Four Easy Pieces, Art Underfoot

Today the light was wonderful, golden, sharp, clear. Perfect for strolling and seeing what's afoot...

You come at art by various means

Various means, some of them mysterious. Anyway, today I found myself studying some fiber pieces on the wall waiting for me to figure out their next stage, and realized I needed fabric behind them, to stabilize and be part of the work and to think it was to do it.

I thought about some of the knitted pieces I've felted, and on the way to finding them in the studio found a bunch of lovely silk and canvas and cheesecloth and other such great stuff. The silk seemed about right for what's going on here at the moment.

White silk is nice but oh well, it needs a little something. So I made a batch of strong coffee and dropped the pieces into it, careful to keep a little air in, so as to have designs, not a solid dye job. Then hung them up in the blessed sunshine we finally got some, and painted them a little more using a turkey baster and let them blow in the sunshine, finally ironed them and made casings temporarily at the tops and slid them onto a dowel to see how they work now.

















At this point they could work with several of the other works, and maybe one I still have in progress,but we'll see how that goes.

I have returned! with early computer generated art

I've been organizing the studio and came across a trove of computer art which I created in the early 1980s, when computer art was at a very early stage. The Mac had not yet introduced all the graphics that are now common, and what was available to students of the medium at that time was a complex system.

I was progressing through a self directed program of art studies,with the guidance of a number of exhibiting artists who thought I should definitely go on and exhibit work. So this was a way of, among all the printmaking and drawing and papermaking and other studio arts, finding a very new medium and seeing what I could do with it.

At that time there was no scanning. What we had to do was a whole series of delicate steps culminating in an image grab. This would take an entire 5.25 size disk, the only type in existence then, and took all kinds of acrobatics on the part of the artist.

Great fun, it involved a setup like a theater organ, with two fullsize PCs, no Macs available, one with a keypad for entering commands, one with a stylus and pad for drawing what would appear like magic on the screen. Huge adventure, and I spent a lot of a year doing this in the intervals of having to go to work to earn a living to enable me to do this. And it did entail computer knowledge and the ability to make string commands, as well as working with all the other requirements of art.

But several of the pieces you see here won awards of various kinds. And seeing them on a screen is their true medium. At that time the only way to exhibit them was to set up a 35 mm film roll inside the works of the computer, scary stuff, and shoot what was on the screen, except that you had to make all kinds of adjustments to allow for the difference between a backlit screen and a film image.

The technicians at the photo place where I used to take my work each week to get it developed were very intrigued and just couldn't grasp that these images only existed in a disk, that they weren't a photograph of a thing. I spent a lot of time talking about this with them, because they were fascinated at this new thing going on. There were only two printers in the US which could actually print out this output, one at CalTech, and I forget where the other was. But for most of the world, it was make a film shot and get it developed.

Anyway, here are some of my works. the ones that look like sculpture are in fact virtual sculpture -- the program enabled me to turn the image exactly like a physical sculpture and work on all sides. But there wasn't enough memory in the system to image more than one side, so I had to choose which would be the "front".

Some of the best fun I had was in forcing the program to get all upset and confused by deliberating putting in commands too fast, so as to create a kind of tumbling effect as all the colors and shapes collided with one another and made amazing new effects. Unfortunately the manufacturers caught these loopholes and "fixed" them, dangit.

Then the college donated all its pcs and cards to the prison system (couldn't sell them, federal money, so they had to find a good new home) and short of committing some major crime and getting into the Clinton Women's Correctional Facility, my computer adventures on the PC came to an end. The college replaced the PCs with Macs, which I found so boring and predictable and programmed, not much room for new thought, that I moved on into other areas of art, on to new adventures.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Studio

What happens when you're working on a bigger piece that won't quite move along as requested, but insists on being something different, and you haven't got all the ideas for it that will work, anyway what happens is that other stuff gets done on the way to the studio.



This is the latest freecycle: a crateload of ancient acrylic rug yarn, decades old, but fresh and nice, been stored well, in various brilliant colors, dying to be made up with a big crochet hook or something.

Then some stuff went drastically wrong in the house, and a fury of intense crocheting was required to recover from it, and two shopping bags emerged from the maelstrom.






Which all goes to show that acrylic has its place, that crocheting and knitting are much better than waving a Glock about, however much you may feel like the latter, being familiar with the works of Janet Evanovich, and that these are the most grin inducing shopping bags at the supermarket this morning.

July Library Gallery show shots

The Plainsboro Artists Group show up for the month of July, is called Wordplay. All the pieces are different takes on the power and existence and significance of words. I took a couple of wall shots, and then picked a few favorites to show you better.









The piece I showed you a while back, woven paper and stamps, and next to it a beautiful piece of calligraphy



Lovely piece, paper processed, quilted, stitched



And here's a wonderful take on the difficulties facing a kid learning to read and write the English language, complete with all its exception and illogic. Donna Senopoulos created this, and I loved it.

The Invasion of the Tiny Purses

Hm. Strange hanging plant or what??


The current tranquillizer, in view of the new series of health crises in the household, is the Tiny Purse. These are one of a kind, just big enough for a cellphone, or Ipod or that kind of thing. Long strap, slings round your neck or over your shoulder, so you can't walk off without your stuff.

A while back I knitted blankets for rescued cats, same idea, tranquillizing in long days and nights in hospitals, waiting rooms, ICU places, and so on. The joke was the a bad week could be a two blankie week!

I've had a few two-purse days lately, purses being somewhat faster to make. So here are the current results. They will be in a craft show and sale in the Fall, to benefit rescued animals, same group as I made the blankets for.

It's a way of making lemonade out of the lemons life has been firing at us! great fun to pick over my yarn, and mix and match and design these items, mostly crocheted, some knitted depending on the yarn and my mood at the time and the state of my hands, which need changes from activity to activity.

