Working with a young artist

A friend in the neighborhood, Tarang J., is working toward a major girl scout award, and asked me to advise on the art side of it. She has developed workshops on a series of art forms, origami, fiberart, mandalas and sand art, all using forms from nature and materials either recycled or acquired in the most friendly way to the earth. It's an approach to environmental art, which she hopes to share with younger kids, and adults, too, who could use a reminder to be kind to the earth.

She learned in my studio last week how to make yarn mosaics, weaving spiderwebs without a loom, and using those plastic can connectors beloved of this artist, as looms to create knotted and looped artworks. One of the best students I ever worked with, she has golden hands.



And she keeps on coming up with more ideas, I love this! today she started a God's eye using yarn from my stash -- one of the deals I struck with her was to avoid buying as far as possible, and I supplied a ton of materials from the studio, gouache, paper, yarn, strings, paper plates, all kinds of fun stuff to haul away and supply to her students when her classes get under way.

All this will be chronicled on Facebook and other places, and I can only say what fun it is to be corralled into this adventure!

Old monotype and new work in draft form

I was reminded of monotype making, a wonderful artform, the other day, when I was talking with Donna S, the star at the library gallery, who, a very good artist in her own right, also runs the gallery and its doings, including herding the artists, not unlike herding cats....

I was invited to share what I could about ideas for her teaching papermaking in her summer program this year, to the multitudes, so I went in for a meeting with her. Anyway we were talking about art and varying sizes of same, and she recounted how she'd done a huge handmade paper piece, long ago, as a project, and been unable to get it home from school, since it wouldn't fit in her little car. Somebody got lucky, I guess, if they happened to see it at the dumpster.

I have the opposite situation, usually, always driving a small car, and typically making rather small artworks. Years ago, I was given a corporate show, and arrived on the day they wanted the doings handed over, with 50 count them, artworks,framed, in my little Horizon hatchback. They were taken aback as I unpacked it like a clown car, and one of the officials asked "If you had a bigger vehicle, would you make bigger art?" and I explained that it was the other way around...

Anyway, those small works were monotypes of all kinds, and in the course of faffing around, I mean experimenting in design, with a piece I hope to send to the libe gallery for part of their summer show this year, I found a monotype from a series I did ages ago. So I framed it and it will finally be on our walls, instead of the walls of the various places it's traveled to on exhibit. I'll have to dig further into my archives (that mass of stuff under the worktable in the studio) and see if there are any other ones worth showing you.



I think this mono, done on black Arches cover, must have been around the time of my black gesso period -- it fits the motif pretty well. I used to do a lot of work with metal pens, drawing copper lines that resembled wire until you realized it was an optical illusion.

And while I'm on this hobbyhorse, I'd like to remind us all that the word for this work is monotype, not monoprint. A monoprint is a print of which the artist chooses to make one, but could in fact make more, because it's a different technique from putting down the inks directly on the plate with no other items involved. Thank you.

Incidentally, you know the Degas pastels that we usually assume are pastel paintings? most of those are monotypes, which he created then finished in pastel. The reason a monotype is so magical is that you're seeing the image from the inside. You put down the image on your plate, then pull off a single copy (sometimes you can get a second, a ghost, but not always). So what you see is the inside of the work. You can't paint that directly, but printmaking is such a different experience. He was a great draftsman and monotype maker, too.

And the other piece is a rough draft of a draft of an idea, the faffing-around piece I mentioned earlier, and doing it taught me about ten things not to do, but gave me a much better set of ideas anyway, so it's all good.




When the finished piece emerges, I can confidently say it will look nothing like this. But then I always claim that if you can plan and execute a piece of art, it's not art, it's shop! I have spoken.

New knitting and crochet artworks

Aside from the felting mania, and the proposed tapestry and other fiberworks show, in progress, I have been committing knitting and crochet again. This is what I do when I'm thinking about bigger works.

Anyway, here are the slippers, shown on







and off human feet (my own not very glamorous ones, but nobody else would stand still)



showing the nice comfortable garter stitch sole and the shaping of the top. This fits a woman's 8.5 or 9 US, and is available to the lucky commenter in here, so take your chance now! maybe you are a PINOAP -- see below.

This is a crochet scarf/shawl



using a lot of different warm fuzzy yarns, which was executed in my favorite ds stitch, and presented to someone who needed a present, in my life known as a PINOAP. Person In Need of a Present.

