up in critiques and techniques and how our work contributes to "the art dialogue." It was around this time that I was really drawn to craft, to outsider art, to process art, to folk art, and to devotional art. Art that was made out of passion, compulsion, prayer or practicality. Art that came out of the need and desire of people to make meaning out of their lives, not just the work of other artists. Devotional art and folk art let me to mandalas, masks, rituals and shrines, as did my own exploration of different spiritual traditions. And I began to look at my precious artmaking objects and my memorabilia and all the evidence of my history and experience of spirit and gather those things together into shrines as a way of both understanding them and honoring them and making art that was meaningful to me. More later, but that's it in a nutshell. Whew!