Closed Doors vs Open Ones

Carol here.

I don't know about all of you but after I have a big push to reach deadlines, I have to take a break.

Literally I have nothing to offer.

I  just completed two articles for the same publication (with only two weeks to write them both) (my own schedule blocked me into that corner) and I am so very wrung out.
I feel like I couldn't come up with one bit of inspiration at the moment.

But I still crave the daily creative activity that I am used to.

What is a girl to do?

I read for a couple of days or at least until my vision was blurred.
Then I watched a couple of good movies followed by a couple of really bad ones.

But I couldn't sit still much longer and not do something.
What I really wanted to do was draw or work in my art journal.

I don't know if you can really call one of the handmade books that I write/draw/collage in an "art journal" but I guess that's the best description at the moment.
Sometimes it feels like an "art" journal but other times it feels more like a regular journal.

It's a huge book that I made in a workshop that I took a few years ago.

I certainly learned my lesson there about making Big Books.

I prefer the smaller ones that I can complete easily or the "theme" book that I can carry on trips with me.

I have a "Colorado" book that I work in while I am visiting friends and teaching there.

I also have a "Charleston" book that I carry when my husband and I venture to The Holy City.
I used a printed copy of a rich beautiful painting by Robert Henri called "The Green Fan (Girl of Toledo, Spain)" that is owned by Gibbs Art Museum in Charleston, SC

One of my favorite paintings.
She stands 41 inches tall
and commands any room that she is in.

My Charleston Book (aka Book of the Holy City).
"The Green Fan (Girl of Toledo, Spain)"
Robert Henri

Having a book like that makes it really simple to decide what to carry with me when I travel.

But back to the Big Book.

She is almost six inches thick, holds a lot of pages and even more words and drawings.
Lots of room for random mark making.
I turn to her pages when I have that desire to draw (or write) and have no idea or concern for the outcome.

I opened her up yesterday morning, grabbed a couple of pens and set to work (while watching one of those bad movies).

Here's a sampling of the pages that I marked up.

A colorful owl that started out as a curved doodle.

I had stitched a doily/sun shape into my page
before I stitched the signature into my book.
Yesterday I journaled deep, dark secrets on the page.

Ah, more secrets.
I'd have to kill you if you read them.

Ideas for simple, yet engaging journal doodles.

You can see the progression in this page.
I love adding the tiny details to finish the doodle drawings up.
I'll go back in later and add journaling.

I also add in single pages with ideas for thermofax screens.

More blurring to make you wonder why I have
so many deep dark secrets.
Most of it is aimless pondering of a bored woman.
Like this one -
"We never consider death before it considers us"
What?
"Dead men do tell tales albeit quietly".
I am a fountain (a deep one) of thoughts.

So you can see that I have an expanse of fertile ground on which to practice my trade.
In other words- I have a big ass book that I draw and write in.

The Muse may be out at the moment but at least I left the door open for her.

Do you find that you close the door completely or do you leave the door open for ideas to flow back in?

You gotta leave room for the entry of creative ideas.
You also need to spend time with these ideas every day.
If you keep showing up and opening that door, they will show show up as well.

fooled myself

Happy New Year! There is nothing like starting the new year with a realization that I have managed to fool myself yet again.. Natalya here and here's the story:

Back in 2007, inspired by Jeanne Williamson I started a weekly journaling project in which I explored different techniques, experimented with recycled materials and generally didn't give myself any rules except for size. I kept this going for two years and then got bored and decided to do a daily sketch journal. Sketching turned into experimenting with collage and painting and printing and doodling all on the pages of the said journal. Then in 2010 I got all fancy and did monthly diptychs based on my sketches from the year before. The following year I embarked on a very ambitious project of daily journaling on fabric. I had it all figured out: monthly prompts, experiments, binding into monthly books and then....I fizzled out and quit. Yup, quit. I thought that was the end of my journaling. Got it all out of my system, no need for more.

What I didn't even realize was that I hadn't really quit, I had just changed my media. You see, back in the beginning of  2009 I started something silly and frivolous on my blog called Wordless Wednesdays. It was really just blog fodder for when I couldn't think of anything else to blog about. I copied the idea from a bunch of other bloggers, sort of fell into a trend. Without even realizing it became a habit. Somewhere in 2012 the Wordless Wednesdays became more and more architecture based, only natural as my artwork was concentrating more and more on architecture. And they became not so wordless too somehow... In 2013 I gave myself a real challenge of making Wordless Wednesday an experiment in Photoshop using photos of NYC only.

So call me slow...but it was only this week as I planned out my Wordless Wednesday challenge for 2014 that I realized that I had never quit journaling! I just changed my journaling media... Isn't hindsight great?

