Book learnin'--what good is it?

Did any of you see the excellent guest blog post Rebecca Mezoff wrote for the British Tapestry Group? In it she describes how she senses that because she trained as an apprentice to a master weaver rather than attending art school, somehow she is less qualified as a weaver and a teacher.  She questions,  "Is there a perception among tapestry weavers that tapestry is somehow sacred or only for people who study for many years to master it?"  Rebecca goes on to say that among expert weavers there can seem to be some disrespect for those who are "only hobbyists."  Quite rightly, she pushes back against this and against the idea that there is only one proper way to be trained as an artist or to weave tapestry.  As she says in her follow-up comment to the post, "there are many paths to our individual goals."  Amen.  

As it happens, I did go to art school and got an MA with a focus on fiber art (the university I attended did not offer the MFA at the time, "just" the MA).  I focused on paper making and surface design and to my regret now, I did not study weaving at all, much less tapestry, when I was in school.  I did learn some very useful concepts and processes there  . . . but like you, I bet, I also know many fine artists and weavers who are self-taught or informally trained who do amazing and wonderful work.  I'm here to tell you an MA or MFA is no magic bullet!  There is no secret art school knowledge that guarantees success as an artist.  I still struggle to some extent with every design I make.  

That said, it is my passion to share with students some of the terms, concepts and processes that I learned that can make it all go a bit easier.  Lately I've been preparing two slide talks that go over some really helpful design concepts, specifically in terms of tapestry.   Scroll down for the details.  

These are some of the books I've been poring over lately.  It's been a fascinating dive into recent tapestry and fiber art history.  It's a wild and woolly world out there!  I've had a lot of fun looking at and sorting through dozens of the best contemporary tapestries and fiber works, figuring out how to talk about all the diversity in an organized way.  

This Saturday, March 13 at 10:00 a.m. Central Time, I will be with the Weavers Guild of Minnesota sharing a lecture about Tapestry Design Elements and Principles.  That might sound dry and academic, and it is possible I'm a bit of a design nerd.  But I strongly believe that familiarity with some basic terms and concepts that are used to talk about how artworks are put together can be super useful for tapestry weavers.  For me, it's not about throwing around art jargon, it's about knowing how to identify and figure out how the parts of a tapestry are working together.  For me these concepts are helpful in talking about tapestry, interpreting it, evaluating it . . . and diagnosing what might not be working in my own work.  In the talk this weekend, I've narrowed down the usual long list of Elements of Art and Principles of Design to the eight that I think are especially important for tapestry weavers.  We look at each element and principle in terms of how it works in lots of actual tapestries.  

Go HERE to register for this Saturday's talk about Tapestry Design Elements and Principles.  The tickets are on a sliding scale starting at $10, and the lecture will be recorded and available for two weeks to those who register. 

Next weekend, on Saturday, March 20 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, I'll be presenting a lecture for the Florida Tropical Weavers Guild virtual conference about a particular trend in contemporary tapestry, toward work with lots of texture, relief elements, mixed media and even 3-D work. This topic is of great interest to me  lately and raises interesting questions about what tapestry is and isn't today. HERE is where you can find out more about this talk.   You can head HERE to become a member of the guild and register for the conference.  I'll be presenting this same lecture for the Weavers Guild of Minnesota on May 1, and you can register HERE for that date.  

It hasn't all been book-work lately. . . I'm about halfway through weaving the piece on my floor loom with the working title SkyGrass.  

I'm also designing a new piece but it's changing so often I'm not ready to share yet!

I hope you are immersed in something fun these days.  Stay well.  

Top 10 Reasons to do a Solo Show

If I've done my job right (smile, wink), many of you are already aware that a solo show of my tapestries just opened at Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA) just outside Atlanta.  I admit, I've been pretty much consumed by the weaving and other preparations for this show for months years.  Today, now that the show is up,  I want to share why I think every artist/maker/craftsperson should aim for a solo show of their work at some point.  

10.  Let's get this one out of the way right off:  it is a nice ego boost to see your name, maybe not in lights, but on the wall.  We toil along in solitude in our studios, mostly, and it just feels great to get yourself and your work out in the light of day.  

title wall of exhibi

9.  It's great to share your work online, through websites and emails and social media--and I love all that--but nothing beats getting it in front of actual humans.  Yesterday I got to talk with people IRL about their responses to the work, hear their questions and their responses, and that was so good.  

