I fought with one particular piece of the project for a week or so before I realized, very abruptly, that labyrinths are a bad metaphor for my life. A labyrinth has one clear path to the center and back out. My life is more like a maze: the path twists and turns, forks, runs into dead ends, and may even have no clear solution. The truth is in the journey, not the destination.

The subject has recently come up for discussion again among a small email group I belong to. It’s centering this time on finger labyrinths, a tactile small fiber work in which one’s fingers trace the path to the center as one meditates. One artist uses sequins to define the “walls,” while another uses beads.

I put this one together yesterday afternoon as another idea:

This one is postcard-size, so it’s not practical for finger-walking, and it’s technically a maze, not a labyrinth. But my thought was to use the close stipple quilting as a touch guide to the path, leaving the “walls” elevated to define the separations.

I need to add something decorative in the center as a kind of reward for solving the maze, and it will be done.

Here are some new small pieces I did this week in response to a frantic SOS from my gallery rep. Click on the thumbnails for a new, larger image (opens in separate popup window). Each one is about 5″ x 7″, mounted on 8″ x 10″ black mat board:

All That Jazz	Mirage
Longboat Key	Luna Moth

More news after the jump.

Mostly this spring I’ve been working with new website clients and putting together a vegetable garden. From time to time I’ve debated posting about the garden; so far I’ve resisted because it isn’t art related. Or is it? And if I don’t post about the garden, I don’t have anything to talk about, as the paucity of posts has demonstrated.

So be warned. I will talk about the garden a good bit this summer, with periodic bits of art interspersed.

And tomorrow is the first day of the season at Pepper Place farmer’s market. I’ll be there with bells on. Hooray for good, local food!

It wasn’t all the Labyrinth pieces; just the green monster. After allowing the subconscious mice a couple of days to nibble on the idea in the dark, I think that the answer might be as simple as I hated the colors. Then I put brown on it, and that made it worse. There’s something very depressing about brown. I keep trying to make friends with it, and it rebuffs me every time.

Another thing that is bothering me about the project is that I realized that the metaphor is inaccurate. Life isn’t a journey, however twisty and full of turns, along one pre-defined path. It’s full of dead ends, forks in the road, broad highways that narrow to two-lane counry roads and then to tar-and-gravel farm lanes that peter out into gravel and dirt and end in a tangle of brambles (where sometimes there are ripe blackberries and sometimes there are just thorns).

I haven’t given up on it. The blue piece is great, and I really like the fire piece. There’s another idea germinating to use these backgrounds. But it won’t be the thing I started out to do.

I worked on the green monstrosity some more today. It’s still green, and still monstrous, and uglier than it was before. The thing is dead, Jim.

On to the next. I refuse to let it upset me any more.

Well… mostly, I suppose, because the Queen of the Art Quilters Webring (Hi, Diane! insert tongue-in-cheek smiley) wrote yesterday about wanting to be sure that blogs on the webring are a) primarily about art quilting, and b) updated regularly. I was feeling a little guilty that most of January and February had been taken up with non-art-quilting posts.

Today? I’m going to wash out the resist, and I hope that much of that yucky oily paintstik stuff washes out as well. I know there are people who love them, but I have about decided that paintstiks are not for me.

Then I will evaluate and see if the thing is worth saving. If not, out she goes, and I’ll try something else.

Well, once I finished that blue piece — and I liked it, but had no idea what to do with it — I thought of doing a couple more in different colorways and then doing some wonky piecing to join the different colors. My thought was “elements.” I had this blue one for water; I did a quite successful yellow-red-orange one for fire. Then I needed an earth one.

I’ve been futzing over this thing for weeks now. I’ll walk around it, eyeing it as though it’s going to bite back. I’ll gingerly dab at it with a wet brush.

It sits there and glowers at me, and I do not like it and I have no idea what to do with it, or whether it’s even salvageable. It’s time to confess my abject failure. I’m really ashamed to even show it off.

It’s distorted because it still has the glue resist in it. That, of course, will be washed out once it’s done (and assuming I don’t just trash the whole thing). The color is a bit more yellow-green and not quite as olive as this shows, but I couldn’t quite get the balance right.

Anyway, I was originally thinking “forest.” This says “jail cell.” I put some brown PaintStik on it this afternoon, hoping that would make it look more like trees, but I think that made it even worse.

Bleah. This is not one of the best days of my creative life.

Off to the art store through the cold pouring rain this afternoon. Excellent! Prismacolor pencils are on sale, even! So I picked up a tin of 24 pencils, noted with pleasure that the box said “Highest Lightfast Rating,” and brought them home.

Piffle.

The pencils in this particular assortment are all earthy colors — various dark greens, a couple of yellows, an orange or two, and a ton of brown and gray. Not at all what I need. I had no idea that there were different assortments — I just thought, naively, that the 24-pencil box was standard.

Ah, well. Gives me an excuse to go back tomorrow, when the weather is supposed to be much better.

Click on image for larger view

And I learned how to make my own slides from digital images, so I acquired a new skill from the experience.