So what's your journaling story? Weekly, monthly, everyday? Textile, paper or computer? And how has it morphed over time?

"Empty Spaces - New Growth"

Carol here.

In my last entry, I wrote of stitching several of the phrases "empty spaces" in a cream colored thread, which would reward the viewer that takes a closer look.

I really love the additional texture that added to this canvas!

I finished up the piece by transferring the enlarged & cropped lily onto the canvas. I used a graphite transfer paper to trace parts of the drawing onto the canvas, freehand drawing the remainder (I had drawn the image several times already in my sketchbook so I was very familiar with the lines of it).

You will recall in my previous post that I wanted to add a touch of red into this piece.

As chance would have it the Lily Leaf Beetle (sometimes called the Scarlet Lilly Beetle) is a pest to the Crown Imperial Lily.

I practiced drawing the beetle in my sketchbook.

Sometimes things just work in your favor, don't they?

So I added three of the red beetles, munching on the plant as they leave their own empty spaces.

I wanted to have one of the "Empty Spaces" phrases more prominent so I stitched the chosen one in red. I used a very light application of watercolor paint inside the letters.

The last thing I did to finish this piece up was to stretch the canvas over stretcher bars. I had planned on this finishing technique from the beginning so I was very careful about where the lily and the phrase was placed.

One of my favorite things about this piece was how the layering all came together in the end. I have many layers of text, transfers, stamping, collage, paint, molding paste, machine stitching and drawing on top of this canvas. 

When you view the entire piece, you can see peeks of each layer.

"Empty Spaces- New Growth"

I hope that you all allow the empty spaces in your life to fill with new growth.

Thank you for following along with me as I created this artwork.

Part Two

Carol here again.
Continuing the tale of my "Empty Spaces" piece.

I want to be completely honest here and say that this has not be an easy or free flowing piece of work.
Life interferes, my mood can change what is happening in my work and I'm not used to following a set theme when I create.
Having said all of that, I will say that my own misunderstanding of the deadline created some angst as well.
I thought that I had a month less than what I really had to complete the artwork.
It was great finishing it early but that extra month would have been nice!


I continued to build up the backgrounds with more transfers.
Using cheap foam stamps, I added a layer of text on top of this.

I used a fluid acrylic paint with mica pieces in it to give a little bit of shimmer.

I really liked the look of the larger letters but wanted them to fade into the background more.
I wanted to introduce more texture at this point so I pulled out the sketchbook that I had been working in.
Here is one of the pages that I experimented on.

I liked that so I applied an irregular layer of modeling paste (or molding paste depending on the manufacturer) with a large palette knife.
You can see that I skipped areas - just here and there to add some texture.
I did a couple of layers of it - I added paint to the paste before I applied it to one canvas, the other one I painted  over the paste afterwards.

Notice how I have left an area around the outside of the canvas blank.
This area will be on the back of the piece after it is completed. 

I think that the paint color was raw sienna. The addition of the white molding paste did act to subdue the paint color somewhat but I liked it.
I started really getting into what was going on with the canvas piece at this point and just kept going with it.

I loaded a small brush with a lighter color and let my crazy side (what? you say...so you thought every side of me was crazy!) take over.
I spattered  small amounts of the (titan buff) paint as well as a little bit of black.

If you look closely you can see the lines from a transfer that I did
of one of my mom's journal pages.

I really liked the piece and was at the point that I feared screwing it up by doing anything else...but knew that it needed something else.
This was when I returned to the sketchbook to work out my plan.

I revisited my writings when I first began working on the theme -
"I began to think of other empty spaces.  Spaces that existed for another purpose.
Like in the garden. You dig a hole (a space that is now empty) to drop a seed into it.
Or maybe in the forest. A tree falls to the ground, rots and eventually leaves an empty space there. Yet, in that space, mushrooms begin to grow. Small plants sprout up.
The space is empty yet the death of one thing has provided a fertile space for another.

Life finds a way to fill that empty space."


With that fresh in my mind, I began looking at the canvas as the empty space that was acting as fodder for my emotions, a space holder if you will...and allowing it to symbolically be a fertile ground for the growth of something else. My negative emotions were decaying, they were becoming fertilizer to this ground.
I felt that I needed to see new growth in this space.


I had a drawing that I had done of a flower with it's roots growing down, strong and bold. I wanted to try it out but not on the canvas that I liked.
I created a mock piece in my sketchbook, scanned the drawing, printed it out and used it as a transfer on the page.
The drawing was rather detailed and I didn't want to take the time to draw it again but needed a fair representation of it. A transfer was the quickest way to do this.

