Lisa Call

Months ago I said I would post a photo of structures #7. I put it off and then the traveling show that it is included in, Elements from the Front Range Contemporary Quilters, got a (much deserved) bad semi-public review on a very large art quilt mailing list a month ago. You can read Rayna Gillman’s thoughts about the show on her blog in this post.

So now I have more to say about this quilt and am glad I waited.

First the quilt – then the comments.

 
Structures #7 ©2001    28"x30":

 
This quilt was made while I lived in New Zealand for 5 months in 2001. You can read more about that wonderful time in this post.

I would spend many hours sitting at the beach watching the seaweed float and shift as the water would surge up and down smashing the plant against the rocks. I found it rather hypnotic.

This quilt doesn’t quite capture the motion but I really love the colors and the shapes and it brings me back to that time. It is an abstraction of the real thing and but that is what my art is about: capturing the essence of moments, thoughts and feelings that are important to me. What others read into the work is also wonderful. The structures series is about walls and fences, so I’m not sure how the seaweed snuck in but it’s okay with me.

So on to the criticisms of this show. These comments were made by a contemporary art collector that saw this show in the company of an art quilter. His major criticisms were that most of the works in this travelling exhibit didn’t demonstrate good design and the maker didn’t display mastery of their technique.

I’ve seen this show in person and I think his comments are valid. I found the show to be rather poor and it got a lukewarm reception when it opened in Colorado in 2003. Bad group quilt shows are a topic for another time, this post is about Structures #7.

I’m embarrassed by this piece. While I like the design of the quilt top and think it’s an okay design (not great, nothing spectacular but not bad), the quilting on this quilt is terrible. I knew it was bad. Yet I entered it in a show anyway. It definitely indicates to the viewer that I have no mastery of my technique. Ugh – I pride myself on my craftmenship and I have noone to blame but myself for this.

Detail – I think it looks like a 4 year old tried to quilt this piece – it’s sloppy:

This was a failed attempt to try to speed up the amount of time it takes to quilt a piece by using a short cut (I was trying to do straight line quilting with the feed dogs down – which means I had less control of the machine – I’m not very good at this and I should have done a test piece – realized it was bad and tossed it and then quilted this piece in my normal way.)

I think back and wonder why I entered this into a national travelling exhibit. Best I could come up with is because I lacked the foresight to consider that this quilt is travelling around the country for several years representing me and all art quilters as a work of art. At the time I was entering too many juried shows and saved my newest and best work for shows that wouldn’t put the work "out of circulation" for 3-4 years. I entered my older, less successful, pieces in this show.

I now realize how short sighted and really rather stupid that decision was. This travelling show is going to museums where I am represented by substandard work. The juried shows that I thought I needed to save the good work for are now long over and forgotten.

Part of me believes this was a good example of being too tied up into the product and not the process of making art. Ed Maskovish recently posted about perfection on his blog and I think had I learned the lesson his instructor was trying to teach them about growth I wouldn’t have made this mistake. I let the quilt be too precious even after I ruined it with the quilting.

I know when the quilt returns home in a few years it will not see the light of day again unless I fix it.

The only redeeming thought about this mistake is that these quilts were made prior to my divorce so they have my married name on them. So hopefully noone will make the connection!

But it still reflects badly on all art quilts. I think showing no work is better than showing bad work if we truly want art quits to be accepted as fine art.

Yesterday at work we had our annual summer party. I’ve been through 2 huge corporate takeover the past few years and the quality of the parties varies each year. This year it was decidedly low key. By this I mean low budget.

We went to a baseball game. In the 90+ degree heat.

I don’t much like baseball.

Or heat.

So I took along my sketchbook because I think sitting at a ballgame sounded like more fun than staying back at work writing requirements. For new readers, I’m learning how to draw, it’s a slow process given my other time commitments but in the sidebar in the category "7. Another What – Drawings" you can track my progress over the last 7 or 8 months.

Here is the stadium from where we were sitting. You might say we didn’t have very good seats. There were 2 or 3 rows behind me but after that I think the next stop was pluto (if that is still a planet). And I must say it’s been a while since I’ve done any drawing. And somewhere in the middle I lost the US Bank building (a coworker pointed this out – good eyes) and for some reason the box seats behind home plate have drifted off to the right. But it was fun and good to get the pencils out again.

 
Looking around for something else to sketch the back side of the huge screen (which we could not see but I’m sure it had highly entertaining information on it) was very appealing.

If this is what I want to sketch it’s not too surprising my quilts are called “Structures”.

 
After this an adorable 4-5 year old girl came over and asked me if I was an artist and told me she could draw a racoon. So I had her demonstrate:

Then she drew me a rat, a possum (she’s seen a dead one), a horse with her riding it, 2 cats (one is fat with some dirt on it), a skunk (her dad runs over them often in their car), the baseball diamond (drawn as 2 triangles back to back), a rainbow and the sun.

