Off the hook

My long-winded and not-tres-amusing part deux of my 'becoming an artist after being in Vermont and deciding to submit work to the Major Show and Venue ' story can be summed up as:
1. got home
2. procrastinated
3. had drainpipe from the second-floor bathtub spring a leak that necessitated stripping the first floor bathroom to the studs and joists and spraying-spraying-spraying diluted bleach all over everything until all the mold died, then having new walls and ceiling installed
4. procrastinated
5. made an appointment with a Professional Photographer
6. procrastinated
7. came up with a sketch and did a little sewing
8. stepped out of my own shower, flipped my wet hair back, and severely sprained my neck
9. procrastinated, but felt justified because of the Pain
10-13. procrastinated
14. panicked
15. realized this panel is part of series (based on Moby Dick) that I've had underway for a while, and saw how I could finish it
15a. finished it
15b. went to the photographer's, managing to get lost only once en route (which is a record for me, really)
16. shipped -- as instructed -- via post, the disk to the stern but ultimately kindly Quilt National folks (aka the major show and venue). felt deeply relieved and uncharacteristically serene
17. was nearly f**cked by the post office who, it seemed, had misdelivered the package. Wept. In public. And I'm not a crier. Decided Never Again to use the USPS for anything but bill payment, if that
18. was relieved to learn that the package was, in fact, delivered -- slightly in advance of the deadline
19. waited, stalled on all other fronts, from then 'til now to see whether the angst was worth it
20. learned, yesterday, that my submission was declined for further review, felt deeply relieved, and realized

YES
IT WAS ALL WORTH IT

I never seriously expected to be asked to stay up late with the big kids, my goal is always 'show up and see what happens.' And I'm sincerely happy about simply seeing it through. (Persistence has never been my long suit.) It was weirdly fun, with very much an air of a great adventure, and I may someday Do It Again. But I am greatly relieved to be released from Waiting to Hear, surprised to find out that that's mostly what I was doing all month (August 30 to Sept 29), and looking forward to getting going again on the various things that were stalled during all the with-bated-breath time. This must be what it's like to be Rip Van Winkle and wake up after a long sleep.

Meanwhile . . . here's the BW2R. I'm happy with it. That's the main thing, maybe the only thing.
(Photos by Howard Goodman)

and in detail:

hard to find good help

This is Beau.
Beau showed up in the yard one day, hunkered and screaming. The screaming misled me into thinking "This is one mean junkyard dog of a cat." But Beau was mostly terrified and, when translated, the screaming went something like Pleaeaeaeaeaeaeaeaeassssssssssssssssse Hellllllllllllllllllllllp Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Now Beau is a housecat. You may be able to tell from his expression that he was still a little uncertain of What Just Happened.

Today Beau is helping me clean.

His role (self-appointed) is to sit in the middle of the carpet and make sure it doesn't get away. The carpet, of, course, is smack inthe middle of the path between the two main areas I hoped to Make Neat.

Cats are a great mystery.

traveling light

This is the story of How I Became an Artist While Staring at the Walls in Vermont, Persisting Through a Plumbing Situation and a Neck Sprain, and Surviving the Eternal Vagaries of the Vile and Evil USPS.

I had something like an idea inspired by the Elements theme for the Journal quilts -- use copper armature mesh as the fire element and overlay panels for the other elements (which, for the non-alchemical among us, are air, water, earth). Further inspired by Virginia Spiegel's wonderful Boundary Waters series, I wanted to do something BIG, bigger than my usual 12-inch squares and way bigger than the postcards I've been churning out. Also floating in the back of my mind was: "Maybe do something for Quilt National. The deadline is Sept 5, so I have a whole month to throw something together." So I loaded up the car with the barest of necessities and headed north from the Bronx. This is the array of my rigorously pared down supplies:

Yes, everything in the green bags, in the copier-paper boxes, and in between is mine. I know what you're thinking -- she must have a really small car. . .
And because you never know when you might need to make a little sketch of something:
And since Great River bills itself as an arts institute and may or may not know from fabric, I brought the iron and ironing board in addition to the traveling sewing machine. And, oh yes, I just happened to have a case of Poland Spring in the trunk, so I brought that too. (Well, really -- do you drink the local water when you're on vacation, or at home?)
Happily it was a b-i-g room, maybe 45 feet by 45 feet. All for me. I pinned this up on the wall --
Inspiring, no?
Then sat down and stared at it and waited to think of something . . .
anything, really . . .
waited . . . . . .
waited some more. . . . . . . . . .
And that great industriousness consumed most of Friday afternoon. I decided I needed food. And maybe some dopamine. Foraged, came back, and thought: This is not going anywhere. Maybe color would help? I pulled some stuff out of the bags and made stacks:Fooled about with some combinations and then thought ... well, if you're going to go for color, then go for color: very fiery, no? and maybe somewhat airy and deep-water-ish on top? maybe the swirly marbleized orange fabric rather than the armature wire? I got this far and could go no further.