Fiberart in progress, maybe Frida

Here's the latest work in progress, photo'd on the patio so you can see 1. the weather is moderate again, cool, cloudy, very nice and 2. the relative size of the piece. Up to now this is a crocheted warp and weft, but there will be more weaving and general playtime before I get through with this. It was plain white cotton yarn, which I dyed and left to dry in the studio during the heatwave, took no time to dry.

So now, this reminds me of Frida Kahlo, no idea why, and maybe this concept will vanish as I work and maybe it won't. We'll see. The ties that fasten it to the stretchers are not part of the work, just put there to stabilize it for weaving purposes. It was crocheted freeform, off the stretchers. This crochet is very elastic, so it won't be a solid mass when woven, but will be interesting to see what happens next. Don't ask me, I only work here.

But I think I'll get spinning with that lovely top I got down at Cape May, which is heavenly to handle and smell and work with, and Duncan the cat is totally kinked out over it, throws himself into the midst, drooling and rolling and generally looking like a total fool of a cat. I have to protect it from him.

I did give him his own little bit to play with and he ran away with it, drooling and slurring his words. But I think the cleaners must have vacuumed it up, so I need to give him a new one, or I'll get no peace to spin. But I think that will go well with this piece, we'll see.

Or it may be that you see a cat woven into the piece, indignantly shouting lemme out! depending on how it goes.

Handmade paper and words

In September I'm invited to take part in a group show on the theme of Wordplay, involving handmade paper and words and that general concept. Which made me go check on what I already have in my studio which fits the bill.

I selected a few pieces, which I want to show you here, and maybe some of these will make it into the show, depending on how they fit. They all involve handmade paper, often my own, or mulberry, and drawing and printmaking, taking words off the internet, an early foray into that as raw material, with the permission of the friend whose journal entries these are, though I broke the words and generally corroded the firmness of the font, to convey my own notions. One is reverse painted on the framing glass, as well as being a mixed media piece.



Mixed media piece, 20 x 16, with my handmade paper collaged, line drawings, the little gold insert a reference to Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, sneaky little art joke there




Handmade mulberry paper piece, with my own artist made paper underneath, mushroom printed. 20 x 16




Painting created from paper pulp used as paint material, with wire drawing, landscape of moon and hills, 30 x 16




Collage of leaf destroyed by gipsy moth, with handmade paper, wire drawing, 8 x 10




Collaborative work with text created by Kristie Helms, and artwork, monotype, stamping and reverse images on paper. Kbean, I have not forgotten that if we ever sell this piece, you get half the proceeds!!




Torn and cut collage of mulberry and handmade paper and charcoal drawing, 20 x 16




Double drawing, handmade paper, charcoal, ink drawings, from series based on the journal headings of Joyce H., with her generous permission




Drawing and painting with handmade paper on cardboard, using gesso as paint material 20 x 16




Small piece, artist made abaca paper, with wire drawing and amber bead, white painting reverse on inside of framing glass, using gesso as paint material, 8 x 10

New Weaving

Paper work, stamped paper strips woven with postage stamps, for an upcoming group show on the theme of Words. It made this a while back, had to let it rest, dry, generally take shape, and today I framed it. I decided that it needed to be under glass, for stability, but I'm not always much into imprisoning artwork under glass!

Untitled fiber art piece for show

This is newly finished, and it's knitting with crochet added to it. The top part is Field of Wheat, very traditional stitch pattern, and I followed it with double crochet, which I hugely increased, then decreased, to create the drapes you see. I falls naturally into a three dimensional shape. No title for this yet, but it reminds me strangely of primitive figures!

Size about 30 x 12 inches. The point of hanging pieces like this for a while before storing them clean for the show is to let them breathe for a while and adopt their preferred dimensions and drape. A dress or not a dress? that too will emerge in a few days. I must get this piece's opinion on that.

Fiber Art 2012 show entry

My work for the solo exhibit I'm putting on at the Libe gallery, by invitation of the curator, to happen next year (!) is moving along a lot faster than I had expected, but that's fine. As usual, the art tells me where it wants to go and what it wants to do, and I'm often just an innocent bystander.

After the Unseen Presence made her presence felt, I realized that there was a dress in most of my woven and knitted wallhangings, which I hadn't realized until that white one turned into a dress before my eyes.

But they remind me of dances, too, so for the moment, the tentative title of this piece, approximately 30 inches by 18, can't measure, it's on another floor, finished this afternoon, is Charleston! complete with the exclamation point.




This contains my handspun yarn, some donated handspun, some unspun wool top (from Cape May, yay), some paper twisted to make yarn, ribbons, cotton thread, sequins, wired ribbon and who knows what else. There are embroidery stitches in here, too, an adaptation of drawn threadwork, with ribbons woven through. Click to enlarge.

As usual, the reds changed in the pic, but there's a wide range of that family of color in this piece. Cameras don't like red!

Many many references in this piece! which blogistas are invited to scope out for themselves. Anyway, you are the first to see this complete work, and I am deep into plans for the next....

The Unseen Presence

Behind every artist there's an Unseen Presence. Mine got very literal, got dressed up in lacy white dress, snappy felt bag and knitted slippers and followed us on vacation. Couldn't shake her.



Her first appearance, down at Cape May Point in a gazebo.




Lounging on the balcony then



On the boardwalk, and showing her hotel room, right above her head there.




Home, resting her feet, before vanishing.



We may see her again, perhaps, her choice.

She's not exactly yarn bombing, since she leaves after the picture, not exactly an installation, since she's in place only minutes, not exactly an exhibit, since she exists only in pictures.

She's just our UP.