All of her animals only had 1 ear. And she would have kept going all afternoon. But fortunately a few raindrops fell and I took it as an opportunity to bail out of the team building event and head home.

 
I enjoy the organic patterns of the water juxtaposed with the straight lines of the deck and the reflection of the rail posts.

I’m also really happy to see the water beading on the deck instead of soaking into the wood and ruining it. Yahoo – I got my deck restained before it rained again.

I read the following quote over on Anna L. Conti’s blog about intelligence and creativity:

Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better – logic, feats of memory, and so on. but if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes.

This is from the book Alchemy of Mind: the Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, by Diane Ackerman.

I think this is utterly ridiculous. I’m not sure what kind of studies she is quoting in her book but my IQ doesn’t fall within that range. While some folks might not think I’m creative, I certainly don’t feel that the door of creativity has been shut for me. I know a lot of higher IQ folks that are extremely creative. And I’m neither qualified nor feel compelled to make a judgment about the other end of the scale.

Based on the reviews over on amazon (most notably the one titled “A Beautiful Disappointment”) I suspect the validity of the sited studies are questionable.

I did a quick internet search on the topic and this was the best I could come up with:

A quality related to both intelligence and giftedness is creativity, which can be defined as the ability to produce valued outcomes in a novel way. Creativity is related to intelligence, but the correlation is far from perfect. In general, intelligence in a particular area seems to be a necessary condition for creativity but not a sufficient one. Individuals with IQs below 120 are less likely to display creative thinking than those with a higher IQ, but above 120, the correlation between intelligence and creativity is essentially zero.

from Psychology: Mind, Brain, & Culture, by Drew Westen. This quote supports the lower threshold but not the upper limit Ms. Ackerman mentions. I couldn’t find any references to support the upper number online but I’ve put her book on hold at the library and am curious to see her quote in context and hopefully with references.

 
On a related note (and really the main point of this post – to brag about my kids – I just need an intro): the past 2 weeks my kids were attending a camp at a college campus for gifted and talented kids. They lived in the dorms and took several classes in a wide variety of topics from music, to physics (my son built a hover craft with a leaf blower), to history, to social science, to art. It’s an amazing opportunity and while my kids also don’t fall within that narrow limit (nor do many of the kids attending this camp) they displayed a tremendous amount of creativity, which I got to enjoy friday afternoon at the parent showcase.

My daughter (10) took a landscape painting class as one of her 4 classes. This is her landscape – it’s a rain drop. She was the only one not to do a traditional landscape. Creative or not I think she’s awesome:

Raindrop 18" x 24"

One of my son’s classes (almost 14) was about brains. In addition to powerpoint presentations on some very intelligent (and generally creative!) folks and many other activities they also did the traditional exercise of coming up with a list of words that exemplify and spell out the words Creative and Critical. Again, I think he’s amazingly creative.

Critical:

This morning I read a post by Cathy Kleeman about something she calls the "wow factor", basically something in a piece of artwork that can take the viewer’s breath away.

I also read a post by Ed Maskevich about accidents when making art. Many are good and we’d like to have such happy accidents often. Great post, worth the read.

As I worked in my studio all day to day I was thinking that maybe these 2 posts are related. Harnessing the accidents and learning from them so as to be able to reproduce them. Could that be a large part of the wow factor?

I designed 4 new quilts over the last 4 days. I think the first two definitely have the wow factor and I’m very pleased with them. The remaining two are less than exciting. One isn’t bad but there is nothing great, good composition, great colors, but still, it looks like an exercise. The final piece is not going to be finished. It’s not worth the effort.

These days if work isn’t good enough I don’t finish it and just toss it. I can always dye more fabric so nothing lost. I’d rather start fresh than try to fix something that is inherently broken because it places such artificial restrictions on the art – ie reusing the same pieces of fabric, shapes, etc.

I think I tried too hard on the last two pieces (the ones that weren’t so good). The first 2 flowed so naturally I was psyched thinking I could make a few more. I think when this happens I invariably make crap. I need to slow down and try to harness what I’ve learned over the years from those "happy accidents".

I don’t think all growth in art is about accidents, there is a lot of deliberate hard work I put into thinking about what direction I want to go. But I do think the accidents are a part of it, remembering them and learning from them is the trick.

And so I’ve started my 3rd sketch book, or idea book, or whatever you want to call it. I tend to work from my head most of the time (or designs and ideas I doodle at during boring meetings at work) but I have thoughts I want to capture and remember so I pulled out a fresh clean book and wrote a few notes.

Time to harness more of those accidents – and deliberate thoughts about where I’m going with my work.

Omega has a post today that I could really relate to. Work and life have been overwhelming lately but this chorus line from Anthem really speaks to me:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Thanks Omega!

 
I designed 2 new quilts yesterday so today I’m hoping to get at least 1 sewn together and possibly both. I have some house stuff to do also – I have to stain my decks again or all that work last summer to sand them will be for nothing. Ugh – home ownership – check out Omega’s post linked above – the first image certainly captures my struggle with this house!