You can see the second piece that I started under the sketchbook.
I had done a couple of paint washes over the surface trying out different colors.

I often, quite often actually, get into working things in my sketchbook so much that I go overboard with the details of it all...
and that is exactly what happened here. 
I was having so much fun drawing, stamping and painting that I totally allowed it to take me away from working on the actual piece of artwork!

The sketchbook was becoming the artwork.
I had to step away from it.

It was a good thing that I did this work in my sketchbook because I realized that the full drawing of the plant was too much - it was too small, too detailed for that size of canvas.
I decided to use a portion of the drawing but modify the size a bit.
Using the scan from the original drawing, I enlarged it so that about a third of it would fit on the 16 inch square canvas.

I cut the flower out to get a better idea about the size.

I liked the size as it (roughly) divided the size of the piece into thirds.

There were two other things that I had in mind for this piece:
adding machine stitching
adding a touch of red (for a tan, black and red color scheme).

So it was back to the samples for me.

Here is a practice stitching (complete with one backwards letter!).

Long story even longer, I loved the addition of the stitching so much that I stitched several of the stamped text blocks with a light colored thread. This will reward the viewer that takes a closer look at the piece.
This brings us to the last phase of the creation of this piece of artwork.

I'll give my cohorts a chance to talk before I finish up with mine.

I hope that you all are living your life as creatively as you can.
As women, who tend to give and give and give, we need the outlet that creativity can offer us.
We need to be able to give some energy over to what is fun, what is joyful to us.
And that is what creating art is to me.
It sustains me.
It lets me put all of the stress of the day on the shelf for a bit and allow my passion to take over.

Are you honoring your creativity?

Brainstorming Ideas

Jamie Fingal checking in.  I often do a lot of research before embarking on a new project.  The thought of empty spaces intrigues me.  There are so many ways that I could go with this idea.  But, where I am right now, is in an emotional state of turmoil.  My dad passed away suddenly in late November, and it has forever changed my life and left an 'empty space' in my heart.  I've been drawing hearts, of all things, and this symbol never reaches the radar in my brain when I am attempting to create a new piece of art.  The fact that this heart wrenching emotion has totally taken over my thought process lately, and for obvious reasons.  This is just the beginning of looking at some of the empty spaces in my life.



I sat down and started drawing, everything that I was feeling, with my heart on my sleeve, or on the sketchbook page.

 



Then I decided that I should create one of those drawings into a painting on canvas to get a larger visual understanding of what I was doing.  I like the colors, but don't really like the heart or the writing.  It seems to trite to me.  I feel that more should be left to the viewer.  This is in your face art, and I am not sure if this is what I want to convey in an art quilt.  And let's be real, it's just a little on the depressing side.  I need to think some more on what I can create with this theme.



So, enter the camera - and we have a button jar that is partially empty  that might have some potential.  Words swirling on the inside perhaps...or a story of the antique buttons.  Thinking out loud here.  Are you enjoying my design process?



and then there is this.  Spaces between the openings.  Might be too literal, or perhaps to easy, but I do love the lime green.



and then I've been making red backgrounds, which could be hearts or something else.  It seems I am really drawn to this right now.  It's easy and I can wrap my mind around it, as opposed to other work that I can't seem to focus on right now.



and then I started thinking about what I do best, my roots so to speak in my art.  The art of the house.  The empty spaces could be negative space.  It would all depend on how it is designed and what kind of fabric I would choose, but it could work, and be something interesting, happy and it could invite the viewer in to see more.  Maybe or maybe not.  Stay tuned.

 

Introductions: Carol Sloan

Hi, I'm Carol Sloan. I am a mixed media artist living and working in South Carolina.

 



 

I find inspiration in many places. I am fascinated by the textures found in nature and use several different mediums trying to replicate them. In viewing my work, you will see layers that include paper, paint, fabric/fiber and natural items. I love using natures bounty in my artwork. I use collage, drawing, painting and fiber manipulation to build these layers in my work.

 



I work in an intuitive manner, allowing the work itself to dictate the direction that it travels.

 



 

 

I build each piece to tell a story or to chronicle an experience in my life or another's life. I spend a lot of time in the forests and rivers near my home, hiking, kayaking or soaking in the beauty. I gather and collect interesting objects, natural items and everyday discards that I take to my studio and later use in these narratives. My hope is that the story will resonate with the viewer.



 

I also teach mixed media/mixed media fiber art workshops and classes nationally.

 



I love to share my belief that there is an artist inside of  everyone.



I plan on beginning online classes this year, teaching abroad as well as submitting a book proposal.



Check out more of my art, classes and my schedule on my blog.