If the slippers will fit your dainty (!) foot, and you feel like a PINOAP,comment in here and I'll make a pick.

Felt, another fiber art

Felt, a material made by taking pure wool knitted fabric and applying heat, friction, cold, and patience, is an impermeable, warm, draft proof and beautiful new art material.

It doesn't fray, so you can cut it at will, and join pieces to make anything from throws to wallhangings to clothing.

My first adventures in felt involved a bunch of thrift store sweaters, and one donated one, accidentally partially felted already, and resulted in a supply of various colored felts.



Which yielded this bag




and this matching shoulder purse for cellphone or mp3 player or other newfangled invention



and this set of three bags, showing the "wrong" side of the fabric, which worked much better than the "right" side for the finished items.







I keep on discovering old unuseful sweaters around the house, and have plans to make a bed covering for HP's hospital bed, which is in the living room and needs to look like part of the furniture.

Black gesso, wire and paper

A few years ago I had a year of black gesso. And copper wire. And paper I made and molded. And wood. And bronzing paint. And it infected other artist friends who all got into black gesso, wonderful medium to play or work in.

All the pieces are created using found pieces of styrofoam or board, sardine cans, wire, handmade beads, all kinds of interesting toys.

There's the series of three faces, starting with a figurative kind of likeness of a face



then deconstruction one




then deconstruction two




There's the little board with the rusty saw blade I found on the road, and twigs, and a bead I found, too,



to create a sunflower.

And the double pieces, with molded paper faces, wire and metallic pens swirling with paint.





And the dancing figures, handmade beads and wire, knitted, too.



The same figures, presented differently, using sardine cans, beads and wire inside



each different, to represent a different real person.

And the giant face, molded handmade paper with a potholder added.



No gesso here, but bronzing paint all over. And the bones and feather piece





Then there's the three bones piece!



this scares some people.

And, to bring us up to the present day, a work in progress, a hanging created from plastic bottle carriers, installed in the opening to a closet in preference to a door.



A matching one will be installed in the other closet in the same room, so they can be seen at once.

Many years since the earlier pieces, but the feeling for reusing and recycling is undimmed.

Tapestry and other weavings

In the process of making the red/pink/etc family tapestry, I took a right angle on finding a nice stash of my handspun in blue related colors, and made the first two of three small weavings, on a handmade cardboard loom.



Weavings, one still on cardboard loom, others posing beside it.

It amuses me to read about real weavers weaving with real looms, full of technical terms and skills, and then return to my simple little loom. But I remember that weaving started out this way and in some parts of the world, still happens this way.

I have a book of Taaniko, which is Maori hand weaving, and without the use of any specialized equipment, the weaving is at as high a level as anything you could achieve with a handcarved, polished, beautiful loom, complete with rosewood shuttles.

Modern big looms are things of beauty in themselves, even if I don't plan on working with one any time soon.

Anyway,back to the little weavings, which may already have a home, which I had better not explain too prematurely, since it's part of a surprise. At least this is my part of it, and if it works out, it will be fiiiiiiine.

It's profoundly satisfying to weave using your own handspun wool, from raw fleece to finished object.

An-ti-ci-pa-a-tion!

A chance remark by a Ravelry friend about happiness in tapestry clicked in my artmind, and before I knew it I was sorting a basket of the yarn I spun from the fleece I washed and combed and carded and dyed, plus some interesting ribbons, for an upcoming tapestry.

The work of a moment to climb to the third floor and fumble about in the studio for a frame and a ball of parcel twine, the frame being a set of stretchers donated some time ago by friend and fellow Unified Fielder, Stefi M., and the twine is to warp the frame. With tapestry, the warp vanishes into the work so it needs to be strong and smooth, but doesn't have to be fancy. Parcel twine is fine. Why they still call it that when twine has been outlawed from the parcel biz for years is one of those mysteries of the universe.

But at this point all is anticipation. It's perhaps the most exciting and dangerous moment of an artwork, when it's all to come and you don't know exactly what will happen, just have amorphous ideas in the part of the brain that's between words and pictures, neither one nor the other, and you know what texture you feel like using and what approximate color range will work but other than that, it's another mystery of the universe.

So I thought you'd like a picture of the first beginnings of a new work.




Then, while the cleaning people were here and I had to stay out from underfoot while they had one of those hilarious conversations with HP, in the course of cleaning the living room, I figured why not now, and I stayed in the studio and warped the frame.



