Lisa Call

Markings #12 - In Progress

Upside Down

Well yes, as Monica and several others correctly identified, Markings #12 is hanging upside down at my show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern. So all those folks that went to the opera last night and the thousands of other people that have been through the theater lobby get to enjoy it 180 degrees from my intended orientation. Pretty funny.

In the above, in progress, photo of the piece it’s clear which end is up as my electric plugs are near the floor not the ceiling. And really, it’s rather difficult to get a digital image upside down.

So at some point I forgot which end was up and I sewed the hanging mechanism (a sleeve of fabric that holds a board) to the bottom instead of the top. Impressive. What’s interesting, when I photographed it I knew which end was up and photographed it correct (I don’t use the hanging board/sleeve when I do my photography).

 
Correct:

 
Upside Down :

I definitely like it better as designed so when I get it home I’ll fix it. I’ll leave the signature at the top. It’s barely noticeable and sideways so it’ll look fine on the upper left instead of my normal lower right. I’ll just unsew and resew the sleeve and label.

In Good Company

I can’t say this is the first time I’ve ever gotten this backwards. Structures #13 hangs upside down from how it was designed because I signed it upside down and the signature is rather obvious and it would look more than odd having the signature upside down. So I flipped the piece 180 degrees and it still looks great.

I almost did the same thing with Markings #22 but caught the mistake before it was too late. It has 2 signatures - one at the top and one at the bottom. The top one is sideways and both are hard to see so I figured, what the heck - a bonus signature.

Do any of you ever do such silly things?

Markings #24    ©2008    24"x 24"

Sunrise

A few days after posting sunrise photos on my blog in Janurary I was inspired to take some more. Watching the color arise and then recede from the sky is a magical thing to witness.

Markings 24

The idea of making a piece inspired by these photos popped into my head at some point soon after taking them and I needed another small piece for my show. In one of the very few occasions in my art career, I set out to make a piece directly inspired by something I was consciously thinking about. Usually I just create without preplanning the object informing the work.

It felt a bit weird at times trying to represent the layers of the clouds in fabric. It might have helped had I actually looked at the photos, instead I just worked from my memory and feelings of the even. I got stuck for a while, but since I started the piece only 48 hours before the work was due to be delivered to be hung I didn’t stay stuck for long.

 
So that is the end of new work in my show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern, hanging in Boulder through March 23rd. Next I’ll post some installation photos. Probably not tomorrow, my kids didn’t make it home tonight due to weather but they should be here by noon tomorrow.

Detail Image:
 

Markings #22    ©2008    58"x 49"

Lemon Sponge Cake

I think I mentioned that the reason my show is only open to the public on wednesdays (from 9am-4pm) is that the gallery is in the lobby of the Macky Auditorium. It makes for a large captive audience for my artwork, which is very nice.

One of the performances at the auditorium during my show will be Choreographic Fusion on March 22 at 7:30pm.

According to the Boulder Philharmonic website:

Music and movement come together in fascinating ways in Lemon Sponge Cake Contemporary Ballet’s interpretations of modern masterpieces by Arto Pärt. Then the full Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra takes the stage for Rachmoninoff’s orchestral tour-de-force, the Symphonic Dances.

I will be there with my kids in tow (currently unbeknownst to them as they return home from their 3 month trip to Europe with their dad tomorrow night - we’ll see if they picked up any culture).

If you attend the performance let me know as I’d love to say hello. You can buy tickets here and kid/student tickets are only $5.

Markings #22

Yet another of my favorites in this series as I love working with yellow and gray. My piece, Structures #31, in Quilt National 2005 was also yellow and gray. I liked the 9 square configuration of Markings #12 so I decided to revisit it in this piece, which is quite a bit larger. Markings #22 has more organic lines and it doesn’t have as much asymmetry as #12 but there is some.

I finished this piece at 9am on the day I had to deliver the work to the gallery, a full 3 hours ahead of the delivery time.

And no, it’s not really an accident I decided to write about the ballet along with this piece, kind of fitting.

Detail:

Markings #19    ©2008    56" x 58"

Beta Bloglines

For the last year I’ve let my blogroll mostly stagnate - not just on my blog but also in my feedreader. There is a proliferation of excellent blogs out there and I just couldn’t keep up. The dual maintenance of adding a blog to both my feedreader and my blogroll was too much to think about.