8.  You will make or deepen your contacts and connections with the folks at your gallery or venue, and also with other artists, potential viewers and collectors.  In the art biz as in every other biz, networking is really important.  I am incredibly grateful for the support of the folks at SEFAA and that of my artist friends in pulling this together.  Specifically, Linda DeMars' and Marilyn Kleinhans' suggestions way improved my initial plan when we hung the show together.  Thank you!

hanging with Marilyn Kleinhans (left)

hanging with Linda DeMars

7.  Other people--family, friends, fellow artists, potential buyers--will see your commitment to your own work and respect you for it.  You demonstrate to them (and yourself) that you are a serious artist.  (For more on the difficult path toward calling yourself an artist, see Kathleen Loomis' excellent recent post.) 

6.  Once you commit, a year or two out, to having the show, then you actually buckle down and make the work!  Nothing is so motivating as a deadline and a commitment to someone else.  And when you're done, you have a coherent body of work that you created with intention.  For the record, I have eight pieces in the Mary series and six in the illuminated manuscript series.  This body of work is now available for juried show entries, other exhibits, and potential sales (who knows?). 

5.  Your artistic growth accelerates.  Again, once you've set the goal, you get busy solving artistic problems, improving your technique, figuring out what it is exactly you are after in your work.  While I know I still have much to learn, my understanding of how different yarns behave, for example, improved a great deal between the first Mary piece. . .   

detail, Mary (a sword shall pierce), (c) 2013, Molly Elkind

and the last one:

detail, Mary (Yes), (c) 2018 Molly Elkind

Or between the earliest illuminated manuscript piece:

 

Huh? (c) 2016, Molly Elkind

 and the lateest one. . .

Red Letter Night, (c) 2018, Molly Elkind

4.  You will get serious also about writing and updating your artistic resume, your inventory (see previous post for more on this) and mailing lists (email and snail mail).  It can be tempting to let this stuff slide sometimes. . . but when you have all your paperwork ducks in a row you are ready when opportunities knock.  And they will, because with a solo show in the works, you are a Serious Artist.

3. You will learn to speak and write with confidence about your work.  You will get your elevator speech down cold.  This has been one of the most challenging parts for me.  I've stumbled and hemmed and hawed trying to explain why I'm fascinated with such arcane subjects as the Virgin Mary, illuminated manuscripts, and tapestry itself.  

It's SO important though, because people want to understand, and they need you to give them some clues and a starting point.  I'm going to give an artist talk at the reception for the show, but for those who miss that, I've installed a mockup of my design wall, with some of the quotes, sketches, images, yarn cards and samples that I used in developing the work in the exhibit.  I hope it helps clarify not only my subject matter but the tapestry process a bit as well.  

design wall at Iconic:  Tapestries by Molly Elkind

 

2.  You will hone your time management skills.  You will start to plan your days, if you don't already, around the studio time you require to get the work made, rather than trying to find creative time after you've done everything else (and you're tired, to boot).  Your priorities shift.  

1.  And for the Number One reason why you should do a solo show. . . Well, you tell me!  If you feel like it, please share in the comments below. 

Now, what are you waiting for? 

Details, details. . . from American Tapestry Biennial 11

I had the immense pleasure of attending the opening reception and artists' talks for the American Tapestry Biennial 11 at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles last Sunday.  I had purchased the catalog months ago, but when the chance arose to see the show in person, I jumped at it. I am SO glad I did.

I was blown away by the impact of seeing the work in person.  No printed reproduction can come close to conveying the texture, scale, technical detail and color of the original fiber piece.  We--I, at least--see so much art on the printed page or online, that it's easy to lose sight of how essential those tangible, physical aspects are to our experience of the work.

So most of the photos I took were actually detail shots of pieces, notes I was taking for myself about techniques, textures, and so on that I wanted to remember.  I was also paying close attention to artists' use of color, since I'm going to teach a class this Sunday, 2/12/17, called More Color! at SEFAA, here in Atlanta.  (It's not too late to register, but act fast).

Suzanne Paquette, Cordes Sensibles, 60" x 36"

Back to the Tapestry Biennia. . . I loved the way the light areas in this piece, especially in the lower left, just glowed.  It's not an area of solid white or ecru but a subtle blend of many colors blending and separating that makes it so effective, I think.

detail, Suzanne Paquette, Cordes Sensibles

Like many of us I'm instinctively drawn to saturated color.  When I stepped in closer to look at this piece with its strong red, I was surprised to find high relief elements.

Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, Crimson Prelude, 52" x 48" x 3.   
This photo by Ogy Blazevich is from the catalog so the colors are different from my detail shot below. 

detail, Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, Crimson Prelude

 There are actually separate woven sections attached to the surface!  Like a collage!  And fuzzy areas at the bottom left corner.  Lots of intriguing play with the conventional flat surface of tapestry.

detail, Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, Crimson Prelude

No account of this show can omit this piece.  Its fine grain, large size, detailed imagery, subtle color and eye-catching subject held everyone's attention.

Gabriele Cristu, Romania, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, 59" x 75".
Photo by Daniel Gora from the ATB11 catalog. 

The color gradations are so subtle and the scale so fine that at the opening I was actually called upon by a small group of non-weaving viewers to explain how this was NOT a painting on cloth but actually was woven.  I did my best but one of them remained highly skeptical.  You can see in the detail below why it might be confusing.

detail, Gabriele Cristu, Romania, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Finally I want to share a piece from another exhibit on view at the museum, a show by Tapestry Weavers West entitled Elemental Tapestry:  Earth, Air, Fire and Water.  This piece caught my attention because of its subject--I am a sucker for hiking anywhere but especially among redwoods--but also for its unexpected color palette.

Ama Wertz, Ghost in Redwood Grove, 29" x 37"

Instead of using greens and other colors of the forest, Ama chose to use subjective color, color that conveys emotion rather than imitating reality.  She also used naturally dyed wool from the area depicted in the piece, its "fibershed," which as she says "stamps the time and place a work was made directly into its structure and design."  The value contrasts and the design itself carry the piece without saturated color.

There are so many more pieces that I loved and could go on and on about. . . but that would make this post too long.  As as Rebecca Mezoff mentions in her post about the show, these are just a few of the pieces that just happened to grab me this time.  All of the work was excellent.

If you want to see more, check out Rebecca Mezoff's blog post and video walk-through of the exhibit. Rebecca has done a fantastic job showing every piece and describing the wonderful artists' panel. She also has some shots of the 40-year retrospective of fiber legend Lia Cook's work also on view at the San Jose museum.  You will not be disappointed.  And if you want to learn more about how to use color in your own work, please sign up for More Color! next Sunday, 2/12, from 1-4 at SEFAA.   

New classes in the new year!

I'm excited to announce that starting in January I am offering five new classes at Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance in Atlanta.  Last summer my series of classes on design elements was well-received, and students requested more classes along those lines.  The cool thing about these classes is that they apply to all the fiber art media.  These are not classes in a specific technique.  Last summer we had garment sewists, quilters, collage artists, weavers, and makers of all kinds in class and it made for a very rich discussion.  

Hint:  these classes could be the perfect gift, for you or for that creative person you know.  You can register for just one or two, or for the whole series at once.  See the links below to register.

On January 15, kick off the New Year with Discover Your Daily Practice.

2016 tapestry diary, (c) Molly Elkind

Just as musicians practice every day, many visual artists have discovered the power of a regular daily practice--of  journaling, sketching, collaging, photographing, painting, embroidering, weaving. . . the possibilities are endless. If you want to see dramatic progress in your art- or craft-making, commit to a daily practice this year.  Even if you are already a working artist, taking a few minutes each to day to do something outside your usual medium can bring surprising joy and insight.  This is time to play with no expectations and no pressure to produce, show or sell.  You will be amazing at how many ideas you generate and how what you learn along the way will improve your making in other areas. In this two-hour class, you will find out what has worked for other artists and take the first steps toward discovering what YOUR daily practice could look like.   Click HERE to register. 

On January 22 join us for Art Critique 101.  Critique can be a scary word, but there is a method widely used by art teachers and museum educators that takes the fear away.  Learn how to observe, describe, interpret, and finally evaluate a work of art--your own or someone else's--in a truly constructive way.  We will practice these skills on work by contemporary artists.  If you wish, bring one finished piece of your own work for gentle, constructive feedback.  Click HERE to register.  

gallery view at Intertwined, SEFAA-sponsored juried fiber show.
Jim Arendt's Totemic Figures in foreground. 

