Art, photography, marketing, and more from Carol Logan Newbill
Sadie got it almost exactly right. The title of the lecture is “Incorporating the Sacred: Quilts, Art, and Spirituality.” Julie was also right — I’m using examples from other faiths as well as Christianity to show how the message can be understood even though it’s pretty subtle.
And as for Day 13, let’s just say that it’s been Friday the 13th all day, and leave it at that.
Deborah asked in the comments for Day #11 what the “touchy subject” is that I am lecturing about on Monday. My first inclination was to wait until the lecture is over before answering (I’m not superstitious at all! But what if the gremlins are listening?), but I think I will post some of the slides I’ll be using and see if anyone can guess.
Game?
Then check the flip side for pictures…
Yesterday was a kind of weird day. I am worrying about a lecture that I am to give next Monday to a local quilt guild on a rather touchy subject, and I felt that my brain was in a fog all day. I did some housework, hoping that paying attention to mundane things would give the back of my brain the ability to work out its problems unaided. I took care of some other household tasks, but it didn’t seem to work very well. And I couldn’t really concentrate on being creative when I had this background worry noise going on in my head.
So in the afternoon, I watched Inside the Actor’s Studio: Sir Elton John. My sister, who subscribes to all the premium channels in the universe, had taped it and we’d met for lunch on Tuesday so she could bring it to me. (Funny sidebar: It took three tries beginning in November to get it recorded. The first time her husband had set the VCR for the wrong time and the second time he simply forgot to set it at all. Fortunately this episode is now in late-night rotation on Bravo, and I was able to find a third showing at 1:00 am, or some such, and he got it for me.)
I love music. I like a lot of Elton John’s music, but I would not have wanted to see this episode simply because he was appearing. I wanted to see it because of a note written to the QuiltArt list back in November by a man who’d seen it on its first run-through. At the end of the program, he said, someone handed Elton a book and challenged him to write music to a random paragraph, then and there. And Elton sat down at the piano, chose a part of Scene II of Peer Gynt, began noodling around on the keys and came up with a spontaneous composition.
Well, this fascinated me. It sounded like the musical equivalent of what we do as artists when we “audition” fabrics against a design wall, or cut out pieces and pin them up there to see how they work together. Some of us are terrific at this, working in an intuitive way that comes together apparently effortlessly, while others of us have to really work at it.
So I watched it yesterday, while waiting for my fogged brain to clear. He’s a little heavier than he used to be, his voice a little deeper, more mature, and without the swooping falsetto of “Benny and the Jets” and “Rocketman” (the result of surgery in 1988 to remove nodules from his vocal cords). He’s charming, devastatingly honest, and funny as hell. He’s also completely serious about his music, and he’s a much more accomplished and highly talented musician than I had ever realized. He was trained in classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music, although he says he was discouraged by his teachers, who told him that with his short, stubby little hands he’d never make a good pianist. Their judgment didn’t stop him studying, but when he started hearing Jerry Lee Lewis and Otis Redding and Ray Charles on the radio, he knew that he wanted to concentrate on contemporary music. And then, he said, his mother brought home a copy of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, and it was all over.
The “noodle” scene was indeed at the very end of the program, perhaps the last five minutes. One of the audience members asked him about staying fresh — How many variations can there be in writing popular music? Do you ever worry about running out of new material, new lyrics to write music to?
He answered (and I’m paraphrasing) that the music always came as a response to the words, and as long as there were words he’d be in business. Any words. “Anybody got a book? Any book.”
He took the copy of Ibsen’s play which was handed to him, opened it at random, sat down at the piano, and chuckled that he might very well make an ass of himself, but here goes. Two chords, then another, and he began to sing the lines from the play along with the improvisation that grew under his short, stubby fingers like magic. He played and sang for a couple of minutes; it started out perhaps a bit tentative, but toward the end there were flashes of something that could send chills down the spine if it were fully developed. It was amazing and humbling to watch.