I want to catch up to some of the great blogs I’ve run across out in the wild and also by many of you that comment on my blog. The first step was to make this a manageable process and find a feed reader that would do these things:

• Keep track of my read vs. unread articles for me as I travel between home and work. This pretty much required it be webbased
• Have a simple mechanism for organizing the feeds, preferably drag and drop organization.
• Provide a mechanism to share my list of feeds so I could avoid dual maintenance.
• Provide an efficient mechanism for reading through my unread articles quickly.

Beta Bloglines is the only reader (out of the entire two I thought about) that fulfilled those requirements. Google reader is nice but it doesn’t provide that type of sharing I am after. If it had, I would have selected it.

This morning I finished moving my current blogroll over to bloglines and I’ve updated my sidebar.

My Blogroll

What I’ve left on my website are just a handful of my most favorite links (I wasn’t ready to nuke the entire blogroll!) That’s not to say I don’t love and read tons of other blogs and I recommend all of the blogs on my list.

I feel my blogroll is out of date. I know I ran across some really great blogs the last year and I failed to subscribe to them. So as I find them again, I will add them. Consider this a work in progress.

I’m not so sure about my organization of the folders. I had too many people in the ‘artist’ category so I broke it in 2 parts - it’s not very intuitive. So I suspect that will be changing when something strikes me as more useful.

What am I Talking About

If you have no idea what a feed reader is or how you might use one. Or even more importantly, how to make sure your blog can be read by a feed reader, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s, as usual, excellent post on how to do this. And don’t worry - by default blogger and wordpress.com blogs have feeds so you are probably fine.

Full or Short Content

My only caveat about her post, as I mentioned in her comments. I really don’t recommend posting only a short summary of your posts in your feeds. Interestingly I was planning to post on this exact topic as soon as I finished my blogroll update.

People are lazy. We spend inordinate amounts of time at my day job thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks needed to do anything in our products because people don’t like to click. They tend to stop doing things that require too much effort. In my opinion having to click an article and leave a feed reader to see the content counts as too much hassle.

I don’t share Katherine’s concern about the dangers or risks of content scraping. She has valid points for her - I just view it differently. Yes - people steal my content - but I do not believe it harms me. My images are hotlink protected so it’s just my words floating around out there on splogs and I just can’t get excited or worried enough about it to care. I don’t track them down and I don’t see it being a big deal. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but blissful is the keyword and it’s working for me.

The big names I read, such as Seth Godin and Gapingvoid, all publish their full content. So I figure I’m in good company.

So as a reader that is lazy - I request and recommended your feed always be the full content of your site.

Markings #19

This is one of the 3 pieces completed in 2008 included in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern, which closes on March 19th in Boulder.

I love this piece. I know, I’ve said that about many of the pieces in this show. Once I got the show hung my fear that this series was not so good evaporated. I’m pretty excited about many of these pieces and have ideas for more.

I love the red here. I love the small piece of blue-gray interrupting the pattern and making it more interesting. I love how I moved beyond straight horizontal lines between rows. It was a trick to construct this piece but it made for a fun challenging puzzle, part of why I love working with the construction processes I use.

 
Detail image:

Markings #11    ©2006    18.25" x 19.5"

 
This piece is the baby version of Markings #4. I wrote about these 2 pieces a year ago so instead of repeating myself here’s the post with both of them. There’s a photo in that post with the 2 of them side by side (while still works in progress - you can see all the safety pins I use to baste them) to get a concept of scale.

This is the smallest piece in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern.

 
Detail

Markings #15    ©2007    43"x 43"

Rebecca Bluestone

Last night I attended a lecture by master weaver Rebecca Bluestone titled “The Rhythm of Color and Visual Texture in Surface Design” at the Lakewood Cultural Center.

Rebecca’s work is incredible. The surface draws you in with intense richness as she weaves with 3 different types of silk in each strand. (I’m no weaver so I’m not sure that I’m using the right terms). Her talk included a short video of her weaving at her loom and I found in rather hypnotic.

Exploring in Depth

She spoke about many things of interest but what really struck a cord with me was her unwavering use of traditional techniques to explore her art in depth. Rebecca has one loom. She weaves each piece with the same warp setup with the same process.

I can so relate. In a day when many contemporary textile artists are exploring dozens of new technologies, materials and processes I am still drawn to very traditional techniques. I’m content with simple dyeing, construction and surface stitching.

The process I use to create my textile paintings is very similar to how my grandmother made quilts. I love taking the traditional techniques and creating contemporary artwork. For me the newness comes in exploring my series in depth.

As Rebecca said - this way of working isn’t better than someone that explores many techniques and has a lot of breadth. It’s just another way of working. And it was wonderful to spend an evening learning about the work of a kindred soul in that regard.

