Lisa Call

As promised, here is my first workshop review. I thought I’d start at the beginning.

While I had taken a handful of traditional quilting classes, my first art workshop was with Elizabeth Busch in 1995. The class, Taking Risks and Breaking the Rules, was sponsored by Front Range Contemporary Quilters and was a 2 day workshop.

The class was a series of design exercises with paper and drawing materials. I remember having to buy a few new supplies for the class as I didn’t have oil crayons or some of the other items that were required.

It’s been such a long time since I’ve taken the class it’s hard to remember much about it. I do recall that I was a bit intimidated as I was such a rank beginner, but I had fun and recall it inspired me to want to take many more classes as I felt there was a lot out there to learn.

I never used any of my collages as a jumping off point for a specific quilt. Although I did learn a lot about basic art concepts such as line, shape and proportion and that would be helpful for any subsequent work.

I have no doubt I would have heaps of praise to give Elizabeth if I were to take a class with her today as she is a brilliant artist and I can see from looking at the handouts and description of the exercises her class was well structured and organized and she clearly put some thought into the class.

I think it’s difficult for an untrained quilter to walk into their very first art oriented class. How to get the most out of the critique or even why the design exercises are useful isn’t really all that clear. But everyone has to start somewhere and become familiar with the format and language for these types of classes. The more advanced classmates can be intimidating but I’ve also found that are generally very friendly and helpful and willing to share knowledge with the newer class members.

Here is some of my work from the class. It doesn’t look anything like what I do today and I have no doubt if I were to repeat this class now my collages would most likely be more closely related to my current body of work. But I was starting at ground zero and the only contemporary quilts I had made were Housework and Spring Cleaning.

These 3 collages were made on 3″ x5″ index cards.

 
This collage is 10″ x 6:

I haven’t missed 2 days in a row blogging in quite a while. It’s a busy time of year but I’m making some excellent progress on some projects so I’m quite pleased. I’ve gotten your requests for postcards and will send you one when they are ready to mail. Thank you for the wonderful response!

Tonight I thought I’d share a picture of a quilt I started back in 2002 and completed last year.

Structures #13 ©2005   44″ x 35″ (wxh)

 
This quilt was designed first on paper before I worked in fabric, something that is quite rare for me. Usually I just start directly with fabric for design.

This is a portion of my sketchbook from the design of this quilt. You’ll notice the final quilt is upside down from the design. That was a result of accidentally signing it upside down. Oops! But don’t tell anyone because I think it works this way also.

 
I’ve designed several other pieces similar to this on paper but I’ve never created them in fabric. I always like the overlapping and elongated shape my motif takes in these pieces so I often think about revisiting this idea.

I’m quite pleased, my postcards from Modern Postcard arrived today and they look pretty darn good for my first attempt at graphic arts. I put Structures #28 on the card, a quilt that I don’t believe I’ve ever published on the internet. It’s large (84″w x 57″h) and red. I decided on the larger card (6″x8″) and I definitely think it was worth the extra money because the quilt has a lot of detail. The quilt has hundreds of very small pieces so this is a hard quilt to get a good image of it. The slides I had taken by a professional never captured the essence of the quilt. Hurray for SLR digital cameras.

I’m working on the mailing list for these cards, to announce my upcoming solo show in February_{(click to view pdf version of the initial press release)} and if you’d like to be added to the list and get a card of your own just email me your name and address. I promise not to send you junk mail, just postcards of my quilts every once in a while. And I promise not to sell your name or give it away to anyone. It’s a way to keep up with where you can see my work in person.

 
I got my first bid on the plumbing problems I mentioned a few days ago and it appears my glass shower wall will have to come down to fix things, in addition to tiling the bathroom floor as I had to pull up the carpet (why do builders carpet bathrooms?). It’s not cheap but I’ll survive and the unknown is over.

So now I can quit being stressed and get back to thinking about my quilts, it’s amazing how much this little disaster has cut into my artwork, not just the time to deal with it but the unsettled feeling. I started designing a new piece tonight (also red) and worked a bit more on quilting Structures #39, which should be done tomorrow. Encouraged by my success of designing my postcard, I’m hoping to design and order new business cards tomorrow also.

While doing some cleaning and organizing of my quilt business files I gathered together all the information about classes I’ve taken over the years. I am a self taught artist in that I have never taken any formal art classes although I have attended several art quilt workshops over the years.

I created a new blog category to my posts on this topic and to start off here is a list of the classes I’ve taken over the years. I’m not sure if it’s complete but it’s close. Note that the years/class titles for some of the classes might be wrong as I didn’t keep all my notes.

• 1995 Taking Risks and Breaking Rules with Elizabeth Bush.
• 1996 Painting with Fabric with Jean Neblitt.
• 1997 Creative Precision String Piecing with Caryl Bryer Fallert.
• 1997 Drawing with Thread with Caryl Bryer Fallert.
• 1997 Small Works with David Walker.
• 1998 Color Theory with Ricky Tims.
• 1998 Painting and Composition with Natasha Kempers-Cullen.
• 1999 Dye Painting with Hollis Chatelain.
• 1999 Design Workshop (I can’t remember the name of this class) with Pauline Burbidge.
• 1999 Improvisational Piecing with Nancy Crow.
• 1999 Sets and Variables with Nancy Crow.
• 2000 Fabric Collage (I can’t remember the name of this class) with Jane Birch Cochran.
• 2000 Sets and Variables with Nancy Crow.
• 2000 Dye Painting with Ann Johnston.
• 2001 Raw Revenge with Sue Wademan.
• 2001 Sets and Variables with Nancy Crow.
• 2003 Master Class (similar to independent study) with Sue Benner.
• 2004 Working in a Series with Nancy Crow.
• 2005 Independent Study with Nancy Crow.