So how does this relate to creativity and all the stuff we do as visual artists? It relates to a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about trusting one’s intuition, about not getting too wrapped up in making everything perfect the first time out. I’m a Virgo. I have to be perfect. But watching him be willing to trust in his ability, to be willing to make a fool of himself in public, opened up for me the possibility that maybe it’s okay to just do and not worry so much about every jot and tittle along the way.
The lecture next Monday will go just fine.
I�m reading a book with the unlikely title of Holy Moly Mackeroly! by Gloria Page, a rubber-stamp artist who lives in Missouri. You can click on the photograph to go to the Amazon page and read the reviews, so I won�t go too much into specifics about the book except to say that it�s a very upbeat, encouraging look at the business of art and how to be successful as an artist.
The book is full of personal vignettes � stories from her own experience that she uses to illustrate one aspect or another of being an artist and trying to make a living while trying to have a life. I�ve skimmed through most of the book, reading it in bits and pieces, and there is one aspect of her character that really stands out for me:
Courage.
An example: She tells the story of the year she lived in Santa Fe to establish herself as an artist with the galleries there. She was working at home one day when her mother called excitedly to say, �Gloria, you won�t believe who is here in Wild Oats Market, having a salad for lunch. James Taylor!� (Yes, that James Taylor.)
So Gloria throws off her studio apron, rushes down to Wild Oats and meets her mother, who takes her back to the deli section where, indeed, Sweet Baby James Himself is sitting alone quietly eating his lunch. Taking a deep breath (she admits to almost paralyzing nervousness), Gloria walks up to him, interrupts his lunch, tells him in very simple terms how much his music has meant to her, and thanks him for it. To his great credit, he listens and then thanks her in return instead of being annoyed at being interrupted.
What struck me in reading that story was the difference between the way she approached him and the way I would have handled it. I�d have recognized him if I�d been in the market, no question. If someone had called me and said, “He�s down here and you just gotta come see!” I might have gone, but I�d have been damned sure to stay out of his way, make sure he never was aware of me. I can�t imagine having the courage � or chutzpah � to insert myself even temporarily into the life of someone like that, to call attention to me, even if it were to thank him for the joy he�d brought into my life.
(Although I did do that once, by email. I wrote to the contact address on Jeff Lorber�s website to ask a question about sheet music, taking a moment to say how much his music meant to me. And he answered personally.)
And yet… is what she did so much different than what I�m doing, putting my own thoughts and stuff out here for you, the faithful 2.7, to read every day? I�ve often thought that if I get through this life without leaving any trace I�d be happy. Completely anonymous; no photographs, nothing that a future genealogist could find out about me.
I don�t think I�ve succeeded very well at the leaving no trace thing, so maybe I have a form of courage too.
Somewhere.
Continuing the PaintStiks and Print Blocks theme from yesterday…
Once your print block is firmly pinned into its little groove, place your pressed fabric over the block and pin it to the side strips as shown. Here, I’ve pinned one edge of the fabric in several places before I began to place pins on the other edge.
Notice here that I am pulling the fabric taut over the print block as I pin the second side.
Be sure to pin down the ends, too.
Now you can use your PaintStiks to apply color to the fabric. One-handed, even, if necessary.
Looking good, no?
Tomorrow I’ll work on doing something with some fabrics decorated with PaintStiks. I have no idea yet what. We’ll be surprised together!
After my PaintStik post yesterday, SueU went to her studio and painted over some rubber stamps using her set of PaintStiks, a technique that seemed more successful than my poor effort. This reminded me that I have a dozen or so wooden dye/print blocks from India purchased in Santa Fe and stashed in a box on the surface design shelf.
Out they come! (Good thing I finished that studio cleanup and organization a couple of weeks ago.)
You know, I’ve got some nice patterns here!
In my class at Taos in 2004, I had one student who had the use of only one of her hands due to polio. As you can see from the photo of the one turned on its face, the handles on the blocks won’t support the block very well if you turn it over for rubbing unless you hold onto it firmly with both hands.
