Lisa Call

Markings #16
©2007 Lisa Call
45" x 68"
Textile Painting (hand dyed fabric, batting, thread)

Still Stitching Stitching

As I mentioned the last few weeks I’m still working towards my big deadline of July 15th. I’m taking tomorrow as a vacation from the day job and intend to spend 15 hours in front of the sewing machine. This will put me on track for finishing the artwork with a few hours to spare.

I delivered my kids to camp today so the house is quiet and I can really stay focused.

All this secret art creation doesn’t lend itself to exciting art related blog posts so things will pick up around here in 10 days or so with photos of new art.

Other Stuff I’m Thinking About

I announced my new solo show in my last studio newsletter (in Boulder, CO in Feb/March 2010) and I’ve been thinking about the art I want to display. I have this vision of making some huge pieces in the Home or Ascending series. I think that would be pretty cool.

I have gone back and forth about what I’ll do about blogging while I’m in South Africa (I leave at the end of this month for a 3+ weeks). I finally decided to stay in touch so I’ve ordered a mini dell netbook to facilitate that decision. Course I might get there and decide I’d rather not bother, but if I feel like it, I’ll have the equipment to post photos.

When I went to New Zealand in 2000-2001 it was pre blogging days (or at least my blogging days) so instead I sent very long and detailed emails to my friends and family during the 5 month adventure. I anticipate having an easier time finding internet this time around. Wireless wasn’t much of an option back then so we carried a cable with us every where.

Speaking of my newsletter I’ll be sending out the July issue this week or next (depends on how well I’m doing on my deadline). This issue will be a celebration of the completion of Structures #100 and I’ll be announcing a fun art project I will be doing in September after my return from Africa.

If you’d like to sign up for that newsletter you can here: Lisa Call’s Studio Newsletter.

MakeBigArt.com

A few weeks back I launched a new website called MakeBigArt. It’s now where I write articles for other artists. This blog is now devoted more to my art and my studio and my life as an artist.

This week on MakeBigArt.com a post about responsibility.

Artful Home

The Artful Home Studio Sale started today or maybe it was yesterday.

Either case you can peruse some of my older artwork that I don’t think I’ve ever shown online before. When I moved I came across some older work from my embellishing days. Lots of beads and buttons on these. I’ve also added in a few of the older pieced artworks also.

It’s a fun trip down memory lane for me to look at this work so I’ve decided to show them on the blog as a group as it’s fun to see our history.

Space Donuts

My preschool aged son wanted help with this quilt, so I let him name it. I love what he came up with.

This quilt is collage appliqued, machine quilted with rayon and metallic threads and hand beaded.

Space Donuts
© 1998 Lisa Call
25.5" x 21.5"
Quilt (fabric, beads, trim, threads, batting)
$1590 $795 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Chicken Quartet #1

A singing chicken! A group of 4 embroidered cocktail napkins found at a garage sale were the inspiration for this fun wall art.

The quilt is composed of commercial cotton fabric over dyed fabric by the artist and a selection of vintage fabrics to compliment the chickens. The piece is heavily embellished with beads and buttons for an updated folk art look.
 

Chicken Quartet #1
© 2004 Lisa Call
12.5" x 13.5"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, beads, batting, thread)
$700 $350 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

El Niño

In 1997 they predicted would be a wet year for the western part of the United States due to the warming El Nino currents in the Pacific Ocean. In October my home in Colorado was buried beneath 3 feet of snow overnight. This quilt is the result of being snowed in that weekend.

Collage appliqued, heavily embellished with machine quilted with rayon and metallic threads and hand beaded.

El Niño
© 1997 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
$990 $495 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Chairs #6

Chairs No. 6 is part of a series of work that was inspired by the shape of my kids’ highchair. They spent a lot of time there and I spent a lot of time washing it. So it was bound to inspire my artwork. Bright colors combined with black and white result in a very graphic and cheerful composition

Free hand cut, pieced and quilted with swirling quilting patterns in multiple complimenting colors on a home sewing machine.
 

