Virginia A. Spiegel

Boundary Waters 60 (RockTime)
Virginia A. Spiegel

I seldom like to detour from the themes I’m currently pursuing in my artwork, but the artwork for Dinner at Eight Artists (Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison) wanted to be created as soon as I read the call for this juried invitational.  Jamie and Leslie invited us to consider “An exchange between friends.  A handshake.  A kiss before bedtime.  The artist at work. A sun salutation. The wave before boarding a school bus. A song, a word, a meditation. A habit, a custom.  The traditional toast at a gathering. A rite of passage.  The sacred moments of the ordinary.  Rituals:  What are yours?”

I even, oddly enough, liked the required size, 60″Hx24″W, as it made me think of approaching the work as though it were a scroll.  As soon as I read the word ritual I knew that I wanted to do something about RockTime which is one of the truest rituals in my life: “My sister and I paddle to a campsite, put up our tent, unload our backpacks, and then it is, at last, RockTime.  We spend hours just sitting and looking.  But what we are really doing is engaging in a ritual of being of the place, in harmony with rock, tree, and water.”

Boundary Waters 60 (RockTime) – Detail
Virginia A. Spiegel

I’ll have more details about this artwork as the premier at the International Quilt Festival – Long Beach in July approaches.  In the meantime, the Dinner at Eight Artists’ blog is now featuring invited artists’ profiles, including mine.

Rituals’ sponsor for IQF-Long Beach is Moore’s Sewing Centers and Havel’s Sewing for Festival in Houston.

Boundary Waters 53
Virginia A. Spiegel

Kathy Loomis writes an eclectic and always interesting blog, Art with a Needle.  She recently posted an article questioning whether details matter in fiber artwork (both for viewing and jurying) by using the example of my Boundary Waters 53 which she saw and photographed at Form, Not Function.  Read her post here.

This post is a comment in a longer format discussing why details matter as much to me as they do to the viewer. Also Kathy was correct when she said her photography didn’t show the richness of the artwork; these photographs were taken by Deidre Adams.

Boundary Waters 53, Detail
Virginia A. Spiegel

Kathy contrasts the use of detail shots for jurying fiber work v. painting. I do paint on stretched canvas (just for myself) when I’m in a creative rush, but I always miss the lovely dimension and texture of fiber.  I work a lot with paper and collage – ditto.  Interesting, but not THAT interesting after a bit unless I spend a lot of time building up texture. In my fiber work I veer back and forth from basically paintings on cloth with a bit of stitch (such as Boundary Waters 19) to heavily textured pieces such as BW 53.

But as I have always said, technique never trumps message for me.  If you start with Boundary Waters 48 and work your way up to Boundary Waters 53 on my website, notice the color changing and morphing.  It’s not coincidental.  Of course, there is a story I’m telling even if you may not know exactly what it is.

My sister and I were “stuck” on a narrow ledge of a campsite in the Boundary Waters due to high winds and storms for about three days.  In small lulls, we would venture forth from our tent and stare at our only scenery – a huge cliff covered in granite rocks, trees with fall foliage, and a few pine trees.  As the storm progressed, the leaves were beaten from the trees and fell in cascades of red, orange, yellow, and green.  When viewed through the never-ending rain, it was as though streams of color and texture were flowing down the cliff. Toward the end of our stay, the dark wet rock rather than the leaves were becoming the dominate feature of the cliff face.

Boundary Waters 53, Detail
Virginia A. Spiegel

In this series within the Boundary Waters series, I’m trying to show this progression.  I’m trying to show that the very horizontal surface of the cliff became very vertical with the falling of a blurred stream of leaves cascading down wet rock.  I was mesmerized then and I am still amazed just recreating the scene in my mind.  So primeval – rock, rain, leaf; so beautiful in the destruction of a delicate autumn scene back to the underlying and ever-present granite.

For these artworks, the materials list is long:  White cotton cloth, acrylic paint, textile oil paint, felt, hand-dyed cheesecloth, hand-dyed yarn, upholstery fabric, duck cloth, velvet, Lutradur, vintage polyester scarves, polyester fabric, netting, silk paper, silk fabric, and thread.

That’s a lot of materials and you would never know or appreciate their inclusion if you didn’t take a closer look. All the materials were needed to show the texture, the movement, and the majesty of that amazing and dynamic event. It was more difficult than you would imagine to keep all the materials in hand, to sew them down without adhesives, to place them with care to keep the rhythm of the artwork, and finally to sew them again to emphasize the flowing verticalness (if that’s a word) of the scene.

Why weren’t there more works along this vein in the Boundary Waters series?  When I’m out of materials, I’m done.  There is no way I can recreate the lovely compost heap of materials I had in hand when I was seized with the need to recreate this message of the ever-evolving rhythm of life and death in Nature.  But the Boundary Waters series continues exploring this message as it has from the beginning.

I say, thank goodness for detail shots.  If you can’t see an artwork in person, they are the next best thing to show you something more about the artwork and the artist’s intent.  With fiber, and with me, there is always a MORE and detail photography is a useful way to begin the dialogue with a viewer about that more-ness. If you have read any of my book reviews you know my refrain, “It’s not a painting, show us detail photos of surface design and stitching.”  It doesn’t make fiber art less a work of art to show us these things; it makes our art more understandable and even more interesting.

And, of course, I have an opinion about the utility of detail photography and other aspects of jurying. I wrote this post after jurying Journal Quilt Project II and this after choosing the artists for the invitational Sightlines exhibit.

Two Women in the Wilderness
31×43.5″
Pamela Allen

I have long admired the artwork of the amazing Pamela Allen.  I asked her if she would be willing to make a very special artwork to commemorate the seventeen Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness canoeing/camping trips which my sister and I have taken. Yes!

I chose Pamela because of her affinity for artwork about women, the fact we have talked about the joys of having a sister, and the fact that she had been wilderness canoeing in the past.  My only request was that the artwork clearly show both of us and that we were out camping.

Pamela included items near and dear to our hearts:  Our Kevlar canoe glowing in the sun, the trees, the water, our little golden backpacking tent, our beloved paddles, Nancy’s hat with the ear flaps, and an homage to my love of creating found art at our campsites.

I have the artwork hanging in my formal dining room turned personal gallery. I stop by every time I walk by and appreciate another detail of the hand and machine stitching, the choice of fabric, and the wonderful imagery.

I would recommend Pamela most highly for a commission and thank her for this wonderful, beautiful, and meaningful artwork.

milkweed 3 by Virginia A. Spiegel
Sold (But check Karen’s blog for more upcoming choices)

My friend, Karen Stiehl Osborn, is raising funds to help with the uber-expensive vet bills of an animal rescue.  I happily made and donated eight special ATCs (small artworks the size of baseball trading cards).  milkweed 3 is now up on Karen’s blog (just scroll down an entry or two).  You can expect to see more artwork available on her blog in the near future.

More information from Karen if you would like to help by buying or donating artwork:

Hands, Hearts & Paws is an all-breed animal rescue in Omaha, NE. Often they accept the dogs that no other rescue will take, usually because of expensive medical needs. Recently they had a surgical bill of $1000 for a dog that had a prong collar embedded in his neck and a chunk of wood puncturing his trachea. Now they have a dog that has tested positive for heartworms and a dog that needs surgery for a luxating patella. Both of those dogs’ treatments will run hundreds of dollars each. I volunteer with this rescue, because I truly believe that they put the needs of the dogs ahead of all politics and financial concerns.

I am asking for your help to raise funds for these medical bills. I will be selling Artist Trading Cards for $20 each, until I run out of cards to sell. The rescue has several events scheduled for the coming months, and I will be selling the artwork at these events, plus selling them online through my blog and Facebook.

If you are an artist, please consider donating an ATC to the cause. If you are a patron, please consider purchasing a small artwork to support the rescue and enhance your own art collection.

I love milkweed as a subject for artwork because of its architectural shape in leaves, blooms, pods, and seeds.  milkweed 3 is watercolor paper mounted to cardstock and includes watercolor, ink, acrylic paint, and a print from a hand-cut lino block.

In the studio and stitching away this week.  That sounds like no big deal.  But as I shared in my July art newsletter, I had six big artworks ready to be stitched in June and they proved unstitchable.  And I mean unstitchable.  I tried everything and the layers, the felt backing, whatever! just made it impossible to sew more than an inch without the thread breaking.  So I let them sit, went to the Boundary Waters, and decided (with reluctance and with considerable pain) to just chuck them and start again.

But when I went to my studio, I had a cone of poly/cotton thread on the holder from fixing a piece of camping equipment.  I took down from the design wall the piece I had been torturing with failed stitching attempts and gave it a whirl.  All good to go now.  So I’m a happy (and amazed!) camper now and have three pieces stitched and the fourth one (above) under the needle.

This is what the back looks like; I’m really just securing things at this point as I think about where to take them once this first stitching is done.

This is what the side table looks like when I’m working.  I can’t say any of these threads are the dominant colors of the six pieces, but I like to have a lot of thread out while I’m working.  Neatness optional.