Markings #15

Yet another piece from my solo show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern, now hanging in Boulder until March 19. Four more pieces to go then the installation images.

 
Detail:

Markings #14    ©2007    35"x37"

Relaxed Creativity

I’ve posted this piece a few times on my blog but after it was hung in the Macky Gallery I realized I had it crooked online. The above image is how it should hang.

This piece is one of those pieces that just came together magically for me. I was relaxed and working intuitively and didn’t get bogged down or uptight. Working free like this is such a huge gift and the more I work the more often it happens.

This piece came out far from square. Actually pretty much none of my work is square. It’s flat, other than the natural draping of the fabric and some of the natural effects that occur from heavy surface stitching, and all my work is meticulously constructed but I don’t worry about straight edges or 90 degree corners. I let the piece take it’s natural shape. I love not being confined to rectangular canvas.

This piece decided to be a trapezoid and it’s awesome. It has a sense of ease that is very freeing for me.

I can’t force this type of loose and free work. As soon as I try I get very uptight and my work looks rigid and forced. I find the best way to reach this type of relaxation is to show up in the studio every day and just work. The worries and structure melt away and fun creativity appears.

 
Surface Stitching Detail. If you click to see the larger image you can see the variety of thread colors I use.

Markings #12    ©2007    44"x 32"

 
For quite a while this was my favorite piece in the Markings series. The simplicity of the 9 squares, which is reminiscent of the zillions of 9-patches I made in my traditional quilt making days, combined with the asymmetrical coloring and organic lines really make me smile.

Markings #10    ©2007    69"x 77"

Another Sign on My Wall

In January I started a series of posts about intent and things I do to help me hold my intent and stay on track. I got sidetracked with all the postings about my show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern, now on exhibit in Boulder but it felt like a good day to write about fear so I’m combining the two topics.

In 1998 or 1999 I read Who Moved My Cheese along with millions of other people.

My favorite quote from the book, which I immediately wrote on a piece a paper and hung on my studio wall:

Real Courage

I had just joined my first critique group and I was terrified. I had a group of women I respected that were going to tell me what they thought of my art. I started to second guess everything I was doing in my studio. What would they say, would like like it, could I handle their comments?

The fear ground my art production to a near halt. I remember sitting for long periods of time staring at this sign. Slowly I let the message sink in and I went back to work.

Real courage is not about waiting until the fear is gone before you proceed. It’s about proceeding in the face of fear. I rarely let fear stop me from creating now but I can still taste that feeling I had almost 10 years ago. And I’m not going back there.

I still have self doubts but I don’t let those voices speak very loudly anymore. I now act as if I am not afraid and move forward and the fear slowly dissolves.

Enough Time

When I wrote the post about there always being enough time to do the important things in my life, I mentioned that when we find ourselves not doing something it is likely to be something that we don’t really value.

The other thing I find is that I avoid things that I am afraid of. I use the excuse there is no time to do it, but the reality is I’m afraid of it. Recognizing this fear and admitting to it is a huge first step to just getting on with things. To having the courage to do it anyway.

Fear is not comfortable but the only way I know to make it go away is to face it head on. It’s why my word for the year is courage. Much of the marketing stuff I used to claim I don’t have time for is really stuff I’m afraid of doing. My intention is to become a self supporting artist and to hold this intention I have to face fear every day and just do the marketing work anyway.

Markings #10

Back in October I posted some images of Markings #10 in progress that capture the texture that is created with my extensive surface stitching. This piece is the largest artwork I’ve made to date (not counting traditional bed quilts I’ve made) at almost 37 square feet. It took me 55 hours to do the surface stitching on the entire piece.

It also speaks to what I wrote about Friday, the disruptions in the pattern. I feel that without the unexpected changes in the pattern, my art and my life would get a bit monotonous and stale. The trick is to appreciate these disruptions for the beauty they provide instead of getting bent out of shape, just like the mice in Who Moved My Cheese.

Related Holding Intent Posts

Transitioning and Intent
Holding Intent - Part I [Realistic Goals]
Holding Intent - Part II [Excuses]
Holding Intent - Part III [Focus]
Holding Intent - Part IV [Enough Time]
Holding Intent - Part V [Self Care]

Markings #8    ©2006    56"x 55"

Markings #8

I’m still not sure where this piece came from as it is very different from most of my other work. Pink and bright yellow. Hm…

It’s the piece that comes to mind first when I think of these lines from my artist statement on the Marking Series:

The artwork also raises the question of how we handle the unforeseen, a break in the pattern. Disruption is often inevitable, no longer making it unexpected but part of the pattern itself.

 
Detail of stitching: