Some reasons I like Paris

Time to get back to the studio!

 

The magical music-making season is over–friends have converged from all over the world, played and partied together, and gone back to their “day jobs”, promising to stay in touch.  The weather has gotten cooler, and a siesta is no longer the most compelling afternoon option. Jacques is revving up for olive picking, and if the beautiful fall weather holds, I am looking at several weeks of uninterrupted time! How to switch gears, and get back to the studio?

And why?

I go back again and again, when I need a shot of courage (and a laugh), to “The Writing Life”, by Annie Dillard (Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-016156-6) I find her words on living the “creative life” poetic and pared down, funny and true. Just now I have randomly opened the book to a passage which seems timely:

“Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality. A shoe salesman–who is doing others’ tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours–is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already–worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?”

Another book on my SOS shelf which I underlined my way through years ago, and still find delightful– “Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, ISBN 0-88496-379-9. Here is a sample passage, on the importance of small conventions and rituals for staying at work:

“The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons. It is easy to imagine today’s art instructor cautioning Chopin that the Mazurka thing is getting a little repetitive, that the work is not progressing. Well, true, it may not have been progressing–but that’s not the issue. Writing Mazurkas may have been useful only to Chopin–as a vehicle for getting back into the work, and as a place to begin making the next piece. For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and ANY device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value…”

Other tricks that sometimes have worked in the past: Put on some music I want to listen to, and clean the studio (if I’m lucky, maybe I will find myself wondering what would happen if I combined this remnant over here with that unfinished piece over there…). Go for a walk with a camera, alone, in my favorite city. Write, “refill the well”, talk to other artist friends…say “Get lost, buddy!”, when Jacques bangs on the studio window and asks what’s for lunch!

It is time to get back to work! I’ll keep you posted….

Gone Fishing!

“Painted sounds”

This series of painted panels are in their second or third reincarnation by now. They began as monoprints on primed plywood, put through a printing press with crumpled sheets of inked plastic–which marks up the surface and embosses the texture in an interesting way, and also wards off blank canvas anxiety! I like printing on wood, for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. If the piece works right away, you can just glue strips of furring along the back edges, and call it framed. If it doesn’t quite work, you can paint over it loosely with gesso, and let that first layer serve as a suggestive underpainting.  And if the next round isn’t really conclusive, you can always sand the surface down part way and repaint it, or  weather and distress it, to see what new ideas present themselves. Plywood panels don’t take up much storage space, or get too wrinkly, if you need to put them aside for a while….

When I recently rediscovered these pieces hibernating on a high shelf, they reminded me of the music I had been listening to in my studio while working on them. I thought that might be an interesting direction to pursue; but they seemed to need more detail. So I tried gluing on the tiniest slivers of patterned papers to reinforce the movement–using bits of papers collected over the years, as well as evocative images from old manuscripts and documents– scanned, altered, and printed. This is an approach I haven’t tried before, and one I look forward to experimenting with. I found that gluing the papers with matt medium works well, keeping the shininess under control, and–if applied judiciously–the printing inks from running. I found it easier cutting with nail scissors than Xacto blades (however I think I feel a tearing period coming on!…)  It will probably take a while to know which of these are actually finished, but here is where they stand today. 

(Note to Mom! try clicking on “view all images”…)

 

 

 

 

Painting dishes in Deruta

By special request, here are some photos of dishes I painted in Deruta one summer! Bea and Edith of the Art Workshop have established quite an Umbrian network over the years, and they suggested that I bring samples of my work to Ubaldo at the Grazia factory. Ubaldo was known for inviting foreign designers to use his facilities, in the hope of acquiring interesting “modern” patterns for his production line. He agreed that I could come paint, with only one stipulation: “Make two of everything, and leave us one.” It certainly sounded promising!

