Lisa Call

Markings #14    ©2007    35"x37"

Two weeks ago I posted a list of projects I needed to complete by the Nov 25. My progress to date:

• Complete 6-9 small pieces for the Arvada Center Holiday Art show. Completed!
• Deal with paperwork for several upcoming shows, including preparing some images for catalogs. Completed!
• Buy christmas presents. We had a wonderful Christmas last week.
• Write and review requirement documents for 3 projects. Completed!
• Attend another memorial service for my father next weekend. It was a warm and comforting service with family and friends that knew him growing up.
• Sleep I slept lots over turkey day weekend - what a treat to have 4 days in a row to sleep late, which is making this week particularly brutal when the alarm goes off at 5:30am.

The 2 things I didn’t have to get done got pushed back but now the pressure is on to get these finished.

• Start a blog for the group show I’m curating next spring.I’m about half way done on the initial setup, although no rush since the show isn’t until next April we want to get our group blog up and running fairly soon.
• Make 10 quillows and help my daughter make 10+ pillows. This is painful, my daughter has little interest in this project and we need to have this done by thursday if possible. I’ve got 5 quillows nearly completed. Many many more hours to go.

So my goals for the next few weeks are to complete the above in addition to the following:

• Get back to putting in 20 hours a week in the studio - including this week. This will be a stretch but I’m tired of my life being so out of balance. Time in the studio with out time pressures and deadlines is where I recenter and it is much missed.
• Update my guild.com webpage. I’d like to submit new work as I’ve not had any luck selling the work on there yet. Time to add some new pieces.
• Ship some new small work to Lux Art Center. They shipped back my work I sent a while back, time to send some new pieces that they display in their fiber art classroom.
• Update my website. I have ideas for what to do but have not yet found the time to make it happen.
• Work no more than 40 hours a week at they day job. I put in enough overtime in November to buy me brownie points for a long time to come.

My plan is to wrap all of this up by Dec 11th as that day marks the beginning of a 3 month period that I plan to really focus on my art and my art business and get them into top shape. My kids are going to London and Spain with their dad for 3 months, leaving me with an empty nest. I’m excited for this opportunity for them but I will miss them a great deal, so I will focus on the art to make the experience as positive for me as possible.

 
The above piece I included in a post earlier this month about my Markings series and the image was terrible. I play around with the raw camera image in photoshop for a few minutes and figured out how to fix it . Hurray! Thanks to the commenter that left some tips on things to try to fix things.

Structures #90    ©2007    12"x12"

 
This morning I finished the final 2 pieces for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market.

Structures #91    ©2007    12"x12"

 
I had my kids help me pick an arrangement of the 9 pieces and we decided on the one below. Both made comments about the work not looking like my normal work with the earth tones. I thought about doing a few pieces in those colors but it didn’t feel right with the very geometric graphic designs. They lost their impact in softer colors.

Structures #90, Structures #86, Structures #85
Structures #87, Structures #88, Structures #81
Structures #89, Structures #91, Structures #82

 
I need to cut the boards and make tags for the work. The tags have to be attached to the work and visible. I’m thinking about printing the information on fabric and pinning it to the bottom edge so it hangs down below the work to minimize how much they interfere with the compositions. Then some paperwork and they are ready to deliver tomorrow, right on time, hurray. The show opens on Dec 6th.

I’ve already attached a sleeve to the back of each them. To hang I slip a wooden slat with holes drilled on each end through the sleeve, nails are put in the wall and the wooden slat is slid over the nails.

This is the back of Structures #89 where you can see the sleeve. The fabric on the back is a piece I painted and stamped with thickened dyes years ago. The backs of these small pieces were a good place to use this fabric that is too small for much else and not the type of thing I use in my artwork anymore.

Structures #88    ©2007    12"x12"

 
The 6th and 7th of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market.

Two more to go tomorrow and I’ll make my deadline.

Structures #89    ©2007    12"x12"

Structures #86    ©2007    12"x12"

 
The 4th and 5th of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market. I didn’t managed to make a piece on monday, tuesday or wednesday but finished #86 yesterday and #87 today. That now leaves me with 4 more pieces to complete before monday. It’s going to be a busy time the next few days.

Today I rephotographed the first 3 pieces posted earlier and they look much better. Amazing what a little day light can do. Although we’ve had snow most of today so the daylight has been pretty dim.

Back to the studio in hopes of getting 1 more finished this evening.

Structures #87    ©2007    12"x12"

Ransom ©1999

Yesterday my plan for posting 1 new piece a day came to an end. Not a very long streak - just 3 pieces finished. After working all day I spent the evening at school with my kids learning what the high school kids had learned about HIV/AIDS and listened to them debate proposals for US foreign policy for aid to Sub Saharan Africa for the AIDS pandemic. Very interesting and it didn’t leave any time for the studio.

This evening I spent shopping for the kids’ christmas presents. I even braved the mall, a very rare event, for some overpriced bubble bath. I think I better test it out before gifting it to my daughter (the sacrifices we make for our kids). Maybe after that I’ll head to the studio for a bit.

 
In the mean time I thought I’d give a shameless plug for my cafepress shop as black friday quickly approaches, although technically I should probably wait until cyber monday to post this but I needed filler given my failure to meet my 1 piece a day goal.

I only have 1 design available for sale on cafepress, the above piece, which is aimed at the quilt maker crowd. Quilters are notorious for they love of their fabric, and chocolate. Magnets, notecards, tshirts, etc are available.

I made this Ransom piece during a workshop years ago. We were doing some design exercises cutting up magazines and I finished early and got a little silly, so when it came time to work with the fabric we painted this seemed the obvious choice. The instructor did shrine type work, this is mine.

