Lisa Call

I’ve added a new category to my blog, "How – The Art World", as I think it’s important for artists to understand how they fit into the greater art world, both past and present and future.

I don’t have an art degree so I’ve always felt at a disadvantage in this area but over the past year I started doing some reading – artist biographies, articles on art history, magazines about the larger art world. It has definitely helped me understand where I fit into this world and where it is I want to go with my artwork.

In general, I think quilters tend to be too narrowly focused on quilts and quilt history and I think this narrow vision is a contributing factor to the slow acceptance of quilts as fine art. If we don’t understand what we want to fit into – how can we expect to fit in?

 
In addition to reading books about art history I’ve been reading more art and artist blogs vs. quilters blogs (I’ll update my blogroll in the sidebar soon). They are really quite fascinating and one of my favorites for an interesting glimpse into the New York City art scene is by gallery owner Edward Winkleman. He has quite a following and the comments, mostly by artists, are almost more interesting than the postings at times. Thursdays are particularly interesting as he often hosts an open thread about a topic of great interest.

Today’s topic was about what to include on ones resume, read it here. He answers a lot of questions in the comments and I’d consider it a must read for any artist. As with anything you see on the net, I’d suggest you filter what you read based on your own standards and needs.

He brings up some topics I’m going to discuss further but it’s late and time for bed. Two blog posts in 1 day, plus 8 hours of the day job, 4 hours of quilting, weeding my garden and an evening conference call with India (can you say offshoring- turns the day job into a night job) – time for some sleep.

A better image of my piece in Crafts National 40. (See this post for images of Structures #53).

Structures #56 © 2006    48"x58"

Detail:

I realize my previous "work work work" post was a little cryptic as to why I was so overwhelmed by work.

In early June I got a new laptop at work, which meant it was now possible for me to work at home fairly easily. At the same time I was assigned to complete a high priority short deadline task in addition to my normal workload. So the ability to work from home and the need to do overtime very nicely dovetailed into several weeks of way too much work at home. This is only the second time I’ve let work come home with me and neither time was very pleasant. I felt disjointed and out of touch with myself.

It’s not all works "fault" as I could have let some things slide at work while I balanced the geek career and the rest of my life. But I didn’t. Hence the lack of art production in June.

It’s all a big balancing act. As Pam RuBert very astutely points out on her blog, having an outside job probably contributes to my creativity in a very positive way much of the time. I just need to work harder at keeping it in balance better.

There will be times the day job will suck down too much time and when that happens I need to readjust expectations and do my best to minimize the impact on other parts of my life. I’m not really sure how to do this but it sounds good. I still have too much work to do but the major stressful deadlines are gone for a while and so I’m committed to keeping the work and work and the art at home.

I’ve been thinking about how I approach my art and fitting it into my life and I’ve decided that I need to give it a bit of a boost for the next few months. So instead of setting goals for the projects I want to complete I’m setting a goal of working on my artwork a minimum of 20 hours a week.

[Although in my head I'm really thinking I would love to make that 30 if possible - my kids are in camp for the next 5 weeks so I have the opportunity to really get focused - but don't tell anyone as that goal of 30 seems a bit unsustainable.]

So far this week (starting monday) I’ve put in 7 hours. Not too bad.

And this 20 hours, it does not include any of the art business, its studio time only I’m counting. I know I need to get refocused on the business side of things but when it comes down to it the most important thing I need, to feel balanced and happy, is a significant amount of time in the studio.

 
Now, back to the studio.

Sue Reno very kindly sent me some installation photos of my work at Crafts National 40, which opened earlier this month in State College, Pennsylvania. I blogged about this juried show earlier. It runs until July 16 if you are in the area.

Here is a photo of my 2 pieces Structures #56 (48"x58" far left) and Structures #53 (66"x41" far right) ©2006:

Sue wrote in her email to me: "You have a prime spot and it looks great! … To orient you a bit, the entrance to the gallery is just behind Carol Taylor’s work [next photo], and my piece is just opposite of one of yours. The exhibit flowed very nicely. "

Thanks Sue!

Sue also has a piece in the show and won one of the Awards of Merit. Eleanor McCain, another quilter, also won with her piece Canyon Study 1. Congratulations Sue and Eleanor!

The Cul-de-Sac by Sue Reno (in the background is another quilt, Symbolic Remnants, by artist Carol Taylor):

Thanks everyone for the kind comments about my day job. I have more thoughts on it and some responses to your words but I’m headed to the studio for the evening. For the first time in weeks I came home without my laptop in tow with work to be done. [Truth is the laptop is busy doing a build of our software overnight so I couldn't bring it home.]

I haven’t spent much time in my studio the past few weeks. I made this post about getting all organized and having goals again and then the day job took over my life. Way too much stress and deadlines and working overtime. That is NOT what I signed up for at mega-huge multinational software giant corporation. Sigh.

It saps all my energy when I’m stressed with the day job. I guess the reality is the day job is really a career. It’s hard to be a software engineer without some buy-in to the projects. And I have to admit I’m working on a really interesting project and I’m getting to do work that I enjoy doing (organizing, writing requirements, etc). Problem is there is just too much to do.

But they’ve assigned me to do something I don’t feel competent to do. Not that I can’t learn it – really it’s not hard to do and infact it is really easy but if you screw up (which there is a darn good job of happening because it’s about picky details) the project is delayed and it is all my fault.

So a boring task that often fails yet carries a big responsibility. Serious yuck. I tried to say no to this task but I was the only one that forgot to bring in a note from their mom saying they were going to be sick that day.

So what does this have to do with art? Well – actually nothing.

And that is precisely the problem.

