Lisa Call

ACEO from Structures #48    ©2007 Lisa Call    3.5" x 2.5"

 
I made the above ACEO with a left over section from Structures #48, shown in the previous post.

 
ACEO stands for “art cards, editions and originals”. Originally known as ATC, Artist Trading Card, and are traded between artists. When sold to the public they are referred to as ACEOs. The primary rule for an ACEO or ATC is they be 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ – the size of a trading card. They are created in many different mediums and are collectible, trade able and affordable art for everyone.

 
My original thought was to sell ACEOs on etsy but my enthusiasm for that project didn’t last long. I put quite a bit of time and energy into my etsy shop doing internal promotion and even joined a couple of etsy street teams. I made 2 sales from my shop, both from people that knew me from outside of etsy. Lots of nice comments about my work from within etsy but no sales. I think my prices don’t fit into the cheaper pricing structure of much of etsy. It was an interesting experiment but not one I will pursue once my listings expire.

Etsy just didn’t feel like the right fit for me. First problem is I really can’t get over the name of the place, it really bothers me for some reason. Second was I felt like I was selling my work at a craft fair and while there is nothing wrong with craft fairs, that is not the venue I envision for my work.

When I restructure my website I plan to include prices for my small works to sell directly from my website. I believe that etsy isn’t going to bring me buyers. They are just providing a store front so paying a fee to a 3rd party for a place to host my images doesn’t make sense for my needs, especially if I’m competing against a bunch of folks that seriously undercut my prices.
 

The above ACEO is available for $20 (includes shipping). Sold – thanks Kit!

I made 2 or 3 other ACEOs and I will get them photographed and on my blog over the next few weeks. They were fun to make but pretty time consuming so I’m not sure I’ll make many more. It’s a very small format and quite a challenge for me. I was thinking about trying something in the 5" x 7" size range but it’ll be a few months before I have time to experiment as I have some show deadlines coming up.

 
It was my post about pokemon cards the other day that prompted me to remember I made these little art trading cards. I spent hours and hours mailing out trading cards. Sadly many of those little pieces of cardboard were sold for much higher prices than my original art work. The most impressive profit we turned was to head to toysRus one day and stand in line for 20 minutes to get a much anticipated promotional Mew card. I turned around and sold mine that week on ebay for $50. Not bad pay for standing around.
 

ACEOs – the pokemon cards for artists!

Back Side of ACEO:

Structures #48    ©2007    48" x 64"

 
I mentioned last month I will have a piece in the The Blogger Show in New York City. In conjunction with this show there will be work shown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at several galleries. I will have the above piece, Structures #48, at The Blogger Show at Digging Pitt Gallery.

The show runs from November 10 – January 12 with a public reception on December 8, 2007 from 6-9pm. I’m still not sure if I will be able to attend this opening or the one in NYC but I’m thinking about it.

Digging Pitt Gallery began Digging Pittsburgh Arts in June 2006. The experience has been enriching for the gallery. Through active participation in the art-blogging community, Digging Pitt has brought new artists to the flat file archive, with results like the Pittsburgh Alumni show, and now, the Blogger Show.

The artists in the exhibits represent a range of visual disciplines and aesthetics. The one commonality is actively blogging. Some use blogging as a platform for discussing issues facing visual artists while others treat the blog as a public journal. Whatever approach or combination of approaches, all have brought a level of clarity to artistic discourse.

You can read more about these shows on the Blogger Show blog.

List of artists that will have work at Digging Pitt during this show:

Martin Bromirski (Richmond VA) – Anaba
Sharon Butler (Mystic, CT) – Two Coats of Paint
Lisa Call (Parker, CO) – New Work and Inspiration
Rose Clancy (Pittsburgh, PA) – paperWorks
Kevin Clancy (Boston MA and Pittsburgh PA) – soft pink pulls through the ivory void
Warren Craghead – drawer
Ann Gordon (Detroit MI) – Detroitarts
Cable Griffith (Seattle WA) – Cable Griffith
Tracy Helgeson (upstate NY) – Works by Tracy Helgeson
Stephanie Lee Jackson (Brooklyn NY) – Pretty Lady
JT Kirkland (Washington, D.C.) – Thinking About Art
Mary Klein (Minneapolis, MN) – stillifes
Eva Lake (Portland, OR) – Eva Lake
Steven LaRose (Ashland OR) – Steven LaRose
Michael Lease (Richmond VA) – Annabelle’s Aspirin
John Morris (Pittsburgh, PA) – Digging Pittsburgh Arts
Elizabeth Perry (Pittsburgh, PA) – Woolgathering
Marc Snyder (Pittsburgh, PA) – Fiji Island Mermaid Press

Digging Pitt Gallery
4417 Butler St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15201
p 412.605.0450

 
Abstract Contemporary Textile Art

Thanks to everyone for their ideas on what I might call my work. I’ve been hunting around the internet and thinking about different words and I’ve decided on Textile Art and more specifically Abstract Contemporary Textile Art as the noun to describe what it is I make. I thought about Abstract Contemporary Textiles but it seemed a bit too nondescript. While I would prefer not to use the word "art" in the description of the noun for my work it has advantages on the internet for search engines so I will go with it.

