Beginnings-The intensity of getting started-again

I think that keeping a blog is a little like weaving tapestry. If you don’t adhere to a schedule it doesn’t get done and/or updated. The ancestors take over and you just never get back to it, OR, only back to it with great difficulty and only if one is really trying to be disciplined and only if one can control the multiplying distractions that can happen in a studio. Yes-I know that was a very long run on sentence, but sometimes a run on sentence is a needful necessity. I have been busy doing other “needful” things like teaching and getting lectures set into PowerPoint-one of those things that actually does –eventually-make life easier. If one can stay on task long enough to sort through 30-40 years of slides and enter them into the computer by scanning, resizing and labeling. So many excuses so little time.

And now the tapestries-I am working on two new tapestries’ at the same time-Finally.

I have just finished reading a book on Optical blending-Ellen Marx's book, Optical Color and Simultaneity which is leading me into reading a second book Color and Meaning by John Gage. I have decided to see if the concept of simultaneity really exists in the true since of Einstein’s theories in relationship to weaving two diametrically opposed tapestries side by side. This is what happens when one spends a whole weekend updating ones research on optical colour blending for a class on colour that I am teaching at IWC this summer. It wasn’t until the end of the day when my eyes were so blurred out from playing with simultaneous contrasts that I realized the play on words/ideas that were happening with the words simultaneous and simultaneity and how it relates to my weaving several pieces at one time.

Anyway-The two pieces are a colour study of a Kona sunset that was taken from my son’s balcony on two different evenings with the vog in play-really 2 pieces one on top of the other. Vog is a combination of fog and vapors from the erupting/venting volcanoes near Kona. The first evening the sunset is as red, orange and as violent as one can possibly see. The next evening as lavender and pink, soft and visually brilliant as one could wish for. The two colour studies are 5x 7 inches and the other is 10 inches by 14.5 inches.

And finally-the "serious piece"-a piece called So Many Chances. It has many different elements all having to do with chance and what if’s. One of its most interesting elements is a border taken from a scan of a piece of my Grandmother Schoolcraft-Todd’s filigree crocheted lace. There are elements from both Grandmothers with a lot of Ikotomi thrown in for good measure (for an explanation of Ikotomi-see-SPIDERS ARE MYSTERIOUS”: THE SPIRIT OF THE SPIDER IN LAKOTA ART AND LORE by Ron McCoy-Drawing on surviving ethnographic records, this article offers some observations about the use of spider symbolism in Lakota belief and art. Volume 34 Number 2 spring 2009)
I have always wondered about the elements of chance that have to do with determining ones fate. Life has so many small and large variables that can affect everything just like the butterfly sneezing in China. It seems that life and the quality of life often hinges on chance elements that aren’t terribly controllable. How do you stop a butterfly in China from sneezing in China and changing the outcome of the weather a thousand miles away? So Many Chances are about those elements and what happens. All these elements layer over an intense landscape of water and sunrise and/or sunset-life or death. Both can become either are often dependant on the chances and choices one makes by chance.