Chairs #6
©2000 Lisa Call
18" x 18"
Quilt (fabric, batting, thread)
$390 $195 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Blossoms II

Japanese style cherry blossoms embellished with button centers. The irregular shape was fun to work with.

Raw edge applique, machine quilted, painted, embellished.
 

Blossoms II
©1997 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
Sold

 
Detail Image:

Insalada Caprese

Fresh Mozzarella and Tomato Salad – a summer garden inspired artwork. A simple recipe that requires little effort (cut up cheese and tomatoes and drizzle with olive oil) and it sounds so yummy in Italian. The green is for a bit of fresh basil to make the dish (and art) more interesting. And of course I don’t grow just red tomatoes in my garden but also orange and yellow ones also.

Hand dyed fabric by the artist, cotton batting, cotton thread. Free hand cut. Pieced and Quilted on a home sewing machine.
 

Insalada Caprese
©2002 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
$1190 $595 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Structures #109 – In Progress
Lisa Call
Textile Painting
©2009
~80" x 80" (unfinished)

More Art Made During Construction

Structures #109 is another textile painting that I designed and constructed in my temporary 10′x12′ bedroom/studio while my house was under construction.

I love working with brown. It’s always the first color of fabric I run out of during the winter when I don’t do any fabric dyeing.

My fence motif got a bit more chopped up in this piece as I was playing around with the square shapes that resulted from some doodling I was doing.

Studio Lighting

My posts on studio lighting will return tomorrow. I spent my weekend up in Estes Park helping Alyson Stanfield with her Art Marketing online class.

Between that and getting sick last week my plan for the week pretty much went out the window, but I’m back on track this week and ready to make lots of forward progress.

Markings #26 – In Progress
Textile Painting
©2009
~80" x 80" (unfinished)

New Work

I’ve decided to take a break from the new studio posts for tonight and show some new art instead, lest I forget I actually do make art also.

During the remodel I designed and constructed 5 new pieces for a curated show. The curators have selected the work so I can now show the ones they did not choose.

The above textile painting is in progress (it still needs the surface stitching/quilting – many many hours left to go).

This work was designed and constructed in a small 10′ by 12′ room that also doubled as my bedroom so I was never able to stand more than about 6 or 7 feet away from it. Makes for some tricky design work.

I posted a photo of the strips of fabric I used back in Janurary (these turn into the thin lines in the finished work). So now you can see what these turned into.

 
Happy weekend everyone!

Structures #1
Textile Painting
74" x 38"
©2005 Lisa Call
$12,000

Snow and Building

I was going to write a blog post about social media last night, and then today, but I decided nope, time to take a bit of a break from doing stuff. So that will have to wait. I need to spend some time chilling out as the construction comes to a close. Basically I’m tired. Need to get my energy back.

Only 1 more week and I think it’ll be done – or done enough that I will be moved in and just have minor things here and there to fix. The major stuff will be done. Tomorrow and Saturday carpet and maybe my studio closet then next week paint. I need some studio furniture built, put up some design walls and then I’m in business.

The weather did it’s best to put the brakes on the project but it didn’t win. They finished moving my studio closet door to a more discrete location then did the drywalling and texturing just as the storm was at it’s peak. Then the blizzard kinda gave up and it’s just regular kinda snowing out there now – no more blowing horizontally – which is always interesting.

The First

I’m uploading images of my artwork to facebook so thought I’d share what I wrote over there here also:

Structures #1 is the first textile painting/quilt I made in the Structures series. I started the painting in 2000 in a workshop in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.

When starting a new series the first thing I do is make sketches and since I work in fabric my sketches are also constructed with fabric, usually black and white. So after that I was ready to jump into a lot of color. I love the richness of my handdyed fabrics.

This artwork, along with all of my textile paintings, is heavily textured with stitched lines less than 1/4″ apart across the entire surface. The tactile nature of this type of detail makes them nearly irresistible to touch.