Necessity being the mother of invention, I created a portable, adaptable, cheap method of stabilizing the blocks so she could concentrate on making the rubbings. Follow me inside for more — with lots of pictures.
I’ve been afflicted with a mild sinus infection and more website updates, so I haven’t had time or energy to do much creative work or even any artistic photography. I decided to play instead — try out some products and techniques that I know about but haven’t done much with in the past.
Today’s topic: Paintstiks.
I’ve had a set of the iridescent PaintStiks for a couple of years but never really used them. I even presented them as part of the 2003 course I taught in surface design at the Taos Institute of Arts. I know how to use them, but I can’t seem to figure out what to use them for.
Here we have the PaintStiks, a sheet of plastic canvas, and a set of children’s rubbing plates that I bought at the local art supply store. These plates come in a variety of textures, but they’re pretty shallow (being intended for use with crayons on paper) and may not work well with fabric.
Cut up some pieces of high-count cotton broadcloth and press them flat.
Now prepare the PaintStik for use. The stick is “self-sealing,” which means that after a period of disuse a kind of skin forms over the exposed surface, sealing in the paint and keeping it fresh. To remove this, you can peel away the surface with a knife, or just scribble with the end of it on a rough paper like this newsprint until you get a good layer of pigment laid down.
If your fabric is slippery, you might need to tape it down tautly over the rubbing plate. The cotton was fine, so I just held it with one hand and gently rubbed the PaintStik over the top of it until some of the pattern starting showing through.
I did find that the rubbing plates were too finely-textured and too shallow to show up well, so I changed to the plastic needlepoint canvas. This works much better.
Nice! I had not expected those more dominant lines to come through.
So now I have this lovely little blue grid on my white fabric. What do I do with it? How about this — turn it a bit and rub it again using a green stick.
Interesting pattern.
Now granted, this is a tiny area — just a couple of inches square — but the whole process feels sort of clumsy and uninspiring to me. Now that I’ve got this, what do I do with it? Where do I go with it?
So please tell me — what am I missing here? There are a ton of people who are hopping up and down with excitement about this process. I’ve looked at a couple of galleries for artists who are doing this and I don’t see anything that really calls out to me. I even have a bunch of antique wooden tjaps from Indonesia that are too worn to use for dyeing but would be perfect for rubbing, and yet I can’t get excited by this process.
I guess I need an imagination transplant? Or the sinus thing has my brain in a fog?
Help me out here!
It’s amazing how a different way of looking at a familiar object can make the most mundane thing an abstract mystery of line, pattern, and light.
This is the center seed pod of the green pepper I cut up while cooking dinner tonight. I found it very beautiful in its alien strangeness.
(Tasted pretty good, too.)
I’m throwing a quiet tantrum tonight.
I’ve been working on a little silk piece off and on for the last couple of days, but it’s stupid and forced and it doesn’t say anything and it isn’t working and I just. Don’t. Like it. And I’m not going to waste my time on it any more just to have something to show.
I suppose this means that I’ve already blown my commitment to doing something every day and posting it on the blog. What I am finding is that working on website coding (very left-brain) is completely incompatible with simultaneously doing visual art (very right-brain). I can switch gears, but it takes a while, and the paying client’s needs have to come first.
I have to be done with this project by the end of January, so there is at least an end to it, with the promise of getting back to a different kind of creative work after that.
Maybe I’ll go back to photography or try writing haiku or something until then.
Until tomorrow…
Most of my day today has been taken up with left-brained creativity the HTML way – I’ve been updating web sites. But since that won’t really count for the 365 Days, I sorta-kinda cheated and finished a piece I’d started a couple of months ago:
Click on the image to bring up a larger version.
Something completely new, tomorrow. Meanwhile, back to the website coding.
Art- and quilt-related posts. For other business-related topics, please visit my other blog.
