Making Your Mark(s)

I am looking for ways to ‘limit’ my artwork.

I am doing that by analyzing the various techniques I employ, the materials I use, my design process. Even as I lie in bed at night, I am weighing, deciding. What really works for me–flows, gives me joy? What is a chore, and why? What materials have I purchased that, though utilized in amazing ways by others, simply languish on my art shelves? What skills do I need to learn or improve to continue in the direction of creating work that I consider successful?

My main goal is to make my own marks on my work even more personal. I have always enjoyed designing, but have employed, to some degree, texture sheets, stamps, and images made by others. I am determined that every mark on my pieces shall be my own, and only my own. I will create my own stamps–I already have a number of methods I have used in the past. I will make collagraphs as personal texture sheets, having first discovered this method at a printmaking course I took many years ago from a talented woman named Lucinda Jones. I will continue to paint and dye my own cloth and paper. I will utilize my papier mache skills to create small “inclusions” for my work. I will take more photographs to use as reference work.

It’s not that I haven’t done all this already–I just want to do it exclusively. That way, my voice and vision have no competition in my own work. It will be ALL mine, and that will feel very, very satisfying.

Suppressing CHAOS through database creation

I don’t know how other people keep track of their computer files and folders, but mine were/are definitely OUT OF CONTROL. When you get to the point where you don’t know what you have, and can’t find what you do know you have, it’s time to make databases. That is my strategy and present pursuit, which will serve writing for Silverspring Studio, as well as the Kemshall City and Guilds course I am taking (I will post more about that later). In the meantime, I am building fields and value lists, so that my photos, drawings, ideas, and inspirations can be put into readily searchable form. That is, at least, the optimistic theory that I have chosen to chase. The most dangerous trap, of course, is to expend inordinate amounts of energy organizing art supplies, information, and performing other artistic rites–while leaving little time for the actual act of creation. I try to outmaneuver this snare by ignoring household chores, but am cleverly ambushed again by chaos, maddeningly morphed to another area of my life. How many permutations will chaos perform before I simply admit that I will never have any control, not really, and expecting to grasp it is like believing exercise will restore my teenage suppleness. It sounds like I am in the grip, here, of an infinite-loop motif. Perhaps it would be appropriate to break into song: “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza . . .” but that endless ditty would definitely consume far too much precious time.

Tuesday morning I received my biweekly “Painter’s Keys” letter from Robert Genn. Part of what he had to say dovetails quite nicely with my comments above:

There was this chap [in art school] . . . who spent all of his time cleaning and getting ready. He’d even clean stuff before he was going to paint–and then he wouldn’t paint. He never really did. After a semester or two he got kicked out and went into dentistry. He sold me a lot of his stuff before he vacated his apartment–it was like a well-equipped art store, labels facing out and everything. I used his wonderful big sables, goat-hairs and quills for about five years. I still have two or three.

I’m sorry–brush cleaning can be just another avoidance activity. I figure the sooner I get the brush in my hand, the better. Coming and going from my easel, I pick one up and drop it down hundreds of times a day. It’s a sacrifice, I know, but I feel I’m a painter, not a cleaner.

Too funny. But creating databases is NOT avoidance activity, uh-uh, no way, forget about it.

Cave of Dreams

Patricia Bolton, the dynamic editor of Quilting Arts and Cloth, Paper, Scissors (I have subscriptions to both magazines) issued a challenge in her Editor’s Blog last September (2006). I was fortunate enough to be one of the 30 to respond in time, and receive one of her bags of “goodies.” She invited us to create anything “your artful heart desires.” Her goodies included: handpainted silk, a piece of lace in gradations of color, a coffee filter, a gold gridded piece, some hand-dyed cotton, a painted napkin, dyed cheesecloth. We were given a little over a month to make our creation and send a pic back to the QA blog, but I had to wait until my package arrived by regular mail to Canada. When it did arrive, I wasted about 5 minutes panicking: “What am I going to make?” Then I just let my hands and intuition go–I began cutting and watching it evolve. The final piece ended up being 23” (length) by 21” (width). I added some of my own fabric, crystals, charms, a beautiful Czech button, embroidery floss, and used a bit of the envelope (tyvek) that everything came in. I called it “Cave of Dreams,” and went a little over the top as far as my usual embellishing goes, because dreams are quite spectacular in their presentation! I also wrote this short poem that I put on the back of the piece:

Cave of dreams

My body lies
in darkness but my spirit
seeks the light.
That’s why I search
the cave of dreams so
fervently each night.
© CAW October, 2006

It was published on Patricia Bolton’s blog in November, 2006. You have to scroll down a fair amount, but the Bolton tutorial is worth it!