Starting in February, we will take a deeper dive into three Design topics.  On February 12, we'll investigate More Color!  We'll start by looking at a PowerPoint that lays out basic concepts and terminology, and see some examples of masterly use of color in fiber media.  We will do some exercises with color harmony using the color wheel, but we'll go beyond that to explore the relativity of color, color's relation to value, and the importance of proportion.  Finally we'll consider the emotional content of color and touch on the challenges of working with color in fiber.   All that in 3 hours!  Click HERE to register.

Monoculture:  Trees, (c) Molly Elkind 

Closely related to Color decisions are questions of Contrast.  On February 26, join us as we Bring Up the Contrast!  Our eyes automatically go first to areas of highest contrast.  As artists we need to know how to use contrast thoughtfully to direct viewers' attention and communicate our intentions. We'll do exercises to explore the effects of "upping the contrast" in terms of value, scale, pattern and texture.  We'll also look at when low contrast may be what's needed.

Cardinals, (c) Molly Elkind

Finally, on March 26, come explore the potential of Collage:  Design Tool & Art Form. Find out why for over 100 years collage has been the quintessential modern and post-modern art form.  We'll look at examples of collage by fine artists and discover how design elements are used to make a visually engaging piece.  It's more than just throwing random stuff at a page with glue on it and seeing what sticks!  We'll practice by responding to several prompts and experiment with different materials. Last we'll look at how collage can be a way to develop designs for work in many fiber media.  Click HERE to register.

Mary (a sword shall pierce) (c) Molly Elkind

Please contact me with any questions.  Hope to see you in class soon! 

  

designing quilts, designing tapestry

I'm nearly halfway through teaching a series of classes in design at Southeast Fiber Alliance (SEFAA).   As part of my research and preparation I rediscovered this book by one of my favorite art quilt-makers, Ruth McDowell.

You can buy it HERE

As I read I was struck by how similar the process of designing a pieced quilt is to the process of designing tapestry.  I shouldn't have been surprised.  In fact, when I took a workshop with the master tapestry weaver Joan Baxter over a year ago, she reassured me that my background in quilt-making and collage was actually excellent preparation for designing tapestry design.  How hugely encouraging that was to hear!

Both quilts and tapestries rely on shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces. In both mediums, the "background" must be designed and constructed with just as much care as the "foreground;" they are integrated together in the construction process.   In both quilts and tapestry there is often an implied underlying structure, even a grid, that orders or constrains the arrangement of the shapes.  Think of the familiar block structure of a traditional quilt, or the over-under grid of woven tapestry.   Because of the techniques used in constructing a quilt or a tapestry, if the artist is aiming for a pictorial representation, a fair amount of abstraction and simplification needs to happen during the design process.  (Yes, it is possible to make "photo-realistic" quilts and tapestries, but why torture either medium that way?  Why not exploit the design potential inherent in each medium instead?)

One of the strengths of Ruth McDowell's approach is that she acknowledges the potentially tricky aspects of pieced quilts and suggests ways of tweaking the design so as to avoid these technical pitfalls.  Her tweaks actually make for more dynamic and interesting designs, in my opinion.  Below you see how a tulip block might be designed in a traditional quilt, with tricky Y-seams and the need to match points.  The second diagram shows those seams shifted so that the pieces can be sewn together much more easily--and the design is more interesting for its asymmetry and cropping.

from Ruth B. McDowell's Design Worskshop, p. 7.  

This got me thinking of how important it is while designing tapestry to take the medium's strengths and challenges into account.  Smooth, gently sloping curves can be difficult to achieve in tapestry.  You have a few choices about how to deal with this challenge.  You can exaggerate and exploit the steppiness of such curves. . . or you can choose to weave a piece "sideways" to allow for eccentric weaving and gentler, easier curves.  Here's another example:  in a quilt, the size of the tiniest design element is dictated by what can be physically sewn together, and the size of this tiny piece in turn determines the quilt's overall size and scale.  In the same way, in tapestry we follow the "two-warp rule" so that our tiniest shapes are at least two warps wide, for ease of weaving.  Notice the two-warp stripe of gold at the side of Mary's face below.

Molly Elkind, Mary (greater is what she bore in her mind), detail

In both mediums, ultimately the same rules for good design apply:  careful planning of areas of light, medium and dark values.  Sensitive construction of shapes and selection of colors.  Skillful use of contrast, variety, rhythm, scale and texture.  And above all, designing with the unique characteristics of the medium in mind.  That's all!

Want to know more?  There are still some spots available in my remaining Design Modules at SEFAA.  Click HERE and HERE to find out more and to register.

