Listening To Myself

Liz here this beautiful Spring Sunday. I have been madly stitching away on my Empty Spaces piece and all the while questioning just what the heck I am doing! I am hand stitching white on white. Is that insane or what? Why am I compelled to do this intensive amount of stitching when it isn't even obvious unless you are looking closely at the piece?

I have to confess...this isn't the first time I have caught myself doing this sort of barely visible stitching by hand. Each time I ask myself why. Why is it important to me do this sort of stitching? Do you ever talk to your art in progress? I do. All the time. Not out loud of course! Well, actually, now that I think about it I do sometimes talk to myself and my art out loud.

Here are some examples of what I mean--of the stitching not the talking out loud:

 

 In this one I even used beads that blend!

This isn't new, I have been doing this for years. I just sort of went with what my intuition told me and while I wondered why I needed to do this I didn't think too much about it. Though I have to admit to telling myself I am stupid for working this laboriously on my pieces.

While working on this  Empty Spaces piece the last couple months I have been traveling a lot; away from home about as much as I was home. This crazy need to add so much hand stitching was on my mind a lot.  Why couldn't I just quickly machine stitch this and be done with it, I asked myself over and over. I have a deadline and I didn't really have time for all this hand stitching that is hardly visible!  Then, on one boring flight (can't remember which one) I was mulling this over when I remembered what my friend Terry White said about my work. She said that what she loved about my work was the details. All of a sudden I had this big thought shift! I realized that these details are my way of inviting the viewer to slow down and look closer. All of this stitching is my way of saying: stop, be here now, allow yourself a moment to be, think and simply breathe. Wow...my work was talking for me. My work is (hopefully) telling the viewer what I would tell them if I was standing there next to them.

Now, unfortunately, this piece has also told me that it isn't finished! It doesn't care about the deadline. It wants to be a diptych. I started out to make one small piece but it is insisting on including the questions I asked in my previous post; is empty space the positive or negative, the black or the white? And, of course it is insisting that a lot of hand stitching be included.  I could ignore it, call it done and spend the day reading outside but I would never feel right about the piece. As you can see in my sneak peek photo above that I have a bit of stitching in my immediate future.

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?

What We Keep

Jamie Fingal - In contemplating 'Empty Spaces,'  I have brainstormed many different ideas, but then it became clear to me, what my subject would be all about.  I lost both of my parents within a four month period.  There is certainly a large empty space in my life, without them in it.   In cleaning out their house, I began to photograph my memories of the things that they used with their hands in the kitchen, sewing, office, and tool chest. 

My mom had a great spoon collection, but I had no room for it in my house, but I do have a lovely photograph of my favorite spoons, to keep forever.  From my mom's favorite cookbooks, to the wood bird with a clothes pin beak, that held a recipe card, to funky aprons and even a apron pocket prayer book.  This has become my labor of love to honor them.  What we keep to remind ourselves who we are.

These photos of my art quilt are what I would call a 'sneak peek' of portions of the piece that I made for our on-line exhibit 'Empty Spaces.' 

Brain Wars

Liz Kettle here, posting today about my progress…or lack of…my Empty Spaces piece. I was immediately intrigued with the proposed title Empty Spaces and thought to myself…wow that sounds like an easy theme to work with! Boy was I wrong. I thought I had a bunch of ideas and I did but the problem was that I ended up completely stalled out because I found myself spinning in circles. I had too many ideas and none of them were any good.



I once took a test that was supposed to tell you if you worked predominately from your left (analytical) or right (creative) brain. I scored really close to a balanced middle brain thinker. At the time I proudly thought this was a reflection of how well balanced I am and how well rounded my thinking skills are. HA!  Well...You all know what happens to pride before the fall right? This balanced brain was my undoing in this art endeavor.



