You say you had a resolution?

Well, you know . . . resolution, shmesolution. 

As a New Year’s resolution this year I decided that I would call a moratorium on class-taking. That lasted all the way to May 1st. My latest exercise in being irresolute took me to Quilting by the Lake and into Terry Jarrard-Dimond’s class “Ask: What If?” My friends who have formal training in art often say that “you start something and then you ask ‘What if?’” then, they say, “you take it further.” I had no idea what this meant. So a week-long immersion in a class called Ask: What If? seemed like a wonderful thing.

In response to prompts, we did a series of exercises. In five days we went from randomness – literally a connect-the-dots exercise – to considering the quite profound idea of using a map as a metaphor. And, to Terry’s great credit as a teacher, everyone in the “all levels are welcome" (and came) class kept pace with the exercises through the week. Highlights from the collection (we made at least six things, I lost count and I haven't fully unpacked):

^approximately 45 inches square
This was the "connect the dots" exercise.
It seems I've found a horse and a bird.

^Doing something with it.

^Doing more. Not quite done, but I can see it going
somewhere with more sections of the parallel lines

New prompt, different idea. This became an experiment in literal depth as well as the illusion of depth. I layered six fabrics, light to dark, and then cut through successive layers inside the pyramid bars.

approximately 22 inches high x 33 inches wide

This was a viewfinder exercise. It's kind of monolithic and I'd like to do more of these. In a more monolithic scale.

approximately 24 inches high x 42 inches wide


An uncharacteristic burst of color. I can do color. I just think that color is so dynamic, it distracts from other design elements. And it's overstimulating. I don't like being overstimulated (and it's a very short trip for me).

approximately 36 inches square

So it turns out that asking what if? is a little like doing the Hokey Pokey: you put things in and you take things out and you shake it all about until you have something that resembles a dance. It helps also to have empathetic and informed input from your dance instructor (see: link to Terry Jarrard-Dimond, above) and some familiarity with fundamental things (like how to use a color wheel).

Being irresolute is turning out to be fruitful. I think I'll do more of it.

lessons learned

Rather than give away Dorothy’s entire syllabus, I think will conclude this class notes series with her blind stitching exercise. This is not sewing nearly, or wholly, invisible stitches but rather sewing while blindfolded.

The supply list asked for a piece of fabric 4 inches by about 36 inches, “any color.” We were all very thoughtful about the colors we chose. We needn’t have been, this fabric was the blindfold.
Tee-hee-hee.
Before beginning, we layered two pieces of fabric together and threaded five needles. Then we gathered at the main table, put on the blindfolds, and had at it. During the exercise, one woman pulled the thread from her needle and called out to Dorothy for help rethreading it.

If any exercise were constructed to promote randomness, surely this is it. But no. In discussion afterward, several people talked about their impulse toward order despite sightlessness and said they used the edge of the fabric as a guide or that they felt for spaces without stitching to fill with stitching. I was disappointed in my result. I’ve been embroidering for so long that the stitching came out fairly straight, flat (no puckering), and even, just from habit:

white kantha stitching, red-orange basting

I’m having better success at home, sewing sighted but not looking at the fabric, and checking from time to time to ensure something like randomness:

blind-stitched scroll (in progress),
prompted by a collaboration between
Terry Jarrard-Dimond and Kathy Loomis


 In class, after the exercise, Dorothy showed us a sample from another class for which the students had added deliberate red kantha stitching to their blind white kantha stitching and assembled the pieces into a large sampler:

 
And it seemed to me that this exercise has at least as much to say about living as it does about sewing. Gather your supplies. Prepare your materials. Keep it somewhat simple. Meet with your tribe. Do the work. When you lose your thread, ask for help. Accept help. Begin again. Review what you’ve done. Learn from one another. Celebrate each person’s effort, contribution, and accomplishment. Carry the learning into the larger world. It’s not too bad a philosophy to spring from a random four inches of cloth, and one very remarkable, not at all random, teacher.

Dorothy creating a freize of our fingerpainted panels.

and then we set it on fire

I know what you're thinking -- isn't Dorothy Caldwell renowned for her embroidery? Yes. Deservedly so. I'll get to that.

The supply list asked for some odd things -- a hammer and a large nail, a candle and matches, incense -- but did not ask for a sewing machine. I was very distracted by this omission.  Was bringing the machine assumed? What if I'm the only person without one? But the class is, after all, called Human Marks, and nothing electrified was needed.

With the candle -- preferably, as it turns out, a cheap candle that smokes -- we made traceries on paper. On the beautiful Arches paper that was in the class kit, the smoke came up very delicately. You can see it under and between the sewn-on doo-dads on this page.



Smoked Arches paper



One of the women in the class first did a watercolor wash, then smoked over the wash, and then scratched into it. I thought this was extraordinarily beautiful and tried it at home on bought-at-Michael's Strathmore watercolor paper. (Sorry this is a bit out of focus, I'm having some trouble with my eyes which is giving me trouble with my camera.)



