Lisa Call

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"

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.

Structures #80    ©2007    15.5" x 15.5"
 
I haven’t had much success in getting things done this week, other than attending the museum opening. I rarely go to a social type event like that alone, so I spent the entire day telling myself how much fun I would have and sure enough I really enjoyed the evening. Amazing what we can convince ourselves of if we think positive.

I’m not much for walking up and talking to people I don’t know but I chatted with several of the volunteers and one of the exhibiting artists. Something that normally I would never do. The internet/email is generally my domain, but I’ve decided I’m not going to get very far in this art world unless I become a bit more social. I’ll never be an extrovert, INTJ that I am, but I think socializing is probably a learned behavior and if I can jump off a bridge I can probably learn to make small talk.

 
I’ve only put in a few hours in my studio so far this week as I’m still lacking focus after my dad’s memorial service. I’ve designed a few new small pieces but they aren’t ready for prime time yet. After I finish this post I hope to get a few of them a bit further along.

I’ve had work at the Lux Center for the Arts that past year that is shown in rotation in their new fiber art classroom. I asked them to send them back so I could send in some fresh work and they’d like mostly smaller pieces.

I need to sit down and see what I have given my other obligations this fall/winter. My mom is coming out to visit next week and then in November I hope to have the focus to get back to work.

Structures #80, above, is one of the small pieces I completed earlier this year.

Structures #78    ©2007    18" x 18"
 
Today I finished stitching the texture lines on Markings #10 (shown in my previous post). I still have to finish the edges and attached the hanging sleeve but I’m going to save that work for a while as it’s been a while since I designed new work and I want to make some more small pieces such as the one above.

My original goal for the year was to complete 10 new small pieces but in July that changed to 18. So far I’ve completed 10 so 8 more to go. An easy goal to accomplish, I hope, because at the end of November I’m going to need 6-8 small pieces for a holiday art show and sale at the Arvada Center, a local art center. I’m also hoping to send some small work to the new Visions Art Quilt Gallery in San Diego

 
Until this year I rarely made small work because I felt too restricted by the small spaces. I like big, the impact and the room for so many possibilities. This year I’ve learned to love to work small. Getting the proportions right is much harder in the small space so it really forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing.

Once I cut the fabric the only way to fix a mistake is to redo the section. But it’s not always so easy to know where to make the cuts because I lose at least 1/2" on each shape when I sew it to the adjacent pieces. It’s taken me years of practice and I still mess up and cut in the wrong place. So I’ve cut/sew and the recut/resewn some of these composition several times to get it as I want it.

Any time I get lazy and think "good enough" I always regret it so I’ve learned to love this process of redoing. But more importantly, I’ve learned to get good at knowing where to cut in the first place as the consequences can be fairly high for screwing up.

 
I originally made Structures #78 as my piece for The Blogger Show in New York. Then I realized I should have read the rules first as this was too big by 2". So I made Structures #79 and sent it instead. You can get a preview of this show on The Blogger Show Online Portfolio. Thanks to Marc Snyder for creating the website.

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.