First of all, I am a bit of a science geek. I home-schooled two of my kids through high school and we did a lot of science. I love learning about quarks, string theory, neutrinos and black holes. There is no such thing as empty space. There is no glass half full…they are all full. This fact kept pushing to the surface every time I started thinking about empty spaces. I tried to outsmart myself…thinking about psychological empty spaces in our hearts, lives and experiences but I kept coming back to the notion that even empty spaces in our hearts are filled in with love, longing or regret. Empty spaces in our lives are often filled up with physical stuff. That led me to a personal rant on how we have too much stuff and I considered doing a piece featuring the absurdity of the storage units phenomenon but that felt too confrontational and judgmental for my art.  Still spinning in circles.



Next I asked myself is empty space positive or negative, black or white, figure or ground? This intrigued me but I still kept going round in circles because I had no answers to these questions and at every turn I could only think that there is no empty space! At this point the deadline is looming and I really just have to start something. When I am totally flummoxed but still need to work my salvation is in cleaning the studio.  Not cleaning cleaning...there is no dusting or vacuuming. I pull out piles and sort them. I move fabric around, pull it out, fold it, put it back. I find lost scissors and rulers and that little doo-dad that would have been perfect on my last project. I make a mess piling fabrics up, touching and folding trying not to think too much.

On this day I was guided to my overflowing bin of hand dyed, mono-printed and painted fabrics. What a mess! I dumped it all out and folded and sorted. Towards the bottom of the pile I discovered this:



Wow! It was black and white, figure and ground, positive and negative…this could turn into something. There is a pattern underlying the black and white reflective of the idea of empty space not being empty and best of all there are CIRCLES so I could stop my incessant mind spinning. This has potential!

I am hand stitching the top. I love hand stitching and because my spring schedule has me away from my machine so much it will allow me to work while I am on the road. I have developed a compulsion to densely hand stitch in blending thread colors. It is a bit insane when I stop to think about it because the stitching can't be seen unless you look closely. But then again,  asking the viewer to slow down and look closely is what I am aiming for.

 

progress...

After a bit of a struggle to get started I've started making progress with a piece for the empty spaces theme.  In my first post about working with this theme I mentioned that I had the problem of too many ideas.  That problem snowballed into too many ideas and not being happy with any of them which in turn morphed into a complete lack of ideas.  So I went back to my sketchbook...



These are just a few of the pages from my sketchbook that I created as I brainstormed what do do with this theme.  There are a lot more pages but I think you can see that I was a bit all over the place with my ideas.   Part of the problem was that I had convinced myself that I should create a vessel or some other 3d structure.  I latched onto that idea and because I wouldn't let it go but at the same time was feeling that it wasn't the piece I wanted to create I worked myself right into a creative block.

So I put everything away for a while and worked on some other projects.  I needed to stop trying to force the process and wanted to create some distance from it.  After a week or so I went back to my sketchbooks and flipped through the pages and I saw another theme coming through: the empty space created between the lines.  It was an aha moment and I was off and creating...

"the space between the lines" work in progress

Humble Beginnings

Carol here.

In my last post, I talked about gathering the collage items that I felt I might use in the "Empty Spaces" group theme.
I was approaching the theme from this viewpoint or perspective -
I began to think about the theme as that kind of empty space – the space left after the “usual or appropriate contents” were emptied.
With this seed of an idea germinating  in my mind, 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.

After thinking about the theme with those things in mind, I returned to the original thought – the empty spaces that loss can leave us with.
It doesn't have to be death, it could be the loss of respect, loss of love, loss of trust.

I spent a few days hiking in the forest right around this time. I had many hours of solitude to work through this thought process.
I wrote pages of notes while I was out there. Sitting there, surrounded by nature, hearing the rushing water of the nearby river helped to clarify my thoughts.

 I only had a vague sense of what I wanted to do, I began by randomly moving papers around on my background.

But first - I want to share a piece of information about the way that I work. One that could help you as well.

When I first begin a new piece, I pull out enough raw material to make TWO pieces. I practice my ideas and layout on one and use the other as the "real" piece.
This gives me SO much freedom to try new things, to experiment with all those "what if's" that I listen to and allows me to screw up all I want while saving one piece to proceed with (most of the time ).
Oftentimes, my practice piece turns out to be my favorite one!
You should definitely try operating this way (especially on smaller pieces) if you are terrified to try new things or just want to experiment with listening to your intuition (instead of doing things the same old way or the "safe" way).

