Lisa Call

Until this morning I was a member of a large email list of artquilters. The list generates a large amount of off topic chatter and rarely digresses into discussions I find interesting. Having been a member on and off since the lists inception in 1995 I’ve struggled the last few years to maintain my subscription due to the overwhelming waste of time the list has become. This morning I finally gave up and unsubscribed. I simply don’t have time to read thousands of emails a month in the hopes of finding the 5 or 6 gems that are posted.

Over the summer I did try to engage the list in some more serious discussions and I must say I was pleased with the outcome. The list has potential, if they could stop talking about television and other unrelated topics.

One of my lasts posts to the list a week before I left on vacation included this pondering in response to someone commenting on a positive review posted in the Studio Art Quilt Association (SAQA) Journal:

While I know it’s wonderful to get rave reviews doesn’t it seem like that is about all the quilt world has to say about itself?

Where are the critical reviews to challenge us and to make us think honestly about our craft and our art? Are we afraid to look under the hood for fear of hurting someone’s feelings? How do we as a collective whole get better if we don’t challenge ourselves with our shortfalls?

When I’ve attended quilt shows lately the artists have plenty of not so positive things to say about some of the work and the shows in general. Yet some how when all this translates into a written review in the SAQA journal it’s all sunshine and happiness. Why is that?

What would happen if someone were to seriously review all these group quilt shows? I’m sorry but there is a lot of bad work out there – and I think as there are more opportunities to show work I see more mediocre work being shown.

I read a blog, Thinking About Art, written by a DC artist. Among other things he goes out and reviews many of the DC area shows and many times he’s pretty hard on the art he sees. He seems to have quite a following.

What do you all think would happen if one of us went out and critically reviewed quilt shows on our blog? We know we think it – we discuss it in small private groups – but to actually go public with what doesn’t work about specific artists work! Would this person be ostracized for being “mean” or would this person be embraced and respected by the community?

The resulting conversation was quite lively and interesting with many folks confirming that quilters don’t like anything negative and anyone that would dare to make such comments in public would not be accepted.

But the end result of that conversation was that a handful of artists, who are passionate about our art and want to see it taken seriously and believe that critical writing about our artform is seriously lacking, decided it was time to do something about it.

The result is a new blog – ArtQuiltReviews.wordpress.com – dedicated to furthering the understanding of art quilts and their place within the general art community.

We are new and are just pulling things together but I think we are off to a great start and I’m excited about the possibilities of this endeavor. Please join us. I am working on getting a feedblitz subscription set up for the blog so look for that soon if you don’t use an rss reader.

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.

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.