If forced to pick I would categorize my work as Mixed Media. I’ve always considered my work mixed media because it is comprised of 3 very different components/processes/mediums. The first being the dyeing of the textiles to create the colors and designs in the fabric I use in my work.

The second is the composition that is similar to collage, using textiles instead of papers or other found objects. I cut my hand dyed fabric into the shapes I want and instead of gluing them together I sew them together.

The third component is the stitching which is very similar to drawing, only with thread. I don’t consider my work complete without the stitching and when you see my work in person it is more obvious the important role the texture lends to the piece.

This is one reason I love my methods for creating art – dyes, fabric, thread, drawing, collage and sometimes beads/buttons. There is so much variety in the process and the materials – I’m never bored.

 

Structures #48 – Stitching Detail    ©2007

 
The last few months I have been really trying to focus on the positive things in life instead of the negative. I came to the realization that spending time and energy on negative is a good way to invite more negative and that I was spending way too much time talking about and thinking about yuck. Focusing on the positive and things I’d like to be seems like a better way to reach my goals.

Things don’t always go well and sometimes they are just downright horrible and I acknowledge the need to recognize, experience and learn from these situations. I’m just looking to not dwell on them anymore.

On the art side of things my goal for the year of securing some solo shows after 2008 is not going so well. I got yet another reject letter in the mail today from a small art center. While I haven’t sent as many proposals as I had hoped I’m doing my best to not let this discourage me. I have 2 solos in 2008 that I set up last year and I know good things will happen if I keep working.

I’m using this experience to rethink my plan for my art career. As I get rejection letters from small unknown art centers I’ve been thinking about how this step in my overall process really fits into my final goal. While I’m not yet ready to abandon this plan I am thinking my approach needs revamped and I need to really understand if this is a direction I want to go. More and more I have been thinking that finding gallery representation might be a better use of my time.

I’ll continue out as planned for the year but next year I might refocus my energy somewhere else.

I have found that while I’m bummed when a rejection letter arrives it doesn’t bother me for very long. Sure, it’s not fun to get rejected, but focusing on the negatives seems so counter productive. Maybe I’m disconnected from reality but I don’t feel these rejects in any way is an indication of the quality and value of my work. Maybe it’s all the good things that also have been happening that allows me to just keep moving forward.

Yesterday I got a call from the Arvada Center for Arts and Humanities. I will be part of a holiday art market at the center this december and they’ve decided to include an image of one of my pieces on the invitation.

When they called to ask me what to put down for the medium I knew I didn’t want to say  fiber/quilt  as I normally do and since I’ve not yet settled on what to call my work now that I’ve decided that the word quilt has to go I ask it be marked  mixed media/textiles . I need to come to a decision on this as I have plans to restructure my website and all my marketing materials once I pick a term I like.

I believe that finally stepping out of the quilt world and completely embracing the art world will help to really propel my art career forward. The first step is the terminology. Anyone have any suggestions?

 
The above picture was taken at Ghost Ranch in 2000. It’s not necessarily related to this post but I wanted something a bit more interesting to look at after the pokemon card the other day.

In 1999 I took my first art class with Nancy Crow here in Colorado. I loved the workshop and knew I wanted to continue to study with this instructor so I kept an eye out for future workshop opportunities.

Although I would be leaving for a 5 month sabbatical in New Zealand in November of 2000, I discovered that Nancy would be teaching 2 weeks of classes at Ghost Ranch in October of 2000. As I mentioned a few days ago, I grew up in Northern New Mexico and was thrilled with the prospect of returning to the area for a workshop.

Problem was I had no money. I was a stay at home mom with no income and no desire to get a job and finding $2000-$2500 for the workshop seemed rather unlikely, especially with the expenses of the sabbatical to consider. But I was determined and signed up for the workshop in early 2000 without a plan on how to pay. I knew it was important for me as an artist to take this class.

At the time, I also had an 7 year old son that was crazy for pokemon cards. Although my son wasn’t interested in just collecting the cards, he loved to play the game. I went with him and played pokemon with all the kids at the card shop and toysRus twice a week. I wasn’t comfortable leaving him for 3 hours with thirty to forty 10-14 year olds and actually it’s a pretty fun game so I didn’t mind. We quickly became some of the best players in town, mostly because I spent hours every week reading pojo’s pokemon website.

Problem is pokemon is more expensive than Nancy Crow workshops. Having the best decks meant buying lots of cards to find the best cards. Whoever invented trading card games was brilliant. It quickly became clear that we couldn’t afford to play pokemon at $3.49 for 11 cards.

So I started selling pokemon cards on ebay. I’d buy in bulk, keep the best cards for playing and sell off the the rest on ebay. I started turning a profit, not a large one and I was barely making minimum wage but over the course of the year I managed to save up enough money to pay for the Ghost Ranch workshop, while at the same time becoming a hero to my son.

The workshop at Ghost Ranch was everything I had hoped for and I’ve gone on to take 6 or 7 more workshops with Nancy. I don’t believe I would be where I am today without the inspiration I gained from these classes.

In addition, during the summer of 2000 my son came in first place in a qualifier pokemon tournament and he won a free trip to California to compete in the first national pokemon Super Trainer Showdown aboard the Queen Mary. He did great and beamed the entire time. I didn’t do so bad myself in the 16+ age group until I dropped out because he wanted to go eat crab instead.

Sadly pokemon at our house came to an end not long after our return from New Zealand, my son lost some interest as the game changed and he grew older. He’s now moved on to playing Magic the Gathering and is again doing well competing against older kids and adults, although now I just drop him off at the card shop because today instead of being a hero for hanging out with him, at 15 he’d die of embarrassment if I joined him.

We do play Magic at home. He can beat me pretty much every time as he’s now spending hours online playing and reading about strategies, but I no longer buy and sell cards to keep him in his habit. He has to win the weekly games at the card shop to get more cards.

Although I bet I could still beat him in pokemon. I rocked. I wonder where my wigglytuff deck went…

Structures #36    ©2005    69" x 50"

Fiberart International 2007 opened at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, North Carolina, last weekend and will run through February 24th, 2008.

I was happy to see a mention of my work in the review of Fiberart International in the Charlotte Observer by Richard Mascal.

American artist Lisa Call’s “Structures #36″ makes a reference to abstract painting from the ’50s.

Someone posted a similar comment on my blog a few months back suggesting I enter my show in the modernism show held here in Denver (I had plans to enter this but life got in the way and the in person delivery/pick up times didn’t work in my schedule). Interesting – I love to hear what others see in my work.

If you are in the area the hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. For more information check out their website: themintmuseums.org

There is also an additional website with more information about Fiberart International here. It includes links to artists websites and a list of resources.

Before I started working my day job and before I got super focused on my art career I used to read 4 or 5 books a month. Mostly at night, reading an hour or 2 before bed. These days I’m reading only reading about 15 minutes a night. Although some nights I’m too tired to even open the book and on a rare occasion I can stay awake a half hour.

I’m reading fewer and fewer books so a few years back I decided to focus on reading art books, mostly artist biographies. I’m really enjoying these books but I was missing the variety of books I used to read. I didn’t want to prioritize more time for reading so added books on tape to not miss out on the latest best seller. I listen to these in my studio when I’m working at a task that doesn’t require a lot of movement and thought.

Designing and assembling my compositions is a lot of up and down between my sewing machine, iron, design wall and cutting table and I have to think about where I cut the fabric to get the effect I want so I find I can’t concentrate enough to listen to a book. I either miss large chunks of the book or I make mistakes that are time consuming to fix. I sometimes listen to music and sometimes not during this part of my process.

Stitching together the layers of my final piece requires hours and hours of zen like repetition. A perfect time to listen to books. I’ve been spending 40-100 hours a month finishing a backlog of work in this manner so I’ve listened to a lot of books recently. My library has an amazing collection so I don’t think I’ll run out of good choices anytime soon but if anyone has suggestions for good books please leave me a comment and I’ll check it out.

Having just finished the Georgia O’Keeffe memoir last night next up on my art reading list is another O’Keeffe biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life by Roxana Robinson. It gets good reviews so I’m looking forward to it.

 
I also still need to finish Matisse The Master by Hilary Spurling. I only have about 100 pages left so I will get back to it soon. I am enjoying this book, but it is a bit dry and tends to put me to sleep fairly quickly. I probably need a few hours of time when the sun is up to finish the book.