Now, I'm off to see how I can use these insights as I design my next big tapestry. . . .

What does your design process look like?

Recently I came across a fascinating interview with fiber artist and activist Mary Fisher.  Mary was asked to describe her creative process "from conception to conclusion" and this is how she responded:

"This is such an interesting question because it assumes, fairly enough, that the process of design has a beginning and an end, and that getting from one to the other is a linear process. Perhaps for some people that’s true: they have an idea and they go execute it. But that’s typically not my experience.

For me, my art emerges as I’m doing it. I don’t start with a guaranteed final product in mind. Rather, I start to see what I might discover by combining these fabrics, those colors, this photograph, that idea or word or image – and I see what results. As the work emerges, I refine it, shape it, change it…sometimes dump it.

It feels to me, honestly, like I grow art and design. It’s an organic process of allowing your soul to express itself without limiting that expression to a pre-conceived idea."

Mary Fisher at work; photo from www.textileartist.org 

Molly here.  I admit it: until quite recently, I've been one of those artists who has an idea and then goes to execute it.  It's been a fairly linear process for me (sometimes the line forms a circle or spiral), often involving a pre-conceived idea followed by research, sketches, samples, and lists, circling back to refine the idea, etc.  Check out my recent post for more on this. I will say that I never assume the end product is "guaranteed!"

Whenever I teach this process--which was taught to me when I did my Master's degree in fibers fifteen years ago--I often get "you gotta be kidding me" looks from students.  Their process is more like Mary's, intuitive, organic and full of serendipity.  Research, sketching, and sampling sound an awful lot like homework. You want to just plunge in and start playing with yarn or fabric or paint or whatever, making it up as you go and enjoying that blissful flow of creativity.   My process sounds like the opposite of loose, free and intuitive--a huge buzzkill, actually.

Hey, I get it!  I LOVE that jolt of endorphins and adrenaline when you start a new project too (that's why I have so many projects going right now)!  All those intermediate steps--making sketches and samples, researching what other people have already done in this medium or with this subject matter, figuring out what techniques I might have to learn or refine in order to realize my vision--they do slow down that blissful flow a bit.  But they can also be undertaken in the spirit of joyful exploration too. 

Many artists, like Mary Fisher, work intuitively all the time and it obviously suits them and suits their work.  My hunch is that they are so experienced that what feels like intuition and instinct is actually long-internalized, hard-won knowledge that operates almost subconsciously.  When these artists are asked about their process and artistic decisions, they respond that it's intuitive, forgetting that at some point way back, they had to learn this stuff.  It's also true that certain mediums, those involving collage-like processes for example, almost demand an intuitive, improvisational approach.

But other mediums seem to call for more planning and forethought.  For me, tapestry work--and before that, handwoven wearables, art quilts, embroidery, handmade paper pieces--these all seem to require some preparatory work.  Now, many artists do work in these mediums entirely improvisationally and intuitively--once they've achieved some level of mastery.  But before you get those mythical 10,000 hours of experience that supposedly equal mastery, if you're like me, you may find yourself making mistakes and re-inventing the wheel more than you would like.  If all you are going on is your native intuition and trial and error, you may not be able to put your finger precisely on what your piece needs.  You may not know that a lack of value contrast is the issue, say, or that colors opposite each other on the color wheel interact in specific ways, some good, some not so much.  You'll just know that something isn't working.  I decided to go to grad school in art because I realized that it would take me a lifetime to learn by trial and error the things that are readily accessible in a formal program.

Our fibers professor assigned us to do an embroidery, after doing library research first.  I chose Amish quilts as my inspiration.  Here are a few of the dozen or so sketches I made before I got approval to stitch the final piece.  

Midway through the process I realized I had to work out the value scheme before deciding on colors.

For me it was a huge help to learn the words and concepts for the basic building blocks of design.  Once I had the words in my head--terms like value, complementary harmony, pattern, rhythm--then I could apply them to any given piece, in any medium, to understand what factors were at play.  I could diagnose and evaluate my work with some confidence.  The down side of working purely intuitively is that without the words and concepts at your fingertips, you may not have control over your work when you want it, when you might want to reproduce something that works, or avoid making the same mistakes again. 

You might say that you make art for pure enjoyment, to learn and experiment and have fun, and if some things don't work out, it's all part of the grand journey.  You don't care about fancy art terminology or the color wheel.  You are a Zen master, and more power to you!  Go in peace.