 
Okay – I’m definitely whining and feeling sorry for myself here. I better get over this and just do the work and get back into my studio before I go nuts!

Structures #5 ©2002   40" x 68"

I was asked to donate one of my Structures quilts to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum a few years back for their new art quilt collection: “Rooted In Tradition: Art Quilts from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum”.

The quilts from this show were displayed in Golden, Colorado last summer and a portion of the work is now touring the country. It’s currently showing at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah through Oct. 15. The museum is open Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m-5 p.m.; Wednesday until 8 p.m.; weekends, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is adults, $5; youths (6-18), seniors, $3. For more information phone check out the museums website at: www.umfa.utah.edu.

The show is an interesting retrospective of the art quilt movement from the 1980s through the present with a lot of top name quilt artists included in the collection such as Michael James, Nancy Erickson, Joan Lintault, Erika Carter, Jane Dunnewold, and Yvonne Porcella . It was an honor to be included in the exhibit.

The piece I donated is Structures #5, shown above. The show in Utah was recently reviewed by the DeseretNews and the review appears here: DeseretNews.com. A detail of my piece is included on this website.

The museum published a book of the collection and it can be purchased from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum Gift Shop or on line at Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (scroll to middle of the page).

You can view the full exhibit tour schedule on here: Rooted In Tradition tour schedule.

Long time readers may recall that I used to make weekly or biweekly goals and often posted them here. I haven’t done this since late March (make or post the goals) so it’s time to slowly get back on track.

In late March I decided I wanted to really concentrate on my artwork as I was getting burned out on the business aspect of art. So I dropped just about everything on business side and made a goal of making 9 new quilt tops in the month of April. I came darn close to reaching that goal, and a few days into May I completed the 9th piece.

[An aside for those unfamiliar with the process of making a piece quilt. There are 2 main phases in my quiltmaking: First I design and piece together the top layer of the quilt. The result is generally referred to as the "quilt top" (clever huh!). Next I layer the top along with a back and a middle layer, called "batting". This "sandwich" has to be "quilted" to hold the layers together, this is the stitching you see on the top of the fabric.]

This means I now have 10 pieces in my new series (tentatively named “Markings”), with the first piece being made last October. They are mostly huge pieces – some nearly 8 feet x 8 feet but most well over 6′ and they all need to be quilted to complete them.

My plan for May, June and July is to quilt a good portion of these quilts along with some of the unfinished pieces from my Structures series. In May I only quilted 2 of the pieces – Structures #34 (I was going to include an image but my camera battery just died in the middle of a download so maybe tomorrow) and Markings #1. I hope to pick up my speed and get 3 or 4 pieces done in each of June and July.

I started Markings #2 last week and have made a bit of progress but it’s a huge quilt. At first I was quite worried that quilting these huge quilts would be difficult but it’s really not turned out to be that physically challenging. It’s just going to take many many hours as I do very dense quilting on my work (parallel lines between 1/8″ and 1/4″ apart). Think about that covering a 6′ x 5′ area and it’s going to take a while.

So my goals for now until June 12th are:

• Finish quilting Markings #2.
• Unearth my goals spreadsheet and formulate a longer term plan for the summer.
• Clean my office yet again as paperwork has really piled up the past few months.
• Work with Alyson Stanfield on our plans for the Geek Dinner to taste Stormhoek wines later this month. More on this later.

For those that recall me saying I was going to take Alyson’s Art Marketing Circles. I ended up not signing up. I do believe they are probably extremely valuable and will eventually sign up. But I needed some time to think some things through on my own – which is why I stopped blogging, stopped making goals and pulled back into just making the artwork. While I’m not sure everything is resolved in my head I know that going back to the basics, where just making the work is the only focus, has helped me gain some perspective on what I’m doing with my art and where I want to go with it.

Rayna Gillman has a post on her blog about what it means to make meaningful art and asked a question about my work. Here are my thoughts on the subject:

My work is generally informed by 3 sources:

1) Fences and stone walls.
2) Southwestern landscape and colors.
3) My thoughts about my internal psychological barriers (the emotional equivalent to the physical walls and fences mentioned above).

My colors, my lines and my shapes are all influenced by these intense interests. The amount of openness in my work or the amount of “structure” is a result of my state of mind, what images (real and photos) I’ve recently viewed, what I’ve been thinking about and experiencing.

But in the end my goal is to make work that is beautiful to me. Proportion is something I’m striving to get perfect. To me this is beauty. And it is so incredibly hard to acheive this perfect proportion with piecing because everything shifts and moves and in the end it’s not exactly what I thought it would be but as I work on my skills and my eye it gets better and better.

I love the challenge of refining my skills as I love the process, I love the results, I love everything about piecing. I love that it is so hard to get perfect as it keeps me engaged in the process. Sure sometimes it is frustrating but I never think about looking for an “easier” option. [oops that was an aside - back to the topic of meaningful art...]

I don’t purposefully go to my studio and say “I’m going to make a work about a canyon wall I photographed yesterday” or “I’m going to make a piece that is about when my friend did X and how I felt about it”. I go to my studio to make art that I love and to make the very best art I can. For me the work is very much an instinctive reaction to my world, abstracted into beautiful proportions that make me feel good when I view the art.

In the end my thoughts and feelings are poured out into the work and some people can really connect. Some to the southwest landscapes, some to the internal barriers, some to the fences. Some to something they see entirely differently than I might ever think. I know much of my work has sadness in it. Some happiness. I think some folks pick up on that. Some don’t. Not everyone is going to connect to my work, but it is very rewarding when folks do respond.

But in the end the most important thing is that it have meaning for me.