I don’t know if they still welcome novices in their midst, but at the time, there had already been quite a stream of foreign artists coming through, with little or no experience in majolica painting. We were given a place to sit, and a few dishes left over from a previous order to paint, and then–looking left and right to see how our neighbors were doing it–just dug in. Not surprisingly, our results were a little hit or miss, and because our experiments had low priority, it could take two weeks before you found out what kind of red that greyish powder became, once fired. Out the back door was a large heap of broken dishes where the more daring of us buried our disasters; the rest of us blushed to see our signed failures on the seconds table!

The local painters, many of whom had been working in the factory for minimum wages since the age of twelve, did not welcome our intrusion. They resented our freedom to come and go as we pleased, and our uncouth methods; they gossiped about us shamelessly to our faces. Their specialty was reproducing the traditional Deruta patterns, and they lived in fear that they might be required to reproduce our designs one day! 

Though it was not a very comfortable situation, I did learn a few things, and came away with enough dishes to hold a dinner party for twenty. Here are some of the black and white ones–my cunning way of getting around the “unknown colors” issue!

 

 

And the winner is….

The computer and I both started crashing frequently near midnight, and we agreed to declare the project Finished!

“Paniers Bio”

 

Rémi has been working hard this year to set himself up in business as an organic farmer in Eastern Quebec. He has always liked working with his hands and being outdoors, and the past few years he has become keenly interested in nature’s fine tuning. His parents applaud this initiative, especially if it means he can spend lots of time on his music, during the long Canadian winters…

When he asked me to make him a leaflet to hand out at the school’s agricultural fair, I could hardly wait to get started.  He agreed I could use this wonderful painting of vegetables he did on a paper bag in kindergarten, and which has hung in our kitchen ever since…

 I was glad to have all my notes from Elaina’s Painter course at LVSOnline, as I set off on this post-course adventure.

   

 

I got plenty of practice using layers; copying, repeating, flipping and fading shapes; moving around text; and resizing and saving files. I even learned that US letter paper is shorter and fatter than the European A4!….

I would emerge victoriously (and crookedly) from my little office,  and say to Jacques, “Ta DAH!”–only to get shot down with “not enough contrast! too hard to read!”

Back to the drawing board.

I revisited Elaina’s instructions for capturing paper textures, after taking a digital photograph of the side of a basket…but then decided just to use the basket as is. How convenient it is to snap a picture, upload it onto the computer, and have it instantly available for use! How many possibilities tumble out, one on top of another…

  

I don’t know which of these Rémi will end up using (which do YOU prefer?), but I have sent him off the files in “Gif” format,  changing from my usual fall-back choice ”Jpeg”, to avoid huge-sized files. One thing I still haven’t figured out is how to get my Canon M600 printer to print the image flush with the edge of the paper; does anyone know how to avoid the default margins?

Reality check! First day of spring…

 That is how it really looked, but here is how it FELT:

(a little Painter X exercise in enhancing weather conditions)

Is spring finally coming?

Weaving at its most basic (and, for me, most satisfying!)

There is a lot of fun to be had with a simple loom you can probably make with supplies you already have on hand, a small paper shredder, the contents of your recycling bin after a major clean-up (old maps/love letters/watercolors/magazine pages/musical scores/photos/outdated foreign currencies); some string or yarn, paint. Plus your old Afro comb, to pack the woven rows together.

This sort of loom is not only simple to construct, but flexible enough to do anything I want to do with weaving these days; and it can be easily scaled to the size you need. Its structure is a simple but stable rectangle which you could make from canvas stretchers–  hammering in, across the top and bottom,  u-shaped nails, evenly spaced  (I find about a half inch apart works for most things). These will be used to tie individual strings for the warp. 

Next to the basic loom in the photo is my little cranked paper shredder, and a long carpet needle which can come in handy for weaving; and also a home made shuttle to efficiently carry the weft over and under, back and forth. 

These are the materials I used for virtually all of the pieces that follow….for stability I alternated weaving a strip of paper with one or two rows of string or yarn (colored or not, skinny or fat). Fragile papers can be glued to a stronger backing before shredding. Nobody says you can’t cut through, or paint over the finished product, if you so desire!