It was marked up in small measurements from a previous work so that bit was done. Warping is not the most exciting thing, more the laundry folding of the life of art in a way, or maybe the rubbing of the ink block part of the work,but while you warp, your mind ranges over all kinds of thoughts and images and adventures to come on the frame.

And I found a ruler to thread through to lift the back warp bits to the front, to tighten the caboodle before I put in some establishing rows that will blend with, but not be part of, the design.

That Calvin and Hobbes New Year strip, where they are looking at the year and the new snow and all the adventures waiting for them -- that joy is where I am right now with this piece! at this point the work can be done in the living room, where HP will have my company.

I have worked very little in the studio since he's been totally dependent, but he loves to see me working on color and fiber. In fact that's one of the reasons I moved more into the fiber arts -- no fumes that could be a problem for an invalid, no stuff that could get knocked over tragically in an emergency, ability to stop and start for sudden needs of his, without materially affecting the progress of the work, these all filled my requirements.

I did the fleece combing and carding on the patio in sight of him, and the spinning in the living room. Dyeing (using very benign materials, Kool Aid, to be exact) in the kitchen where he can see me through the pass-through.

So that's the context. I'll let you see it as it moves along, or drags me along after it, as the case may be.

Food, nature's artform

I was cutting and chopping and slicing vegetables for salad today, and just had to stop and take pictures of the beautiful red cabbage, so like a precious stone when you see it in cross section, resting on a bed of celery slices, against the white of the colander and the steely color of the sink. Art by accident.








Cooking is an artform, and the colors and smells and textures of the food never fail us.

Out of ice, art, for you, Tarang!

I noticed a few minutes ago, after our ice storm, that the downspout in front of the house had a major chunk of ice stopping the draining, so I knocked it off, it fell into two parts, and I realized I had two lovely ice sculptures, courtesy of nature, in my hands. Environmental art, at its best, spontaneous, balanced, harmonious, fleeting.

So I took pictures



here, you can see the shapes, one like a crouching dog, one like a robed figure, on a weathered old bench

And here, a little adjustment introduces negative space into the composition.



So then, thinking, these are the gems of winter, I brought them indoors, and arranged them on red felt, like the jewels they are



Context is everything! and the pressure of getting this done outdoors before the camera froze, then indoors before the ice melted, is all part of the process of art. Life, too, when you think about it.




Already the subjects of the pictures are melting rapidly out there on the bench outside the front door, but they still exist, in these photographs, for us all to continue to see.

This is art that is kind to the earth and to us, too.

Artist's books

This is a whole area of fun for the artist. I've made many books, usually very flowing, loose kinds of approach, not the bookbinding world at all, but a more flexible kind of work.

I've learned a number of stitching techniques, and I just wanted to show you a bunch that have not been seen before, because they are still awaiting the finishing and putting in of the pages. But the covers are nice to see, and range from paintings on muslin







inside, see the handmade paper additions



outside covers

which I then stretched over cardboard and adhered, to paintings directly on cardboard



or canvas



or paper




I've given away many little notebooks which I created, and want to let you in on a neat notion I came across: you know when people get those lovely art cards with reproductions of famous paintings and you keep them and keep them and never get around to sending them as cards?

Just learn a simple stitching technique, then cut plain old white paper, insert it into the card, stitch it and you have a really nice little notebook which is better than sending a card, but not too elaborate to send as a casual gift. If you have a corner punch that will round off the corners, all the better.

When I first got a corner punch, I went mad with it, rounding off the corners of everything that didn't move. The cats steered very clear of me at this period, hiding their ears.

Another supposedly office-intended appliance is my little shredder, which I originally got as a shredder then realized it would make wonderful strips for paper weaving.




So I sliced up a lot of old photos that were surplus to requirements, and wove the results, glued the piece down on card, and they are awaiting their pages and a destination.

I've made some books with my own handmade paper, too, lovely soft and irregular stuff, great to handle and play with.



outside showing plant material embedded in the paper



Inside cover



outside cover


Most of the drawings you saw in my other entries are stored in these portfolios.



One was a giant book made for another purpose, in an exhibit, and once home



adapted to being a drawing portfolio. In this one, I did the Japanese stitching using brass chain.




Several of these pieces were originally exhibited as paintings, and now will be happy as book covers, big ones.