On the other hand, you may want to be sure that your investment of time, effort and materials is likely to succeed on a regular basis.  You may have a lower tolerance for failure.  You may be at the point with your work where you are trying to meet deadlines for shows, and you have no time to spare for detours and dead ends.  You may have a limited budget for supplies and can't afford to waste materials on full-size experiments that don't work out.  You may simply want to know how to describe, understand, and control what's happening in your art so you can hit the home runs more often.

The embroidery in the sketches above eventually ended up in a juried show and on the cover of the Embroidery Guild of America's magazine.  (Apologies for the reflective glass in the photo). 

The moral of this story is not that everyone needs to go to art school (though if that is a possibility for you, go for it!).  You can learn a lot about the elements and principles of art and design elsewhere--like from me!  In my design module classes we do lots of fun, hands-on sketchbook exercises that reveal the words and concepts that lead to better artistic choices. These principles apply to all forms of art and craft design, not just fibers.  And here's the best part:  knowing this stuff actually increases the bliss quotient of your art-making!  Putting this knowledge into practice gives you more competence, more confidence, and ultimately an informed intuition that you can call on throughout your process.

It's not too late to sign up for my Design Kickstarters class at the Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild on Sat. April 23.  Click HERE to learn more and to register.

Starting May 22, I'll be offering an in-depth series of classes in design principles at Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA) in Atlanta.  These 3-hour workshops will each focus on one or two aspects of the design process or elements of art.  Each class stands alone; you don't have to take them all.  The first session focuses on Shape and Line (May 22); then we'll look at Color and Value (June 5), Pattern and Rhythm (June 26), Composition (July 10), and finally the whole design process itself (July 17).  Click HERE for more information and to register.

If you're attending Convergence, we'll touch on these themes and ideas in my Art Journaling to Kickstart Creativity class--there are still a few spots open there. Don't hesitate to contact me with any questions you might have. 

Two ways of looking at the design process

Here's one way.  If it looks like a PowerPoint slide, that's because it is.*  If you start at 1:00 on the circle, you see how you start by giving yourself permission to try--to carve out the time, find the materials, use them (even "waste" some), fail, try again.   You show up to the studio or wherever you make stuff, even if all you have is 20 minutes.
You get the idea.  Each step follows, one leading neatly (?!) to the next.  You get that it's more a circular than a linear process, though, that continues on around, revisiting some stages, until you collapse from exhaustion the piece is finished.

Then there's Austin Kleon's view, from his wonderful book, Steal Like an Artist:

In my experience these views are both accurate.  The design process is sort of like riding a roller coaster.  You strap yourself in, hold on, scream, almost wet your pants with fear and excitement, wonder why you ever decided to do this, swear never to do it again.  Then it's over, and you get off, exhilarated and ready to do it again.
Come explore the ins and outs and ups and downs with me.

*It's from my Design Process:  Inspiration to Roadmap class, next Tuesday at Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild. Click HERE to register.

Keepin' it Creative

In both my Design Intensive and Design Kickstarters classes, I share my "Top Twenty Tips for Continuing Creativity."  Most of us struggle to find enough time in our daily lives for creative work.  And once we find the time, we may run into stumbling blocks that slow down our momentum.  Over the past twenty years as a working artist, these are some tactics that have worked for me: 

 Use even the smallest blocks of time.  Try to find at least 20 minutes every day to sketch, stitch, note down an idea or try something out.  I discovered "the rule of one hour" when I was making bed-sized quilts and hand-quilting them.  If I could stitch for just one hour a day, eventually the quilt would be finished.  Even 15-20 minutes a day, if that's all you have, can be productive.  In fact, I can really get down to business if I know that's all the time I have!

I wove on this for 90 minutes after dinner last night--soon I'll be done with the background and get to start weaving the image in the cartoon!  (Those are my initials in the lower right) 

Keep your supplies out and accessible as much as possible.  Make it easy to get started or to pick things up and work if you have a few free minutes.  More than one artist's dining room has become their studio.  Above you can see my tapestry loom in the family room.  (Do yourself and your family a favor though and keep any toxic supplies out of the kitchen.)  

Tell your inner critic to get lost until the piece you’re working on is finished.  It is artistic abuse to judge it in any harsh way while it’s still in process.  On the other hand, do listen to the small still voice of the piece itself telling you what it needs.  Be willing to let go of cherished preconceived ideas or materials if they don’t seem to be working (“kill your darlings” as writers say). 