The classes between 1995 and 2000 were all in Colorado (except the Nancy Crow) and mostly sponsored by Front Range Contemporary Quilters. Colorado brings in a lot of well known teachers through this organization and also with the more traditional statewide guild, Colorado Quilt Council.

I traveled to attended the workshops from 2001 through 2005 as I was looking for more advanced classes than I can find locally.

 
My thought is to highlight each of these classes at some point in my blog, with a review and some photos of the work I did during the class. I also want to talk about how these classes effected my work and direction as an artist so stay tuned for these over the next few months (or year).

This week’s Everyday Matters Challenge was to draw our TV with our favorite show on the screen and to journal about it.

This was a simple week for me. I don’t have a TV. We’re unplugged and it’s wonderful. I’m culturally clueless. People talk about TV shows and commercials and I sit there with a blank stare on my face. Huh? Who cares. I’m too busy to waste time watching someone else living their life in a small box on my shelf.

My kids weren’t very happy the first few months but they got over it. No more fights about too much TV. They’ve learned to entertain themselves instead of relying on passive entertainment (although admittedly at times they spend too much time on the computer).

Unplugged 8.5″ x 11″:

 
There was a discussion on the Everyday Matters yahoogroup about drawing with pen so you can’t erase. I’m not too excited about pen as it’s too polished for my tastes, I like the rough primitive feel of pencil. I also like the value variation that pencils provide. But I do agree that not erasing is good, as it forces me to slow down and really look at what I’m drawing. So in this drawing I didn’t erase, just went back and added new lines and left the ones I didn’t like.

A few weeks ago I wrote a posting about my first “art” quilt, House Cleaning.

Right after completing that quilt I made a second quilt in the series. At that time I don’t think I had heard of the concept or term “working in a series”, as it’s not really a topic we covered in computer science graduate school. I guess this is just a natural way for me to work.

This quilt was completed in 1994 several months after House Cleaning. You can see I learned my lesson about trying to hang odd-shaped quilts and this one is pretty much straight across the top, at least enough so that I could attached the usual sleeve that holds a board so the quilt can be hung on the wall with just 2 nails.

This quilt was part of the 1994 Hoffman Challenge Traveling Exhibit and was also in the show Quilt Colorado in June 1998. For the Hoffman challenge you have to use a “challenge” fabric in your quilt, one that is manufactured by Hoffman. In 1994 the fabric was the butterfly fabric. They then have a competition and select many quilts to travel around the country to show off the new fabric (and quilts).

This quilt was made before I learned how to finish the edges without a binding. I think the butterflies as a binding really don’t look so good and this piece would be a lot stronger if it had no binding at all.

Spring Cleaning ©1994  43″ x 30″ (wxh)

In the past I almost always did fairly extensive piecing on the backs of my quilts. This quilt was no exception. I think the shape of the back of this quilt is interesting as it reminds me of a map of the United States.

 
I had always planned on making more “cleaning” quilts in this style but I moved from Virginia to Colorado in the fall of 1994 and my plans were disrupted and I never got back to it.

In thinking about it I see some similarities between these quilts and my new series of drawings: Plains. The same things interest me over and over again.

I found my photo of Squares #2, which I mentioned in an earlier post about my Squares Series.

This piece was made at Quilt Surface Design Symposium in 2003 (the only year I’ve attended the conference) and donated to the fund raising auction for the scholarship fund.

It’s made from the same fabrics as Structures #33, which I was working on at the conference.

Squares #2 ©2003  9″ x 11″ (wxh)

Well, I’ve done a pretty bad job at completing my goals this week. It’s been a very unproductive weekend. So my goals for next week are the same as they were for last week. With the addition of doing new drawings as I did manage to get 5 new ones completed last week.

Friday afternoon I had a yucky plumbing problem that I haven’t yet been able to fix and so a call to a plumber is probably the plan for tomorrow. And when that is done I have some carpet and drywall to replace. Houses are great big time drains. And money. I wrote on my entryway drawing that I had a love/hate relationship with my house. Well we’re in the negative part right now.

But I posted another new picture today. I wanted to try colored pencils, didn’t work out so good. I put it in an older post so I could compare the graphite pencil drawing of the same objects I drew a few weeks ago. Here’s the link to the post: colored pencil drawing.

As I mentioned a few days ago this week’s Everyday Matters Challenge was to draw our entry way. Here is the result of that drawing.

 
A photo of my entryway (from a slightly different perspective) can been seen in my posting about my first art quilt, which is featured above the closet doors.

I really liked this drawing and felt it had more potential than just playing with my new pencils. So just like in my fiber work, my drawings have now entered into series work, and here is #2. Few areas but more complex shapes.

This is all drawn freehand, no rulers involved. I’m going to have to investigate larger pieces of paper as I’m feeling a bit restricted by the 9″X12″ paper pad I have now.

Plains #2 © 2006   8.5″ x 11″