 
Goal tomorrow - post 2 new pieces and rephotograph the ones taken with a flash. We should be getting off work early tomorrow and since I plan on working from home I’ll be set to jump right to the studio when the email arrives.

Structures #85    ©2007    12"x12"

 
The third of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market.

I mentioned on friday that one of the pieces in this group of 9 I really loved, this one is it. While I like all of these small simple compositions, there is something about this one that makes me very happy. The proportions, the shapes, the not quite perfectly straight lines. It just went together perfectly for me, something that isn’t always possible as often I struggle. These rare gifts, when the work just makes itself, are much appreciated.

I was tempted to skip posting an image today since I didn’t get the piece finished before leaving for Kansas early Saturday morning. It’s been a long weekend with a lot of driving and I had a long list of ‘must do’ items for this evening. I didn’t get far on my list but I decided I couldn’t give up so quickly on my goal to finish and post one a day. I’ll have to put in several hours tomorrow to get the 4th one completed.

Structures #81    ©2007    12"x12"

 
The second of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market.

Today image and yesterday’s were taken with a flash so they are less than optimal. I depend on daylight for my photography so a few months of the year are a struggle to get any images because I leave for work just as it’s getting light and it’s dark by the time I get home. I’ll retake photos of these pieces when I get some daylight time in my studio but for now I wanted to get this photo posted.

[Update - images replaced 11/23/07]

Structures #82    ©2007    12"x12"

 
This is one of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market. I have 2 pieces completed but most have a least somewhat of a start. I ended up working late every night this week for the day job and I’m still the bottleneck according to my manager. Hm. Bummer for that. I did everything I could, now I need to focus on my life and let work fall apart (as if working hard 40 hours a week is bad). Last night the server crashed again and I wasted an hour waiting for it to come back up. Just how stupid of a waste of time is that? I wonder why I get so caught up in this craziness.

Repeat after me…. Work is not more important than my life!

 
Back to art.

These pieces are due at the Arvada Center on the 26th, my plan is to post 1 image a day until they are finished to keep motivated on this project. I’ll be out of town this weekend for another memorial service for my dad but this evening my goal is to finish the third and put up postings for saturday and sunday so I make my goal of one image a day.

Each piece will be 12" square and my goal is that they look somewhat reasonable together. I’m not happy with a few of the designs so I might toss them out and start fresh on them.

Making these very simple geometric compositions is a lot harder than I thought it might be. I spend a lot of time cutting and recutting as the small size really emphasizes the mistakes in proportions. It’s all to easy to make something that is just down right boring. Happily I have one that I just love. It’s awesome when that magic happens.

A few people mentioned juried shows in their comments on the last post and Robin asked if I’d explain more my thoughts on them.

I wrote about this a while back in my post How to Become a Successful Artist - the usecase.

Looking at the usecase I wrote for success one of the preconditions I wrote was:

Artist has a definition for their idea of success

In my mind this is very important. Years ago my definition of success was getting into certain juried shows. I didn’t know much about the art world and it was the thing to do, so that’s what I did. Now that I’ve spent time being an artist I realize that those juried shows don’t have much future in them so they are no longer in my definition for success.

While I started my art career with juried shows I certainly don’t think it is required. There are many avenues into the art world. These days I’m more interested in solo shows and gallery representation and I suspect most places I’d want to include my work don’t care very much about my resume so I’m not sure the juried shows really helped all that much. And now that I should be looking for gallery representation and solo shows I find the juried shows to be a distraction to those goals.

I don’t think juried shows are all bad. Providing a line on a resume, self esteem, baby steps into the artworld. These can be important things. But I think it’s easy to stuck at this level, just entering the shows over and over again and not taking the next step. It’s easy. It’s deceptively rewarding.

Some people are happy leaving their career at this level and that’s fine for them, but it’s not for me. There are a couple juried shows that I will probably continue to enter because they do provide clear benefits beyond a line on the resume. Quilt National is one of them, the book they publish every year is a valuable piece of quilt art history and I like having my work included in that history.

One thing I do feel is a problem with juried shows is that many artists (myself included several years back) put all of their work into juried shows. Everything they ever made that was any good has appeared in a juried show. So if they did get a solo show it would a show full work that is not new and fresh. The word from Edward Winkleman on this topic is overexposure. You can read his very interesting thoughts about juried shows in this old post of his: The Jury’s Still Out on Open Submission Exhibitions, don’t skip the comments.

Markings #3    ©2006    74"x66"

 
I’ve entered the annual juried show Materials Hard & Soft at the center for visual arts in Denton Texas 4 times. A few years back when I got my 3rd rejection I decided that three strikes was time to call it quits figuring my work didn’t fit their vision.

Until a few months back, when I decided to enter some juried shows to jump start my art business. I entered this show again expecting a similar result but this year’s juror, Georgia Gough, reversed the trend. Apparently 4th time for this show. Markings #3, above, will be included in the 21st annual national contemporary craft competition and exhibition.

The show opens January 26, 2008 and will run through March 20.

I’m happy to finally have made it into this show. Although I suspect this will be the last time I enter this show, and most juried shows. Even so, it is always a nice boost to receive the acceptance letters from these shows: "Oh yay! Somone liked my work". And that is why I entered this year. So thank you Ms. Gough for the acceptance.

 
My work laptop is calling from across the room saying "if you don’t get busy now you will be up until midnight again". Sigh. So much for no more overtime. Tonight I have to recreate most of the requirements that were lost when the server crashed - a painful exercise at best. I definitely need this acceptance letter today - perfect timing.