 Keep it fun!  If it’s not fun, try some other way of working, some other art form or medium or size or process.  Try cutting up your piece and reassembling it! 

Make visual decisions visually.  You can’t tell from just thinking about something whether it’s going to work—you have to try it out and see it.  And this leads me to the topic my students can count on me to preach about:

If you are working with materials or processes that are new to you, make samples.  Do a model or a rough draft of a representative part of your piece before you do the full-scale version.  Use the exact same materials and techniques you plan to use in the real piece in order to get the most accurate information from your sample.  You may need to do several samples before you feel sure of where you’re going.  The knowledge, confidence and peace of mind you gain by sampling is priceless!  Save your samples—they will become a valuable reference library for you.  I have drawers full.

On the other hand, be careful not to work an idea to death before you start the real piece.  Save room for spontaneity and creative decisions as you work, to keep it fresh and loose.

I wound and beamed this warp for scarves yesterday but I'm not sure yet which weave structure or weft colors I'll use.

I have lots more to share on this topic.  In the Atlanta area, I'm offering Design Kickstarters here and Design Intensive here in the next six weeks.  Would love to see you in class!




 

 

Designing for tapestry

A word of warning:  Not much eye candy in today's post until the very bottom.

Weavers know that working at a loom is a meditative practice.  Throw the shuttle--or, in tapestry, carefully place the wefts--and the slow, rhythmic pace of the work slows your heartbeat and calms your mind (at least when the weaving is going well).  You shift into the creative zone where hours pass like minutes.  Weaving is bliss.

But then there are the times when meditative calm may shade over into obsessive brooding.  So lately I've been wondering, as I contemplate how many hours I spend making tapestry, and how to begin my next project, Why do I do this?  How do I do this? 

Regarding the why, There is the bliss.  We weavers are addicted to the feel of fiber between our fingers.  We are drawn to tapestry in particular because we want to make images that are the cloth, not superimposed on it.  But what sort of images?  And how do those images come to be there?  

In the past 24 hours I've come across two articles about historical tapestries that highlight for me the ongoing discussion among tapestry weavers about what sort of art form it actually is, or should be, for the contemporary artist-weaver.   Rebecca Mezoff wrote yesterday about her chance to observe the conservation work being done on a historical tapestry at the Denver Art Museum.  She points out that 500 years ago, tapestries were designed by painters and the weavers' job was to translate the painting--usually a scene from history, myth, or scripture--into woven thread. Rebecca writes:

"All this discussion of medieval tapestries brought me back to the conversation I had recently with Archie Brennan as I was writing my article for the Spring 2015 issue of Fiber Art Now.** Archie talked both to me and in many talks and articles you can find if you dig a little about how tapestry became a reproductive medium in the middle ages. That means that weavers were trained to copy a painting in thread. This brought tapestry weaving away from the lovely improvisational work we see in the Coptic tapestry fragments to something that was stiffer and less creative from the weaver's perspective. Of course those weavers were and are incredibly skilled. But somewhere in that practice of copying paintings, tapestry lost its ability to be an art medium in its own right. It is my opinion that we need to regain the standing of the work of the artist/weaver as an art form before tapestry can even hope to become recognized as more than a 'decorative art' or craft."

 

Historic tapestries done in this "reproductive" mode are the subject of today's New York Times review of a show at the Frick Collection that features Coypel's Don Quixote Tapestries.  The show features three wall-sized narrative works commissioned by the king of France as gifts for other monarchs and two large Flemish tapestries also inspired by Coypel's paintings and engravings of the Spanish novel Don Quixote.  The artist Coypel designed the image, and the mostly anonymous artisan-weavers crafted it, with great skill, in woven threads.  These tapestries are meaningful on several levels.  In their day, the French tapestries were in-your-face status symbols, emblems of the king's immense wealth and of French craftsmanship.  They brought to vivid life stories that people would only have known from texts.  Today, we notice that these pieces are not just translations of the artist Coypel's work, they are translations of translations--woven versions of paintings that illustrate a work of fiction.  Very meta, we might say.  And as Rebecca indicates in her discussion, today there is a sizeable contingent of tapestry artists who do not want to weave woven versions of paintings, even their own paintings.  These artists mostly skip the design stage of preparing a painting or cartoon that will guide the weaving, and simply sit down and start weaving improvisationally.   