 I decided on the finished size (16 inches x 16 inches) and added about three to four inches to this measurement so I'd have enough room to place the canvas onto stretcher bars when it was completed.

I used two different substrates since I wanted to experiment with the Multi-Purpose Cloth. The other one was a piece of canvas (medium weight) that had a light to medium coat of gesso applied to it.

I used Golden's Soft Gel and Matte Medium as my adhesive and sealer.

The first approach was to collage a bunch of different things onto the background- everything from handwritten notes to tissue paper.

And keep in mind that this layer is NOT about beauty. It's about embedding my thoughts, the physical evidence of those empty spaces left from personal loss or grief and about adding items that will deliver some texture in a subsequent layer.

Here's a look at how they started.

 The photo above is of the base with  Multi-Purpose Cloth (MPC). It's much thicker than the canvas.

I lived with the background for a day or two before proceeding.

That's one thing about working intuitively - you have to spend time quietly listening to your inner voice. There are times that my voice screams at me (lol) to do things but other times she has me quietly looking and listening for what's next.

One thing was pretty clear to me though - the abundance of color on the MPC background had to go.

I felt any piece that was approaching the topic of "empty spaces" as a loss, as a  space left after the “usual or appropriate contents” were emptied didn't need to be colorful...I felt that it needed to be very quiet, very soft and a noticeable lack of color.
It needed to look the same way that space felt to me.

I decided to add a wash of acrylic paint over it.
I used a watered down fluid acrylic paint and spread it across the entire piece.

paint+water=wash

I had several deadlines looming that were playing through my head. I believe that this fact combined with the addition of some  physical pain that I was going through caused me to rush the process.
I tried to push the creation of this piece, which resulted in - you guessed it- a lot of (what I considered) mistakes or poor decisions.

That's one good thing about using acrylic paint and image transfer. You can cover things up or bury them so deeply into the background that no one will know what you did!

Well, except now you will know what I did...but it's all about learning and growing, right?

The wash helped to knock back the brightness but it still wasn't what I wanted.
I used an old credit card (my favorite paint mover) and scraped some watered down white paint across the surface.
I loved the way that the texture from the addition of the tissue paper and napkins took the paint!

I began working on the canvas right about this time. The time spent playing on the first piece taught me that I didn't want bold, loud colors for this canvas.
I was starting out with an empty space of canvas with a light coat of gesso on it

raw canvas on the left, canvas with gesso on the right

I knew that I wanted to embed the definitions of certain words into the background. I wanted them to be partially hidden, elusive to the viewer and fairly transparent at this point.
I decided to use Matte Medium to transfer since it would be kinda grungy, transparent and I already had several things printed out.

I had forgotten to "flip" (or "mirror") the text before printing it. This would result in the text being backwards if I used it for transfer. I decided to go ahead and use it anyway since most of it would be covered up.

I cut out the text that I wanted to transfer, leaving a narrow strip around the edge so I would have something to grasp when I removed the paper. I also fold one corner back to make it even easier to begin that process of pulling the paper up.

Spread an even layer of matte medium on your substrate, not to thick but not too thin either. I would practice this a few times if you're just learning how before you do it on a "valued" piece of artwork. It certainly isn't a perfect transfer but I love the dreamy/airy look of it.
Burnish the area that you want transferred, making sure there is solid contact between the paper to be transferred and the substrate (canvas).
Since I used an ink jet printer, I didn't wait for the medium to dry. After a couple of minutes, I pulled back one corner of the paper to see if the ink was transferring.
If it is you can pull the paper up (as much as you can), being careful to stop if you notice that you're pulling the entire image up.
I wet my fingertip and rub the area to remove the rest of the paper from the transfer. It can be a pain if you have a large area to work with but it sure is a lot of fun to see your image appear!

I love the areas of overlapping transfers

 In the photo above, you can see that I have several images that are overlapping each other. That's one of the things that I like about this type of transfer, you can layer your images and they still remain transparent.

I'll pick up from here on my next post.

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.