Virginia A. Spiegel

Just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw.  Galdwell is always an interesting writer who takes things we think we know about and makes us look at them in new ways.

If you, like me, are thinking about the New Year, take the time to read his essay, Late Bloomers:  Why do we equate genius with precocity?.

To summarize:  Some artists and writers are like Picasso.  Made lots of art, started young and carried on throughout his life creating masterpiece after masterpiece.  Other artists and writers are like Cezanne.  Painted a long time, but really only became a great painter later in his life and frequently had to be supported emotionally and financially by his friends and family.

Picasso knew what he wanted to paint, executed it and that was that.  Cezanne painted the same subject many times, refining, exploring, always seeking, seldom finding.

That doesn’t mean Picasso was a better artist.  Gladwell’s conclusion is that late bloomers proceed by trial and error, use the process of making art as a way of refining their vision and revel in the process, not the end result.  This takes time.

I find it very reassuring as I approach the New Year, with a not-very-clear idea of where my art wants go, that others have trod this path before me. Some of us come to art relatively late in life after perhaps being successful in other venues; spend a lot of time experimenting, refining, thinking; and find fault many times in what we do create.

Gladwell’s essay made me realize all of this is part of the process for late bloomers and there is nothing I need to do but carry on searching in the New Year by making more art.

I had my nose to the grindstone before I left for the Boundary Waters and finished up three new artworks for A Sense of Place II and three for Fiber Art Alliance. I am contemplating making three more pieces similar to the A Sense of Place II artwork, but much bigger. And vertical again, if you can believe that. I still haven’t finished thinking about those cliffs.

Step 1 to start these new pieces is some serious dumpster diving.  I haul out each of many storage containers filled with all the offcuts and little pieces leftover from making other artwork:

Here’s the setup.  My purple chair (leftover paint courtesy of my front door), a container of “schnibbles” and a basket for any pieces that match the palette I have decided to use. Fair game is any scrap that is fairly saturated in color and green (including blue/green), orange, yellow, or brown.

Because my schnibble bucket sits right next to my sewing table, things sometimes fall in and are lost until I go dumpster diving.  And sometimes I find stuff that mystifies even me.

In the last couple of days of my dumpster diving, I have found a pen, a ball of hand-dyed yarn, some black shiny fabric with bright red lips on it?????, a stitched and bound 35×28″ whole cloth quilt made of painted polyester fabric (again, ?????), discharged bias tape, tons of painted Lutradur (that’s where it was), two dyed silk scarves, sheets of burned felt, and lots of little pieces that I wasted time studying and setting aside as they were just so interesting.

I learned that even though I neither wear nor have anything in my house that is orange, I seemed to have painted and used a lot of it. I have gone through a purple and blue stage, a murky stage, and seem to be in a clear and bright stage.  I used a lot more dyed, rather than painted, fabric when I first started out.

I have tried many kinds of substrates on which to build my artwork including cotton batting, polyester batting (what was I thinking?). Lutradur (what a waste), Stitch-N-Tear, felt, interfacing, and flannel.  I tried many ways of building my artwork that were dead ends and many that I use to this day.  I am certainly fearless:  I have cut-offs so thick with fabric that they are truly useless as I have no idea how I stitched them together even with my trusty little Bernina.

I’m thinking even though I have several containers in which to dumpster dive that I am on the verge of a schnibble shortage.  I have periodically gone through stages, such a now, when I want to work organically and only schnibbles will do the job. I guess that’s a good thing or I would be buried in schnibbles.

Dumpster diving is fun, but tedious.  Here’s a close-up of my first basket of palette possibilities:

P.S.  I’m missing a scissors.  No doubt MIA until the next dumpster diving session.

October: Field and Forest (In Progress)

I’m working on the above art quilt for the members’ show, Surface Matters, for the Surface Design Association conference.  Under the influence of the organization’s focus and my recent peace artwork, it’s all about layers of surface design.  The theme of the conference where the members’ show opens is Off the Grid. Well, that’s a theme I can work with on both literal and metaphorical levels.

I started with a basic quilt (sort of a crazy-pieced top, batting, backing) with the theme of forest and fields in October in the Midwest.  We have a certain glow going then with the tawny empty fields and the brave sun.

I used a variety of my hand-painted fabric in an orange/peach palette with creamy beige highlights and a little green.  Some parts of the pieced top were made of a vintage polyester scarf with dark-colored swirls fused with Mistyfuse to a painted fabric.  

I added machine stitching in green thread in a jig-jagging hedgerow-kind of pattern.  Then I added “forest” with hand-stitching with Laura Wasilowski’s Artfabrik’s hand-dyed cotton variegated thread and some tiny sun stitches in variegated rayon thread (only for the totally stitch obsessed- very slippery stuff for hand-stitching).  

Onward from there to oil paint sticks (Shiva), adding some irridescent gold, copper and turquoise highlights.  I let that dry and pressed it well. Then I hit the top ridges of the piece with a dark pigment ink stamp pad. Then I added some strips cut from my big Boundary Waters 32 that include painted fabric, Lutradur and velvet. Then light washes were added of several colors of Golden liquid acrylic paints in the gold, copper, and yellow families.

October:  Field and Forest (detail)   

To top it all off, I added a tilted machine-stitched grid of variegated rayon composed of squares and rectangles.  I still need to square it up to 18×18″ (required size) and, believe it or not, I’m thinking of a 1/4″ binding.  I haven’t done a binding for a long time, but this seems like an artwork that would benefit from a strong edge. I also marked this artwork as “In Progress” because, to be honest, I haven’t decided which edge is the top yet.

The Surface Design Conference is May 28 – May 31, 2009 in Kansas City, MO.  More information here.