busy! Busy! Busy

Busy! Busy! Busy! Running in circles. I cannot believe how much time I have spent in front of the computer in the last couple of weeks. The good news is I have been weaving and weaving  a lot.   I should finish my new or next piece by tomorrow evening.

Bedazzled -Asa's Rocks

So sought after-Small Expressions

I'll get my Bedazzled and Small Expression pieces off tomorrow to Convergeance. then all I need to do is decide if I am going to try and do another piece before my Small Things at Village Wools. The next piece is thought and drawn out. It's a simple background of mixed blacks and dark colours with hazmat symbols and a broken Nautilus shell-the future. I am working on prehistory right now. Sego Lilies and earthstars. The oldest of things.

Received the new ATB8 catalogue  today. The Catalogues seem to just keep getting better and better. Of course,  I am probably going to be the only one who notices I left off my MAIS in Craft Design, History, CTRA and economics degree. My fault not theirs.

                                

So Sought After                               So Many Chances  

Lucked out and found   an Oaxaca rug a few days ago. It's background colour is a lovely turquoise. I really like this detail of the band in over shot and floats.

Sometime in the future I want to weave a design that is poly chronic and related to Einsteins theory of relativity mixed in with  or related to the philosophy of  non  backgrounds of the truly horrific cutsey-ly designed tea towels  each with a crocheted border that both of my Grandmother's had me embroider endlessly.  Were they truly about the love for home  and of decorating ones home and making it a home  or were they really about killing time-literally?  I always wondered if that tiny dinky needle could be pegged through the art of the vampiric designer of those cutesy thingies that seemed to be so necessary to ones survival as a  "good homemaker".  Or maybe the act of creating was like having bound feet.  A show of not needing to do anything-a show of wealth and upper class ism. Even though "it" was needful to always keep ones hands busy at all times. I always wondered why since both Grandmother's encouraged me to run a muck-but always tastefully and with mindfulness.  This stuff or statements of my skill at embroidering mindless things without backgrounds were  always meant for my hope chest. In real life with 3 males in the house it was always a battle to keep them pristine and not turned in clean up rags. I keep thinking that there has to be a relationship to the non backgrounds that  my native American Grandmother was so fond of  and one sees in Native American art and tea towel art and  or fribbles.  Which in  some ways  has influenced me not to think that back grounds are terribly important to a design. AND, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with my horii vacuii that often invades my designs. Perhaps in protest of voids.  True paradoxes.

It is no wonder that I that artistic statements  are anything but a creator of confusing  and disbelief for me. I wonder about there worth unless they  are very very long-too long for the average person to wade through. They always feel like such an invasion of privacy to me. Why can't the work stand on its own.  How does one write about the lunacy and all of the elements that influence us to do a medium as slow as tapestry. I always seem to end up humming excerpts from West Side Story such as Officer Krupke. Yet, on the other hand I can spend days and weeks writing in my journal about why, how and what a tapestry is all about. It's not that I don't like to write. I think-maybe- it's about putting something so personal out there for everyone else to see and read. Perhaps giving up a piece of myself.

 

Black Hawk Lakota ledger Art-definitely not a fribble, but  the style was  influential to my Grandmother- This was on Wikipedia and for this particular piece copyright has run out.

It is amazingly warm in the top part of the studio today-around 92 degrees and barely 70 in the bottom floor of the studio and around 80 out of doors. My garden is finally starting to look like it might survive-about time. A lot of the plants are really rather battered looking. Do bad it brings out the sticky bind weed. Chene' tried to chase and attack a pit bull the length of the fence and became so entangled that by the time I tried to retrieve him he couldn't move. Served him right and me hours of picking burrs out of all that fur.

Had lunch with Kathy on Friday and attended the "drunken barbecue"   for a few hours.  Yes, it was at the Off Center one of my favourite places in Salem. On Saturday we attended the "Drunken Barbecue." Perhaps the other stuff happened after we left. It was really fun see Arjay, Scott, Star and the rest of the crowd.  I so miss not having them all closer. It was all rather mellow-not quite like the past and many more children. What is it they say nothing like reformed...So tamed now. Guess that's what happens when the children begin to out number the adults or supposed adults.

Haven't done much  actual silver work for a while. Unless one calls chasing down and purchasing tools for my upcoming classes silver work. Did clean and polish one of my garage sale finds. It was an opal and gold ring that I bought for 10 cents at a garage sale. It had these funny  dark little balls on each side of the opal. While I was cleaning the ring with a pick I discovered that the two small balls on each side were incredibly dirty. When I finished I discovered at the center of the balls two small diamonds. Talk about magical when I picked at the ball and tried to shine it. So suprising.

Couple of days ago we had a lunar eclipse I was all jazzed  to wake up and take pictures. But,  decided when the cloak bellowed while trying to wake  me up up and get at it  that I would rather sleep through it so I did.  So much for adding those photo's to my weaving.  Funny what working 12 hours a day on paper work and weaving will do ones goals and good indentations. Meant to say good intentions.

Okay it's time to weave.

Cheers,

kathe

Never enough time!!!

My last entry was May 29 right before I spent a week in Kona. Today is the 18th. I have done very little weaving since my return-a pass or two.