 

Of course if like Archie Brennan or the late Silvia Heyden, you have been weaving for decades, it is probably not too daunting to simply sit down and weave.  The rest of us, especially relative newbies like me, tend to make multiple sketches, collages, and samples, to plan and prepare obsessively, because mistakes can be extremely time-consuming to repair.  This is the way tapestry is conventionally taught.  In my own practice so far I have discovered the truth of the late James Koehler's words, that you should make your cartoon as detailed and specific as possible before you start weaving.  

 

And yet.  I have found in all my fiber work, including tapestry, that some of the work that draws the most positive comments, are my samples--the pieces intended as trial runs, the ones I didn't overthink or stop to repair mistakes on, the ones I initially did for my eyes only.  They have a freshness, a looseness, even awkwardness, that seems to appeal to folks.  

Here's one early piece in the Mary series:

The central woven image, only about 4" square, was intended to be a sample for figuring out how to weave Mary's face on the for-real, "final," piece.  This sample is neither flat nor square.  . .  but it somehow works.  

And the piece below I also did as an experiment.  I took the same simple design and made an embroidered version and a woven version, to see which I liked better.  This is the woven one: 

 Again, it has flaws--now I might handle those slits differently--but on the whole I like it.

 

Of course every individual weaver and artist is entitled to their own way of working, and for most of us that process will evolve as we develop skill, confidence and new approaches to our art form.  Ultimately the way the image came to be woven, whether from following a cartoon or weaving improvisationally or something in between, is less important than the power of the image itself.  While I am impressed at the scale and workmanship of historical tapestries, I am most moved by the work of my contemporaries who design and weave from their hearts.

 

 

 

Looking at the design process

Lately I've been preparing to teaching a class on the design process at the Southeast Fiber Forum conference at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.  I put together a slide show of several of my artworks, along with their inspirations and the samples or models I made while working on each piece.  It was really interesting to look back at my work in this way and to realize that like everyone I return to the same sources of inspiration and ways of working over and over again.

I started as a quiltmaker, and I literally started making art quilts twenty years ago by looking out the window at my own backyard.  We had lots of trees and bird life, and in the snowy Kentucky winters cardinals would practically line up at our bird feeder.  I knew I wanted to capture their vivid red against the snow.  I wanted to design my own original quilt block, one that was recognizably a cardinal and was also sew-able, without too much sobbing and gnashing of teeth.  Here are a few of my early sketches:

You can see these early ideas were all over the place, from semi-realistic to completely abstract, and they were hardly resolved, in some cases quite crude (I'm lookin' at you, triangle bird!)   I find that the hard thing at this stage is to keep faith and remain patient with yourself as the ideas do develop and resolve.

My fibers professor in grad school required that before we plunged into the construction of any piece, we had to make several samples, mock-ups using the actual design and materials, in order to test our ideas, materials, and methods.  Often we had to do half a dozen or more samples before we were permitted to proceed with construction of the final piece.  While this is not a project I did for school, I followed this process. So here are a few of the cardinal blocks I tried:

The last two examples are very close to the actual block I used, a diamond-shaped block that tessellated with background blocks in the same shape.  I decided that despite their drab coloring the female cardinals deserved to be seen too so I included them as well.  Often it's the duller, quieter colors in a piece that allow the brighter colors to really sing.  I added a wing that is a faced flap that stands out from the block, an idea I borrowed from the amazing quilt artist Ruth McDowell.   To add interest some of the background blocks are pieced in strips, and the quilt's border is irregular and interrupted in places by the blocks themselves. 

Here's the final quilt:

 Of course, you know what they say about the best-laid plans.  In this case, after I had all the blocks pieced together and had done the quilting--when the quilt was nearly finished, in other words--I added the large branch shapes, appliqueing them over the surface of the quilt.  It seemed that the birds perched on their tiny twigs needed to be connected to larger branches somehow.  Not all the birds are on a branch, but enough are.  The birds are no longer floating in space, and the branches lead the eye through the piece effectively.  And I like the disconnectedness of the branches, which would never have happened if I had designed them in from the beginning.

So it seems that both deliberate planning and then being able to respond sensitively to the piece in front of you as it develops are both crucial.  Hmmm.  This is one of those lessons I seem to learn anew with almost every piece I do. 

There are still some spots available in my class at Fiber Forum, April 16-19, 2015.  Email me for more information, or go here.