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...

firsts

My ether buddy Denise Aumick and I have been trying to get together IRL since May. We finally managed it yesterday. We met in a town on the Hudson River that is the roughly halfway point between our two home towns and talk-talk-talked, then had a meander... and found this intriguing bit of broken sidewalkand wandered into Beadwildered Women -- a vintage bead
and button store with two extraordinarily helpful owner-operators and the as-implied bewildering but very seductive array of cool stuff (alas, no website). I spent too much money, but got this neat pewter medallion that I think is going to find its way into a Moby Dick panel. It made me think of Queequeg. I also picked up some amoeboid doo-dads that I'm not sure I have a use for, but that I fell for in a big way. (and which seemed to inspire the person who was helping me to ask: Are you an artist? And I just said: Yes. And was not cleft in two by lightning.) As soon as my camera battery charges up again, I'll spill out everything and post a shot.

Happy trails, y'all.

rant

Why, precisely why, is the Post Office so maddening? I went Saturday -- yes, I know -- prepared, I thought, for long lines and short tempers. I had an envelope of material overdue to the library -- yes, I know -- and the clothespin people nestled in their foam core in a pre-addressed mailing envelope. I needed an envelope for the library package and to know the weight/postage for the book exchange.
I started a postal collage on the ToC of the book in hopes that each person who gets it might stick down one of the cancelled stamps and/or other stickies from the package as they receive it. So I wanted stamps for the clothespin people package. Stamps. The primary commodity of the Post Office. You would think I had asked the clerk to recite the list of gases that comprise the atmosphere of Jupiter.
It's two-thirty-six, she said.
Yes, I'd like stamps.
Wha... you wanna book?
A book? I thought. They have a book of stamps that adds up to $2.36?
Clearly my hesitation exacerbated the confusion I had sown by this extraordinary request. So the clerk turned to the one other clerk who was working on midday on a Saturday and said: "She dozzun wan the [mumbled string of initials that stand for the register-tape thingy that if I had been in my right mind I would have accepted]. She wans stamps."
The other clerk seemed equally flummoxed: Stamps?
Now the line -- which wrapped almost completely around the perimeter of the airless room -- was getting restive. And I'm thinking of how, in May, the Post Office "lost" a package I mailed to Scotland because the PO doesn't recognize Scotland as an independent location. Anything mailed to Scotland should, I learned, include not UK, for United Kingdom, but rather GB, for Great Britain. Go figure. But do they tell you this when they accept the package? Oh please, would there be any sport in that? So a month went by and then Scots Heather (the recipient) emailed to let me know that the package -- shipped via the somewhat costly Priority Mail so it would arrive expeditiously and could be traced in the event it went astray -- had not arrived. And I went to the Post Office where they gave me a phone number to call. Apparently the PO doesn't handle tracking things that were mailed via the PO at the PO. So I called and gave them the customs number from the receipt and they said -- "According to our records this was mailed yesterday and sent to Turkey." What?! Apparently they recycle customs numbers. (This conversation is when I learned the PO doesn't know Scotland is a country.) They'll put a trace on it. That will take up to 21 business days. Four weeks later -- it's now the middle of July -- I called again. "Didn't you get the claim form?" "Claim form?" "We sent you a claim form on July 1st. The package was lost." So they sent me another claim form and I started looking for the fabrics I had used to make the original collage so I can make another one and send it to Heather in Scotland, GREAT BRITAIN, and some time goes by before I can get to it. Meanwhile, Heather spends 3 weeks in Canada and I go to Vermont for the weekend. When I got back I had an email from her saying that the original package had been delivered. In pristine condition. No extra stamping or franking nor any suggestion of anything out of ordinary in its handling. Now that is what I call Priority service.
All this flashes through my mind while I'm baffling the staff and irritating the other patrons with an absurd request for stamps, so I snatch back the clothespin people, pay for the library package, and go home to my Mother. Who has lots and lots of stamps. Really. She collected stamps for a while and has quite an assortment. She's started using them and so I thought I could raid her stash. And I could, and did, and as of this afternoon the clothespin people are finally on their way to Ohio. Or to Turkey. Or maybe Great Britain (but not the United Kingdom). It's anyone's guess.

clyff dwelling

This was fun.
I've been dithering -- what else? -- about the covers for my contribution to the book exchange. The two books I've received arrived straightforwardly braced with foam core, so I decided to follow that lead and today I cut 2 pieces of foam core to size. But I couldn't bear the idea of naked foam core, so I gelled down some tissue paper -- and I'm completely tickled by the results.

Those of you who do these sorts of things all the time will undoubtedly be all "Yeah, d'oh," but I'm all agog at channeling Clyfford Still, albeit in the most humble way.

So the clothespin people can start their travels tomorrow and I can start on the next thing -- whatever that might be...

class act

I'm back from Vermont. As is typical, I went thinking I was going to do one thing and ended up doing something completely else-wise to what I thought I intended. I like what I've got, and I'm forming a post on't, but first...

Before heading to Vermont, I took Rayna Gilman's gelatin printing class at the Country Quilter. I was a little anxious about this Vermont escapade, and these see-and-do classes tend to give me performance anxiety, so I was not the most ebullient participant*, but now that I have the basic idea, I think it will be fun to Try This At Home. Here are some of the results: Above right, fragmented gelatin plate, ink lifted off with a crocheted placemat, successive colors on a commercial, pale gray, printed fabric. Below left, a mishmash monoprint surprinted with the crochet pattern, printed on commercial marbelized fabric. Below, right, the same marbelized fabric, print made from embossed paper and commercial stamps (circle and spiral).

I think the most successful piece is this one: metallic mesh, torn paper, and feather resists; commercial text stamp on the gray fabric.
And the most interesting things were most accidental. When I pulled the paper resists off the plate, some of the layered residual paints came with it:

*The most ebullient participants

wereJane Davila and Vivien

(Whose Last Name I Don't Know).

Apologies for being slow to report on Vermont, but it feels like a lot to process. Now I know why some of the folks who do the Yaddo and McDowell things find themselves paralyzed by a sense of The Enormity of What I've Done. I wasn't exactly paralyzed, and I don't want to make too big a deal out of the Profundity of a Weekend, but there is feeling of something having shifted.