Sunday Pat and I are leaving to teach at Midwest Weavers conference. We are driving. Wednesday evening I have a very short presentation to give at the Falcouner Gallery at the Small Expressions exhibit. Pat is also in Small Expressions and giving a presentation. I can hardly wait to see how badly my framing was destroyed when I sent it. The framing problem cost me third place in the show. I was notified that I had received third prize and that it was being rescinded because of problems with my piece. I have added the letter to my class slides/lectures as a reminder for my students and myself about how framing can make or break a piece. I learned a valuable lesson always make sure the glue is dry on the framing before you send the piece.
One of the big disappointments on this trip is that we had a day between the Gallery talk and when I start teaching. We were making arrangements to go to the Vesterheim Norwegian Museum to view tapestries/Rolaken. They “furloughed” the curator that would have pulled the tapestries I wanted to look at for technical details. Now I will only be able to view them digitally and perhaps not see the details front and back that I wanted to see. It’s disappointing for everyone I know. Everyone-not just me- is losing out by not having this kind of resource available.
I have spent most of the day doing a 60 second animation of the construction of So Between Two. I really enjoy putting together power point slide shows for classes. My daughter-in-law Kathy has been putting together slide shows and DVD’s of family and friends trips to Kona. She’s really quite proficient. I left her my flip Video Camera. I think she’ll have fun with it. To me it was just one too many digital things to carry around. I prefer my new camera which is much more like the SLR’s that I used in the past. I love using my lenses and remote cable. Another great feature is I can set the lens to correct for my vision. I don’t have to wear my glasses anymore to take pictures. It allows me to be a little steadier when taking pictures.
I have over a thousand pictures that I took while in Hawaii. I desperately need to organize them for use in my cartoons and colour studies that I weave. Fortunately, I have almost a month before I teach at IWC. I find it interesting that 10 years ago I would have come home with maybe 7-8 rolls of slides and perhaps 50% of them would have been keepers. With a digital camera, I filled up a 2 gig card in my camera. It will take me months to go through and sort through what is usable and what is not. I have hundreds of floral shots and close-ups, even more sunsets and family pictures.
Several of the shots are of plants that I took at an arboretum near Kona, Hawaii. Several of the flower species have only 3 bushes left on the island.

Originally, all of the hibiscuses on the Island were white with pink stamens and pistils and now they come in every colour. I was also very lucky to get shots of the volcano glowing at night. It was closed on either side of our trip up to the volcano because of the vog.

My favourite flower shot is the multicolour sweet smelling flower whose name I can’t think of at this point. We were given leis of this flower when we arrived. They lasted the whole time we were there and perfumed everything they touched. My Lei is now drying above my computer and I can still smell it’s very slight scent. The flower is plumeria.

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.

another week gone

Learned a new lesson this week. When I take snaps I should make sure the camera is square to the piece I am photographing. Each of these pieces is 2 inches by 6 inches. The dice our pretty much self explanatory.

The second piece of the two is within a gold and silver crenellated border. The red woven beads refer to Mother, Crone and Virgin. The spider is related to the spider tat on my wrist and all it implies. These pieces reference the hand surgery I had a year ago and the hand surgery I'll have in the next couple of months to release frozen finger joints. The two tapestries will be mounted in a silver fretted bejeweled box with dice as the feet and handle.

Last week was busy, but not so much about tapestry for the most part. I spent several days learning new silversmithing skills. I am finally ready to start the fret work, bezels, etc. for the box that these two small pieces are going to be contained within. Historically, it seems a good time to explore the locks and boxes I have used in the past to house my tapestries. I am making the switch to silver because it seems cheesy to use aluminum and copper to but around my tapestry pieces. Silver is so much richer and loaded with tradition. It's a little more difficult and time consuming for embossing and embellishing, but feels richer, most substantive and more precious.
I made two rather ornate neck pieces and a ring with bezels, jade and flourishes in four 15 hour days. I have 3 small pieces of malachite that I have started to do the bezels and mounting for another small box that will hold one of the small tapestries I am designing. I think the piece that was the most fun to do was the silver pendant piece with a pottery shard as the stone. I finally did something with the dish I broke from my good china set. I can tell my husband I am going along with his rabid recycling.

BUT, still this all leads back to tapestry. This week I am going to be working on finishing these two small tapestries called miracles and a third purple sky colour study as of yet unnamed. It is 3.75 inches by 5.75 inches. The image is from a pencil drawing I did of a windy autumn night several years ago. I am also working on designing another piece that I have waited several years to attempt. It is called So Many Chances". My designs seem to becoming ever more complex.



We made a new edition to the studio tools-a time clock. A simple effective tool for discovering how many hours are in a given piece. Should help with the paperwork. Should be interesting to see where I will be in a week time wise. I am almost scared to find out how little time I actually get to weave in a week and how much goes into the paper work that surrounds FFP.

Our-FFP- studio assistant-Jen- will be working on sample exercises that I will be using when I teach shaped tapestry in Riverside in March. I am doing the seem samples, but am trying to decide how much information and how much actual weaving can be covered in a 2.5 day workshop by someone who is a little more then a beginner.

Cheers until next week.