Detail:

Structures #38
Textile Painting
©2005
43" x 42"

How It Began

Four years ago on February 22 I made my first blog post. I had been thinking about blogging for a while but without a digital camera it didn’t seem like an art blog was going to get very far.

I think we got bonuses at work or some other money fairy visited in mid-February 2005 so I walked into a camera store and bought a Nikon D-70 without doing any research on digital cameras, 15 minutes tops and I was out of the store with my new toy. I had a N-70 and knew the lens were interchangeable and that seemed like a good reason to buy another Nikon.

With my new studio I’m going to have to buy another lens. I can’t take photographs of my largest pieces with my 50mm lens (room isn’t big enough) and my zoom lens has crappy color (in comparison to my very nice 50mm, which I use for all my art photography). So I’m thinking positive thoughts for the money fairy to come visit again.

We All Love Stats

According to wordpress I’ve made 600 posts (the first few months were on blogger – once I got serious about blogging I quickly moved to my own install of wordpress.org).

There are currently 3,940 comments and akismet has blocked 19,741 spam comments from appearing. The spammers have the real people seriously out numbered. Ya’ll need to get busy.

According to my website stat counter I had 104,821 page views and 26,713 unique visitors in January and my traffic seems to grow fairly steadily over the year. I had a pretty big drop last may-july during my move as I had nothing to say.

Construction

With my construction I suspect I’ve increased traffic by doing a daily photo log of the action even though the art content has slowed a bit over the last 4 months. The next three weeks I’m not likely to have much access to my studio as they are doing drywall/texturing/painting in the existing part of the house, meaning my kids bedrooms will be my studio for a week.

Then the hardwood floor will be refinished and I’ll install carpet – all of which requires a large amount of furniture shuffling.

The timing is interesting because the deadline for submitting photos for the large pieces I’ve been working on the last few months is March 1. I have about 2-3 more hours of sewing and then it’s photography time. My goal is to do that on tuesday – so guess I need to buy that new lens tomorrow.

Hm… Anyone want to buy some art?

Not much still for sale on that page, I think near top priority once the studio is done is to make some more small art.

Lines #17
©2008
3" x 3" – Mounted on stretched canvas
Sold

What is a Painting?

I’ve been using the term Textile Painting for quite a while now and have gotten several questions about what it exactly means and why I’m using it.

After reading a post on Jeanne Williamson’s blog the other day I thought maybe I’d tackle the subject. From her post Definition of a Painter :

Andrea Myers considers herself a painter. You might not know it wandering through her show at Steven Zevitas Gallery. You’ll see ripped stacks of paper and fabric collages on the wall, piles of fabric on the floor and on a pedestal, but nothing you might immediately think of as a painting. That’s Myers’s point. The Chicago artist intends to push at the edges of painting’s definition.

A lot of Andrea Myers’s work is very dimensional (see here for photos). My intention is not to push the word painting as is Myers. Instead I believe I’m just using textiles instead of paint to provide my color and am indeed making a painting as most people think of a painting – an art object to hang on the wall.

Looking at wikipedia’s page on painting it defines painting as:

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting.

Citing Merriam-Webster Online as the source of the definition.

Why Textile Painting?

That definition pretty much covers what I’m doing – applying color to a surface. I’m using textiles to provide the color and the surface are the back 2 layers of the quilt (batting & backing – see my definition of basting for what these layers look like).

With the smaller paintings I then attach the 3 layers to a canvas. Very much a painting – just a different medium provides the palette that is applied to the surface.

Why don’t I just call them quilts? Because that word is a loaded term and generally includes conjuring up images of grandma. I love traditional quilts but that is not what I make so if I say quilt I have to start qualifying it and it’s pretty hard to move off the bed with those that aren’t familiar with fiber art.

When I describe what I do I prefer to start with the word painting and expand that image as I find it much easier to describe what the artform is from this angle.

Both "quilt" and "painting" need a modifier to more accurately describe what I do – might as well pick the one that I think is closest to the intention of my artwork – a means of expressing myself resulting in a non functional 2 dimensional object that is hung on the wall.