Bedded down at the inn, reduced to watching the Red Sox game --
(god help me --did I mention I'm from the Bronx? the place with the team that inspired the T-shirt slogan "If it's called the World Series, how come it's always played in the Bronx?" . . . but I digress . . .)
--feeling sad and agitated, and having second thoughts that verged too close to the yips. I said to myself: "Self, white is your favorite color. Maybe go back to the white idea." Okay.

Saturday morning, back at the Institute, looked at the orange-purple-aqua array and thought: Holy mother of god, what was I thinking? And stared at the wall. Remember the wall? Considered crying. Reminded myself that crying is something I can do at home for free. Packed away the orange-aqua-purple array and the stacks o' miscellany. Covered a table with the one piece of batting I brought, measured out a couple lengths of muslin to cover the length (5 feet-ish) and width (2 feet-ish) and started tearing the muslin into strips roughly an inch-and-a-half wide. Wove the strips together into a big piece of fabric. This took longer than expected and, by itself, is of little or no interest to interested bystanders. Besides, I didn't take a picture.

Skipping ahead to late Saturday evening when the Good Self-esteem Fairies swarmed in, trailing clouds of confidence and enthusiasm. Next door to the Institute is a radio station. A local theater group (displaced from Brooklyn and longing for home, i.e., New York) came in to do a promo and I ran into the voluble playwright, the artistic director, and two very large dogs in the lobby. Conversation ensued, the playwright wanted to see what I was doing, and then somehow the costumer and someone else from the company had joined in. I said "It's not much to see -- white strips of fabric woven together" But they bustled in, looked at everything, exclaimed happily over gelatin plate prints from Rayna Gilman's class that were still scattered around, and Discussed Seriously what I might do with the big white woven rectangle (BW2R). Turns out the playwright got his MFA at the same school I did, and somehow my undergraduate theater degree also came up in conversation. Then they all bustled back over to the door, the playwright turned and said: "Look at at all the things you do. You're a Real Artist" and then -- poof! -- they were gone.

Okay. That was over-stimulating. But even before being spangled with complimentary pixie-dust, I thought I had Something That Might Be Something, so I ironed the BW2R to some fusible Pellon and called it a night. In the morning, with variegated white-to-mid-gray rayon thread, I machine stitched parallel vertical lines across the width to secure the sections that weren't in contact with the fusible, packed up, and came home.

And now this post is more than Long Enough, so here endeth the reading for today. The chapter in which Melanie Rushes to the Deadline Whilst Beating Back All Odds Against It will resume in a day or so.

simple minded

August has been a bit tumultuous. My computer picked up a virus that required an 8-day layover with the geeks. I'm not sure it's completely well but I have it back and I'm going to go bravely on until I have a reason not to. And the second-floor bathroom sprang a leak which resulted in having the first-floor bathroom was stripped to the studs and spending several evenings with bleach in a spray bottle assaulting mold -- banks of fluffy, surprisingly pretty, green mold that looked rather like jade, but that had to go, nonetheless.

And all the while, I was working on an almost completely white panel that I started in Vermont at the beginning of the month and decided to send for consideration by the Quilt National '09 folks. Once they turn it down, I'll post pictures. (All three judges show a deep affection for the hot end of the spectrum in their own work, so I expect that, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, they'll react along the lines of "it was the whiteness of the whale that appalled me.")

All of which is a bit of prelude to a question my friend Jane asked, prompted, I think, by all that whiteness: Do you think simple is harder? In the moment I thought "yes" -- mostly because of how difficult it is to write simply -- but now that I think about it, in terms of visual art, No. I don't think simple is harder. At one level I think it's all hard, but the art I'm generally attracted to and the art I've started to make is relatively simple: few components, extremely limited color, small format (usually), formal composition. Such austerity demands precision in the elements, but it's what I like and how I see things, so it's easier for me to swoop a couple of red lines across a white field and call it a day. I find it much harder to try to do the kind of richly textured and highly colored work that my friend Denise does so well. I admire her work greatly and I do wish I could do "that kind of thing" but it just doesn't come out of my fingers gracefully and I get paralyzed with anxiety. There is some anxiety in working out precisely where and how those red lines cross that white field, but I have more confidence that "it will come" when I'm working sparely.

What do you think? As a viewer and/or as a creator, is simple harder? How so?
There's also a more than even chance that I misunderstood the question...