Back to “Sticks”

Last May I told you about a project on which I was working that I call “Sticks.” It evolved from a workshop I took in March from Nancy Crow titled “Lines, Curves, Shapes, Figure Ground.” I reported on two quilt-tops, and since then I have completed three more. So, here’s catching you up on “Sticks”:

Sticks #3 was influenced by a possible title, “Stick Around.” I had planned on putting a circle in the middle of the piece. Then some patterning in the background led me to making two circular cuts. It worked, but I can’t find a real purpose in the cuts.

For Sticks #4, I decided to leave the color of the sticks in the same fabrics and vary the values of the background pieces. I felt this was more successful but still needs some refinement.

Sticks #5 was influenced by a small Xerox copy of a painting in the Portland Art Museum that was given to me by my friend Toni. I was getting bored working with the same design and thought a new one might give me – and the piece – more energy. I cut the entire background into shapes – also new – and pinned them on my design wall. They hung there for about two months while “life” got in the way.

About three weeks ago I got back to the project. Originally I pinned up the sticks in shades of neutrals, but it wasn’t right. My love of color made me switch, and I think it worked. It, like the others, is a “sketch.” I plan on designing more “Sticks” and experimenting and refining as I work.

Prior to Christmas I made seven pieced, leather pillows. The leather came from samples given to me by my friend, Mary Z. It was a project filled with learning, frustration and finally success. I won’t go into the details, but I’m happy to share with you if you’re interested in sewing on leather.

I currently have quilts hanging in two branches of the Vancouver Regional Library. “Africa Goes Crazy,” from 1994 is at the Battle Ground Library as part of an exhibit by the Battle Ground Art Association. “InCircle” is hanging in the entry to the Three Creeks Library. I urge you to consider libraries as possible venues for your work. They may not sell, but it’s better than having them rolled up in your studio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also have two large quilts featured in “New Works,” the January exhibition at Art on the Boulevard in Vancouver, WA. “Canyon Dancers” (53”w x 66”h) is inspired by a visit to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. Water drips down the canyon walls forming, with a little imagination, tall figures that resemble Indian dancers. “Black Mesa Landscape” (45”w x 51”h) is inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1930 oil painting, “Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II.” Both are machine pieced and quilted from my hand-dyed fabrics.

Coming up – trips to Hawaii and to Australia to visit family – and I’m sure both will inspire future work.

Exciting news – my quilt makes the cover of a book!

A short post this time with exciting news: Sandra Sider’s new book, The Studio Quilt, no. 6: State of the Art, has recently been published and is now available on Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/Studio-Quilt-no-State-Art/dp/1463789467/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321838591&sr=1-6

 Why is this exciting? A photo of my quilt, “Seeing the Light” is on the cover! This is one of the two quilts which are traveling around Europe and the British Isles with the Color Improvisations exhibition. The Amazon price for The Studio Quilt, no. 6: State of the Art is only $15.00 – considerably less expensive than the price on the quilt – which is also for sale!

This 56-page volume of The Studio Quilt series showcases recent contemporary quilt art by sixty artists, with one quilt by each, including an introduction by critic and curator Sandra Sider. The quilts were selected by her via an international call for entries. I haven’t seen the book yet, but am very excited about it!

Color Improvisations travels to British Isles in 2012

I recently learned that Color Improvisations will be shown alongside The Knitting and Stitching Show in both England and Ireland in autumn 2012. My two quilts created for the show, “Seeing the Light” and “Out on a Limb,” will be among those on exhibit.

The London exhibition will be held at the Alexandra Palace  October 11-14, 2012. The palace was originally built by the people of North London to mirror the Crystal Place in South London where the Great Exhibition was staged in 1851. During the last century the Alexandra Palace was the home of the BBC and the world’s first television transmission was broadcast from this building.

Today the Knitting and Stitching Show in London attracts some 50,000 visitors and is the leading public textile event in Europe. To mark the opening of the London event, Nancy Crow, who curated the Color Improvisations exhibition, has been invited to lecture on Friday, October 12, 2012, at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum.

November 1-4, 2012, the Knitting and Stitching Show will host Color Improvisations at the Royal Dublin Society in Dublin, Ireland. The RDS was formed in 1731 to promote the development of Ireland’s agriculture, arts and science. The Knitting and Stitching Show attracts around 24,000 visitors each year in Dublin. Color Improvisations will be housed in an adjoining hall where recent renovations have uncovered an original timber framed and pillared Victorian hall.

Closer to home one of my three-dimensional quilts, “Green Vessel,” has been juried into Earth and Fire, a Columbia Fiber Arts exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR. (museumofcontemporarycraft.org) The exhibit contains 26 pieces by member artists of CFG and will be on display through January 8, 2012. CFG’s exhibition is in conjunction with Northwest Modern: Revisiting the Annual Ceramic Exhibitions of 1950–64, an examination of juried exhibitions held at the Oregon Ceramic Studio, now Museum of Contemporary Craft.

Meanwhile, you might be wondering about what happened to my “sticks” project. Actually one is blocked out on my design wall, but it’s on hold as I complete some Christmas projects. They’re a secret until after December 25^th when I’ll share with you my successes – and frustrations!

At this time of year I reflect on the many things for which I’m thankful – family, friends, church, good (and aging) health, and especially the opportunity to create  art. May you have many blessings, too.

DYING TO DYE

First of all an apology for not “blogging” with you in some time. Actually I took the summer off to enjoy family activities and take a few trips around the Pacific Northwest with my husband and friends. I won’t go into details because I promised you I would concentrate on my art work in these posts.

Whenever life intrudes and art takes “second fiddle,” I find myself eventually getting frustrated because I am not spending time in my studio. I also find it difficult to get back into the “work routine.” Where do I start? Where was I when I left off working on a project? What should I do to get my creativity flowing again? Sound familiar?

I decided to dye. First, please note the spelling. I did not do anything drastic. I cut some 1-yard pieces from my PFD bolts, bought some new dye powders and got to work. I was nudged to do so by two friends who shared their recipes for grays and browns. I’m not very good at working with neutrals – except black which I usually buy commercially – but I was challenged by my mentor, Nancy Crow, to use neutrals in my work. And she wouldn’t agree with me that yellow is a neutral.

Though many dyers I know work with 8-step gradations of a color, I decided to experiment with 7 grey formulas and only do 4 steps of each. If you’re quick at math, you realize I now have 28 yards of grey – which should keep me going for awhile.

At the same time I dyed 12 yards of brown -4 gradations of 4 shades.

Of course, one of my favorites is a small piece of fabric which I dyed with the leftover brown concentrates with marvelous crackling – and which I probably can never duplicate again. But that’s one of the joys of dyeing – you never know exactly what will happen.

Catching up from the summer, I had one quilt – “Its Not Easy Being Green” – in the special exhibits CQA (Contemporary QuiltArt Association) did in the APWQ (Association of Pacific West Quilters) in Tacoma in August and two quilts – “Sorok dva” and “Square in a Square” – in the special CQA exhibit at Northwest QuiltExpo in Portland in September. I also had two quilts – “Let the Sun Shine In” and “Record Rainfall” – in The American Art Company’s Eleventh Northwest Contemporary Quilt Invitational in August and September in Tacoma and three in the Rio Patchwork Design exhibition in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, in June and July. All of these were quilts which I’ve shown before.

Also catching you up, my “Sticks” series continues. I am currently working on a new piece and will update you in a future post. Thanks for reading this one, and let me know your thoughts. If you’re also a fabric dyer and would like to share recipes and/or techniques, I’d love you to respond. In the meantime, keep dyeing, keep designing, keep sewing and keep exhibiting.