Left: smoke alone. Middle: watercolor wash.
Right: smoke over wash and scratched.

The smoke-over-wash is darker in real life, but this gives the general idea:

 I think the Surrealists called this "fuming."

an exit from one place

may be an entrance to another.

I've been sad this weekend. I’ve realized that a friendship that once meant a great deal has ended and that we’ve grown apart in ways that probably preclude coming together again. No one’s fault, just one of those things that happens. The realization has made me sad, and also oddly relieved. It’s been frustrating to struggle and try to keep a machine going when the parts no longer fit. Accepting that something is broken in a way that can't be fixed admits the opportunity of moving on to a less frustrating circumstance.

But first, feel sad. 

spa day

Late in the week we did waxing and bleaching -- not on ourselves but on fabric.

I had the idea that working with wax would be complicated and hard. But this was fun and easy because it used soy wax. I like fun and easy. We each glued string to a wood block in some kind of pattern to make a stamp, dipped the stamp in gently melted soy wax, pressed the waxed stamp on black fabric, then bleached and rinsed. One of the joys of soy wax is that it is water soluble so you can rinse it out in the sink with HOT running water and not clog the pipes.

I added some drips (the round spots) with a tjanting. The blotchy bits are either residual sizing or not enough patience with the bleach. I was late to the table so there was very little wax in the pan which, I'm told, is why I got so much detail in the string.

I think I will do this again. I was at Home Depot cruising for stamp supplies for a project I have in mind. The first homemade stamp, tile spacers adhered to a sheet of Lexan, is drying upstairs.

best laid plans

This year, I had decided that I wasn't going to take classes, but instead "just do the work." But then some things came around that proved irresistible. The first of which was a class called Human Marks taught by Dorothy Caldwell at the Crow barn. We went at a fairly gentle pace all week and so I was little surprised at the end to see that we had done a Great Many Things.

We began with ink and other stuff on paper. I am falling hard for ink.

^Day one, Exercise one: Make a single mark

^ This is the only time I'll show work from the other people in the class. My colleagues  were wonderful and talented and thoroughly embraced the adventure of the exercises. But several folks expressed concerns about "being published" and that is to be respected. The assignment was to make a single mark with ink and a brush. Then we posted the single marks and, as so often happens with the posting part, a graceful arrangement emerged.

^ Exercise two, Fingerpaint with ink

The above and the next two pics are marks made by fingerpainting.

^ Exercise two, Fingerpaint with ink



^ Exercise two, Fingerpaint with ink

The last exercise (Thursday into Friday) was to assemble the exercises into a sample book. I liked this streaky fingerpainting so much that I used it to wrap/cover the book.

^ Make a mark using a Micron pen

Detail

^We got two pens in our supplies package. This was just "fool about and make a mark with the .03 pen. Fill the whole page with the mark." I held the pen very loosely and let it bounce on the page, then quickly pulled it toward me -- bounce, pull; bounce, pull. Two marks, dot and line, for the effort of one.


^BIG painting on some lovely Arches watercolor paper

^ Then we each strapped a biggish brush -- 2" or so -- to a dowel or yardstick and went outside to paint. (It was cold and damp, but who cares?) Assignment: Splash around making BIG marks, fill the page. I liked this so much I took it to the framer. It will finish about 48 inches (122 centimeters) square. This flashed me back to college. I was a theater major and did a fair amount of scenic painting -- b-i-g brushes on l-o-n-g handles and the canvas on the floor.

Dorothy has the gift of materializing beside you, saying just the right thing -- usually something like "Do more of this" -- and then vanishing. It was wonderful.

We did some more paper stuff and then started working with fabric. I'll post it in chunks so as not to take up too much time at one time. But it was wonderful. And, I think, transformative.

Master class

After the guild show this weekend, Rosalie Dace taught a class called Line Dance in which she demonstrated practical ways to create lines with specific qualities (e.g., v-e-r-y skinny lines, random curved lines) and also showed a lot of examples of lines in photographs and art. One of my favorite things from the class was her characterizations of line as:

Straight   Horizontal   Vertical   Diagonal   Continuous   Broken   Random   Crunchy   Thin   Thick    Soft   Gentle   Repeated   Make a shape   Suggest a shape   Define an edge   Overlapping   Rhythmic   Wavy   Suggest tracery   Lacy   Fuzzy   Parallel   Dark   Light   Different scales   Wide   Narrow   (NB: I'm not sure how -- or whether -- "thick/thin" differs from "wide/narrow" but there is the whisper of a distinction in my former wordmongering mind.)   Organic   Curved   Shadows make lines   Spaces between shapes make lines (like mortar lines between bricks)    Grids   Weaving    Zigzag   Over an image   Radiating

So many intriguing possibilities beyond "stipple" in the machine's programmed stitches guide, isn't it?