Virginia A. Spiegel

Art is Good!

Yesterday I covered prep, the Trained Monkey stage of Layer 1, and the first ironing of the 200 yards. Jamie and Ann asked about my paint.  Here’s a previous post that’s all about my paints. I do appreciate all comments and questions. The comment section in this new blog format is by the date.

Onward to the fun stuff!  I’m featuring individual pieces of fabric today to show some representative techniques. 

I made a lot of screens on my Thermofax focusing on my maritime photos from Alaska. This was a net with little floats on it, but when enlarged it looked like a plant with fruit. An unusual color combo for me. My printer was making weird lines on the original, but I made the screen anyway as I thought it would look better than big solid circles.

Using a graphite pen for the original, I also made screens of doodles (above), drawings, and many kinds of handwriting. This was an intermediate layer for this piece of fabric. 

Here is the same doodle screen on a blue Layer 1 with one of my sketches screenprinted in two colors on top.

I also made quite a few pieces by stamping with a sponge-like lawn mower filter. You can see this full-sized in yesterday’s post at the very end.

I had fun stenciling over a cardboard coffee cup holder (above).

But it really was screenprinting that captured my attention time and time again.

Painted, screen-printed with drawings from my sketchbook, and then painted again.

Painted, screenprinted with dingbats, and then screenprinted with a screen made with a spiral drawn with a graphite pen.

Painted, screenprinted with my writing, screenprinted again with a screen made from a blown-up photo of a bush in winter.  And this way is the correct orientation.  I think of writing as texture, as the human touch that unconsciously draws us to a work of art, not as something to necessarily be read.

Painted in blue and white, screenprinted with a “burst” made from a photo of a plant in pink and white, then screenprinted with hand-drawn circles and then screenprinted one last time with a swoop of hand-drawn little squares.

 
Painted, screenprinted with an enlarged harbor scene turned on its side, gold added with a cool little dental tool, like a syringe, given to me by Leslie Jenison. 

 Screenprinted with a screen made from a photo of harbor junk blown up and edited. Layers of screenprinting using blue, gold and copper over a Layer 1 of white. I made one screen of normal size, then enlarged the photo and made a screen of that.  So the two screens are obviously related, but totally different.

Part of the display wall for Open Studio Day.  The fabric above is center. At top left, top right, bottom left and bottom center are pieces with MANY layers of paint and screenprinting. And, yes, with this type of paint, adding layers does add thickness and stiffness.  But that works for me in the type of artwork I generally create.

The blue swirl piece is actually a Layer 1 piece and the hand is the same as a dyed piece of fabric.

The top left piece will be a whole cloth piece, but the top left piece will be cut up as will most of the fabric I created.  The center left piece is a finished piece of art constructed of Tyvek on painted and dyed fabric (more on that in the future.)

Tomorrow – stacks and stack of fabric!