Last night I overdyed some fabric from last week and added in a few more yards. I think between the 2 dye sessions I dyed about 70 yards of fabric. It’s all pressed and folded and ready to make some new work.

I love having a pile of brand new colors waiting for me. I find I have a million ideas about how I can use them. Every dye session is different because I don’t use recipes. I do control what colors I make but not with exact precision and a lot of time when I mix some of my dyes the results are rather unexpected. Pulling the newly washed fabric out of the dryer is like getting a wonderful gift.

I have today and tomorrow off work so I’ll have lots of time in my studio to make new work and finish up old stuff. I’m most excited. I finished up the dyeing and cleaned up my studio this morning so now I’m ready to start designing and piecing new work with all those yummy new colors.

 
Some color from my gardens this morning…

My ex husband is a computer science professor and a few years ago he was tasked with figuring out how to increase enrollment for his department. With off shoring of our technology jobs fewer and fewer people are going into computer science as a major. Hard to blame them if there are no jobs. But it will be a travesty for this country if the decline continues as we will surely lose our technological edge.

But that is beside the point of this post. What my rather clever ex came up with for the solution was to create a new degree program for game development, with a focus on socially conscious gaming. Denver University is one of only two or three universities in the country to offer such a degree (although more are jumping on the bandwagon).

The degree program is a joint program between Computer Science and Art and Digital Media Studies. The students must take classes in all departments. The Art and Computer Science departments working together, when I was a grad/undergrad in computer science 15-20 years ago this was a concept that noone would have ever considered.

I think it’s very cool. More information is on the University website. The program is in it’s first year and it has been successful in increasing enrollment.

In addition to the degree program they also started a summer game camp for high school kids with a focus on outreach to at risk kids. My ex is a good guy (read the article for details), but better as an ex than husband.

I was having a discussion with some artist friends about making art and a common thread through the conversation is that basically making art is a lot of work and it can be extremely time consuming.

So why do we do it?

After putting in 40 hours a week at the day job there are many many days I come home and think life would be so much easier if I didn’t care – if I could just pull a few weeds in the garden, make a nice dinner, go for a walk, see a movie or maybe plop down in front of the tv like 95% of the country. Why do I have a drive to have something more in my life?

But when I try not to focus on the art I’m so incredibly unhappy – it’s just so boring for me. Even though life is frenzied I’m so much happier when I devote time to my art. It’s the process of creating that keeps me going.

But how in the world can you explain this to someone else? Friends think I’m nuts. I think some times I’m obsessed and it’s a bad thing. But is it really?

One of the things I finished over the weekend was a small piece that I have been carrying around and working on here and there over the last year. I do the hand stitching while waiting for kids or on a rare occasion at home when I’m in the mood to just sit and relax and do nothing. Since I don’t have a TV this is my level of mindless entertainment.

The last of these small hand stitched pieces I completed was Squares #3, posted here. It takes me about a year to make each of these pieces. I don’t make them for any reason other than I really enjoy doing the hand stitching. And it keeps me occupied while waiting at the orthodontist office.

(The image was taken with flash as it was too soggy to take photos outdoors this morning. I’ll have to retake them later as the glare from the flash on the embroidery floss makes it look kind of odd.)

Squares #4 ©2006
9" x 11"

I doubt anyone will recognize the colors in this piece but they are the same fabrics (plus or minus a couple) that I used in the piece below and posted a while back. I really like this color combination.

Structures #44 © 2005
28" x 28"

 
It stopped raining this morning and the sun came out, although it’s looking like rain again this evening. At least my airconditioning bill will be low for the week. This morning it was foggy and damp and I took a couple pictures of my garden. It doesn’t look dry and Colorado-y – definitely unusual for around here.

This first garden is my veggie garden. The front part has about 30 tomato plants and the back has green beans, cucumbers, squash and beets and maybe something else. I’m having serious deer problems this year and they keep munching my tomato and strawberry plants. It’s very annoying. I haven’t gotten a single strawberry all year.

 
The second image is my herb garden. The front part is being taken over by oregano. This used to be a second veggie garden but with the day job I no longer have time to deal with 2 large gardens. So the last few years I didn’t water this garden and it was a weed bed – only the oregano survived, barely – this year it got water and went crazy. My neighbors are thrilled I cleaned it up and put in stepping stones, mulch and some more herbs and flowers.

Although the deer have eaten most of the flowers. I love pansies but apparently so do they. I never had problems before, I’m not sure why they feel a need to munch my stuff this year. Anyone know a way to get rid of them without a fence (or a gun)?

I will eventually add more herbs and flowers but this year I planted watermelon in the empty space. We really don’t have a long enough growing season for watermelon but I thought with global warming and all I’d give it a try. I have 2 tiny baby watermelons on there right now.