 
 
But first I’m going to take a break from art related books and read Life on the Refrigerator Door: Notes Between a Mother and Daughter by Alice Kuipers. I put it on hold at the library and it just came up. It seemed to be a book that would lose something listened to on tape and looks like it’ll only take about 30 minutes to read so I should be back to O’Keeffe soon.

 
My favorite book on tape recently has been Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. While I had issues with some parts of the book (you can read some criticisms of it on amazon). I didn’t let the flaws get in the way of the captivating story. The author read the book so more of her personality came through in the reading and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s on my list of books to listen to again if I run out of ideas for other books, not likely to happen soon as I just returned from the library with 7 more books to listen to.

I guess this means I should get to the studio. Unfortunately tonight that isn’t an option, I’ve got to put in some overtime for the day job, and listening to books on tape while writing requirements doesn’t work out so well, for either the book or the requirements.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s House at Ghost Ranch
 

This weekend I finished reading Anita Pollitzer’s memoir about Georgia O’Keeffe, A Woman On Paper. I very much enjoyed Pollitzer’s personal view of O’Keeffe and found it a refreshing and enjoyable read after attempting to get through the rather dense biography of Matisse, Matisse The Master, by Hilary Spurling.

It wasn’t until yesterday I remembered I toured O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu, New Mexico in 2000.

I spent two weeks at Ghost Ranch in the fall of 2000 attending an art workshop and I went with some classmates down to Abiquiu for the tour. While fascinating, it was also a bit weird to be traipsing through and gawking at someone’s personal life. Not much had been done to the house and what really stuck in my mind was they showed us the container with the tea leaves for the tea she drank daily, kinda weird to me they still had it 14 years after her death (how long does tea keep?).

The house is no longer open for tours so it was a wonderful opportunity to see how a talented and focused artist lived, but I always remember it as a bit creepy also.

Many of us in the class also drove over to look at the area around O’Keeffe’s house at Ghost Ranch, which has never been open for tours. The above picture is her house and the amazing view she had. The best piece of land at Ghost Ranch in my opinion.

Below was O’Keeffe’s view of El Pedernal, which she often painted, from the house.

How can one not make amazing art surrounded by such stunning colors and landscape. I’d move back to Northern New Mexico in a heartbeat if I won the lottery. I grew up in Los Alamos, only 40 miles from Abiquiu and I very much miss the southwestern scenery.

 

El Pedernal as seen from Georgia O’Keeffe’s House at Ghost Ranch

 
When I was a kid, I knew Ghost Ranch as the Ghost Ranch Living Museum and they had a lot of desert animals like a zoo. I’m not sure I spent much time appreciating the scenery but animals were very cool as they were in small cages and very close and scary: wolves, mountain lions, snakes and I’ll never forget the gila monster, ick.

Although my favorite spot on the drive past Ghost Ranch was Echo amphitheater just up the road from the animals. Definitely a place to visit if you are in Northern New Mexico.

 

Echo Amphitheater

 
I took the above pictures in Ohio in May at sunrise.

I love this barn. Lines, shapes, history, colors.

 
I’m happy to report I got my work photographed, images processed and my entry form for the juried show ready to mail as I set for my goal for today. Now I’m off to my studio for an hour. It’s been a productive but relaxed day. Very nice.

This past weekend I flew to Arizona to visit with my dad. I spent much of the time sewing beads onto a small art piece that I have been working on for at least a year with no end in sight (more on that project someday). It was great to see my dad and it was nice to take a break from my normal activity packed weekends and relax with some hand stitching.

I got up at 4am monday morning to be back to Denver by 9am for a full day of work. This month is extremely busy at work as I pull together requirements for a brand new product and 4 subprojects. Lots of writing, meetings, organizing, more meetings, etc. I’ve got some extremely ambitious deadlines that are going to require overtime to complete by Sept 24.

By evening I was exhausted so I bailed out of working in my studio or on my studio newsletter and instead went to see the movie Bourne Ultimatum. I went to bed at 8:30pm after a delicious dinner of Maggie Moo ice cream (coconut ice cream with dark chocolate flakes mixed in – kinda like a frozen mounds bar).