COLOR IMPROVISATIONS EXHIBIT CONTINUES ITS JOURNEY

My quilts “Seeing the Light” and “Out on a Limb” were in the second German venue of Color Improvisations, which closed Sunday, June 12, in the city of Karlsruhe. The show was on the second floor of the Regierungspräsidium Karlsruhe, within a minute’s walk of the central market square. Color Improvisations appeared concurrently with another exhibit, Quilts from Sweden to Israel.

Uta Lenk, another artist in Color Improvisations, said the May opening in Karlsruhe was attended by a number of people. The audience was reportedly quite impressed by knowledgeable remarks on quilting by the museum director, Werner Lerch. In addition, the audience was treated to a lecture titled “Women and Creativity” by Dr. Annette Bernards, and Susanne Rosea performed a couple of songs on a golden lyre. As we learned in Stuttgart, these Europeans know how to put on a wonderful opening!

Thomas Curtze, who produced the Color Improvisations catalog and the pictures from the opening in Stuttgart, also took pictures in Karlsruhe.
“Seeing the Light” can be seen on the right side of the 7th photo.

Beata Keller-Kerchner, an artist from Switzerland who also has work in Color Improvisations, made two short videos of the exhibition. In her “short walk around,” you see not only the quilts but also the beautiful space in which they hung.

The videos are on YouTube, part 1 and part 2.

Winding up this post, I must brag about another success for “Seeing the Light,” one of my two quilts in this exhibition.  It has been accepted for Sandra Sider’s new book The Studio Quilt, No. 6: State of the Art. The book will contain works by sixty artists. As a further brag, “Seeing the Light” will be on the front of the volume. The book is set for release in November and will be available on amazon.com The first two volumes in The Studio Quilt series, featuring artists Ludmila Aristova and Jeannette Meyer, are now available on Amazon.

The evolution of “Sticks”

In my last blog post, I mentioned a workshop I took in March from Nancy Crow titled “Lines, Curves, Shapes, Figure Ground.” I noted problems with my design made up of curved shapes and lines.

I came home slightly frustrated, but I didn’t give up! I sketched out some new ideas, including some with straight lines because I thought the curves were restricting the purpose of the exercise. I started with a straight-line design based on my original curved one, but it didn’t work.

So I decided to start anew and came up with a design I like. It reminds me of “The Portland Panels” Klaus Moje did for the 2008 exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in fused glass, another example of the influence glass art has on my work.

I put the design on my studio wall using black strips on a white background – 2 feet by 2¼ feet – but it was not as exciting as I had hoped. I changed the orientation, turned it upside down, moved some strips. It was better, but still not ideal.

Then I made a larger version, thinking the size was restricting me. I cut wider strips, which worked better. The black crossings of the diagonal strips made some interesting new triangular shapes.

I sewed it together – black and white, piece by piece, trying to make it as close to the pinned-up design as possible. There were some obvious errors. One black line didn’t continue straight through a small white triangle; another black line didn’t match up at the crossings. Although I’d intended the lines to be relatively straight (I don’t use a ruler), some were obviously curved.

Because the high contrast of black on white did not meet one of the requirements of our figure ground exercise – i.e. to bring tertiary lines into the design – I layered some cream-colored strips on top to create new configurations. It looked even more like Moje’s “Portland Panels.”

I then interpreted it in color using a pattern-dyed piece of fabric for the background and solid-colored strips on top in complementary colors. At first my strips were too close to the same value, so I made them lighter for the “black” lines and of similar value for the tertiary lines. Then I sewed it together piece by piece, tediously matching intersections as closely as possible. It wasn’t easy, because I didn’t have any extra background fabric. The whole piece came out quite skewed. It was also quite structured – but I pushed on.

I pieced the design again used another pattern-dyed piece for the background. I cut the strips more freely and inserted them into the length (or width) of the background, cutting through previously sewn strips to make the intersections. It was easier to construct, and, amazingly, the strips matched up even better than doing it piece by piece. I also eliminated some strips so that I didn’t break up the patterned background. This was much more fun!

Now I’m thinking of other variations – strips appliquéd on top; strips made up of smaller, collaged pieces or strip pieced like Moje’s work; no strips and slashing and sewing the background together instead; moving color across the piece; making a piece out of only the strips with no background. It’s beginning to look like a series!

So a couple of nights ago, I dreamed about the series and came up with a title: “Sticks.” Possibilities and images are filling my head – Pick-Up Sticks; FiddleSticks; Sticks and Stones; A Sticky Situation; Stick Around; Pile of Sticks; A Stick-ler for … ; Stick Up; Stick to Me Like Glue; Stick It to ‘Em; Broken Sticks; Stick Figures; Walking Sticks; DrumSticks; ChopSticks – to name a few.

I’ll keep you updated on the “Stick” series in future blog posts. In the meantime, keep dreaming and designing – and having fun!

Red sky at morning

I recently returned from two adventures. Last month, my husband Rich and I, plus our older daughter Julie and her boyfriend George, spent nine lazy days in Hawaii on touristy Maui and delightfully laid back Molokai. The trip was pure leisure, and I had no plans to do any work. However, I found the tropical landscape – waving palm trees; mesmerizing ocean, with its breaching whales and curious sea turtles; and glittering beaches inspired me.

During my second adventure – a five-day workshop taught by Nancy Crow in Indianola, not far from Bremerton, WA – it was coincidental that my “off-the-top-of-my-head” design featured palm frond-like shapes and a circle, perhaps representing the sun. However, the work was not as successful as I hoped.

Whenever I’m in a class, I consider the works I produce to be studies, not masterpieces. But this time I had not “done my homework”: I hadn’t brought the range of fabrics – in this case, neutrals – necessary to open up my creativity. I also hadn’t sketched possible designs, so I came to the class with limited ideas. Consequently, I floundered and did not do my best work.

What I did do was add to my knowledge of figure ground, which was the focus of the class. Figure ground is our ability to see parts of a visual field as well-defined objects standing out against a less distinct background. The figure comes forward; the ground stays behind. I need not only to be more aware of figure ground in my own work but also to recognize it in the work of artists in other media. I also learned that it’s okay to fail – as long as I don’t do it too often.

I’ve studied with Nancy Crow since 1993 and in over 22 workshops, and she always inspires me and gives me the “shove” I need. I returned from this class with some goals: do more “sketches” in black, gray and white fabrics; translate the best of these sketches into actual quilts emphasizing figure ground; and return with five completed quilt tops, which is her assignment for next year’s workshop.

In the meantime, the Color Improvisations exhibit – which includes my two quilts, “Seeing the Light” and “Out on a Limb” – has completed a successful, but short, visit to Verona, Italy. I learned from Nancy Crow that Verona was added to the tour after the president of the Aurifil Threads Company saw the show in Stuttgart and arranged for its venue in his hometown.

I also have three quilts – “Healing I,” “Let There Be Light” and “The Waters of Heaven” – on their way to Brazil for exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in June and early July. I’ll post details and a link to these exhibitions’ website later. “Sorok” and “Sorok dva” are on exhibit at the Lynnwood Convention Center in Lynnwood, WA, through July 31.

More locally, I will have three quilts – “Let the Sunshine In,” “Autumn Leaves” and “Green,” a three-dimensional vessel – in the Battle Ground Art Alliance exhibit in my hometown this weekend, March 19 and 20. I’ve also donated a quilt – “Red Sky at Morning – Sailor’s Warning” – for the raffle in conjunction with this show. The raffle proceeds go toward participation by the group in local art festivals, the purchase of art books for the Battle Ground Public Library, scholarships for students interested in the arts, and other projects of the nonprofit group. Tickets will be available during the show, so be sure to pick some up if you attend.

Now, back to work on those goals!

“Red Sky at Morning – Sailor’s Warning”
©2006 Melisse Laing
13″w x 12″h
Donated to Battle Ground Art Alliance raffle