I woke up this morning with thoughts of getting myself organized and back to work. Instead this was my day:

• Wake up at 5am.
• Shower, yoga, pack up stuff needed for work.
• Work in studio 1.5 hours.
• Eat a healthy breakfast of whole grain cereal and skim milk while I read wikipedia pages on previous Bourne movies to try to figure out the movie from last night. Discover I’m not the only one that thinks the camera work is over the top on shaky jitteryness.
• Realize I’m wasting time. Back to the studio for another half hour.
• Leave for work at 8:15am, stop at library and post office.
• Decide I need a treat – stop at LaMars for some devils food cake donuts (and an apple spice just for good measure). Yum. So much for my healthy breakfast.
• Meetings, meetings and more meetings about how our project is organized and why we should do it another way.
• Work through lunch instead of going for planned walk.
• I am tasked with finding a solution to our poor organization (my reward for being the first to point out the problem).
• Work late getting ready for morning meeting to attempt to solve organizational problem.
• Order some brand new tofu lettuce wraps for pickup from my favorite local thai restaurant on my way home.
• Eat dinner and sort through a weeks worth of mail. It was all junk.
• All thoughts of working in my studio or writing an article for my newsletter are gone.
• Find last piece of left over chocolate zuchinni cake in freezer.
• Nuke cake and eat while I read articles on Operation Treadstone and other useless topics on wikipedia. Do I really need to know the operatives in a CIA operation that only exists in the movies?
• Realize I’m being seriously nonproductive and there are better options for non productivity.
• Take 1 hour bath and relax. Delicious. The weather cooled off for a few days. This is my first bath in months as I lack a desire to sit in hot water when it’s 95 degrees out.
• Emerge refreshed but still not motivated to doing something productive.
• Write this blog post instead.
• Spend too much time editing post.
• Finally go to bed with my manager’s mantra repeating in my head ‘perfect is the enemy of finished’ or something like that.

Plan is to get more motivated tomorrow.

I need to limit my daily goals outside of the day job to at most 2 until I complete my deadline at work at the end of this month. When I think about my todo list (pick garden veggies, pay bills, unpack, mow yard, finish newsletter, enter juried shows, work in studio, etc…) I can get a bit overwhelmed when work is taking up so much of my brain. When I slow down at home during these times it’s much more manageable and I am less likely to just give up and read wikipedia articles about things I’m not really interested it.

Tomorrow the plan is to enter a juried show I’d like to enter. This will require photographing new artwork, processing the images and filling out the form – about 2 hours of work – easily doable. If I find time for more, great, if not at least I’m making forward progress and I will be happy to cross an item off my todo list.

I rarely run into situations where work is so demanding that it interferes with what I consider my real life, which is why I love my job. I need to just go with the flow when it happens.

That and stop eating so much junk food. Back to garden veggies tomorrow. While a nice treat, ice cream, donuts and chocolate cake are not exactly going to keep my brain working. At least the lettuce wraps were healthy (kinda, if you ignore the fried inside parts).

Chairs #16: Canyon Layers – Tonto Platform
©2003    6.5" x 6.5"
Private Collection

Chairs #17: Canyon Layers – Red Wall
©2003    6.5" x 6.5"
Private Collection

 
The last 2 evenings have been a bit frustrating for me as I’ve worked long hours trying to write my first studio newsletter. I can sit down and write out a blog post in just a few minutes but for some reason the text for the newsletter isn’t flowing as easily. I’ve clearly psyched myself out thinking it needs to be different or perfect.

Instead of writing the text I’ve been tweaking the formatting. Email applications like outlook, eudora and thunderbird aren’t browsers but they have to act as one when an html formated email arrives. Then there are the browser based email applications such as gmail and yahoo. They strip out all of the header information in such emails. All styles have to be inline and css positioning doesn’t work well, so lots of nested tables and repeated style tags making the source file hard to read.

Basically it’s a bit of a pain to get things to look good in an email and one can spend hours and hours perfecting the layout so it works in all browsers, email programs, etc. Normal people would use a template or software program and not worry about this, being a software engineer I hand code all of my html and css, which clearly at times is a very big liability.

While that was maybe a bit technical the point is I’m wasting my time and getting sidetracked by technology (something I find very easy) instead of concentrating on the content of my newsletter.

Solution – tonight I’m going to just work in my studio and forget the newsletter. After a day or 2 break I’m hoping I’ll find the right focus again.

 
I realized when I posted the series of Grand Canyon quilts last month I forgot the 2 small studies that I made during that period. The two pieces above could easily be in my Structures series but back in 2003 they ended up falling into my Chairs series, which I will post more about someday.

Chairs #16 is in a private collection, traded for a wonderful piece by another textile artist, but Chairs #17: Canyon Layers – Red Wall is available for purchase for $75.00. is sold.

These two pieces were some of my very first pieces working with thin lines. The start of something I still haven’t tired of 4 years later.