I just ordered ten stretched canvases from an art supply house.  I'm gearing up to produce work for the exhibition next fall; this feels like even more of a commitment than signing the contract!  Wow--that means I have to make at least ten pieces.  It's not so daunting as it sounds, as I've decided that most people don't have tons of space for hanging art so it's wise to make smaller things that might appeal to prospective purchasers.  These will finish at 12" x 16", a nice non-threatening size.

Besides, I have two pieces ready for mounting.  Already--how cool is that?

It started with the watercolors and the encouragement of friend Barbara, who visited last Wednesday.  Over curried lentils we talked about the little paintings I've done, whether I should work on details and try to make them more complete, different techniques.  I have a big wonderful watercolor of ripe tomatoes hanging in the kitchen, and we went over that artist's use of paint and preserving white space.

This was painted by Cynthia K. Read in Huntsville (sorry about the reflections!)  It makes me hungry every time I look at it.  Having such a good example to talk about was very helpful (of course, we were also eating some tomato and cucumber salad at the time.)

I had been thinking, wondering, how to structure the work for the exhibition, when a concept formed just as I was waking up--I will do some studies using that blue chair I painted last week, and see if I can put them into fabric.  It's taken on a life of its own.  I have a long mental list of scenes I can use, paint them first, then adapt for fiber.  The watercolors don't have to be particularly precise or detailed, just enough to preserve a basic composition and color scheme.  I took the  studies and the two fiber pieces I've done to my Thread Songs meeting on Saturday and got more encouragement from colleagues.  Therefore, the order for the canvases; instead of hanging from a rod, these scenes will be gallery-wrapped on stretched canvas.  They won't need framing, but will be ready to hang with nice, crisp sides.

I'm not ready to do the big reveal, but for those whose curiosity is alerted, here's a detail of the first scene.

Lots of hand-dyed fabrics in the rocks here.  I'm pleased with the result and eager to push ahead.


The canvases should be delivered this week.  Then I can work on my stretching and stapling skills.  That's engineering, baby.

I've been dutifully working my way through The Unknown Matisse, a biography of the artist's early years.  I bought it, and I'm determined not just to put it on a shelf and pretend I've accomplished something.  Dull, gray French-Breton childhood, rejection of family business (seed merchandising), stultifying classical art education, rejection of legal career, poverty and frustration, mistress and beloved daughter, mind-bending visits to southern coast, exposure to Van Gogh, Monet and Cezanne.  Discovery of color, working through styles of other artists, marriage to a supportive and intelligent woman, two more children.  That's how far I've read to date, and there's only about 100 pages left in the book (which takes him up through 1908).  I shall order the second volume this week.

While I'm somewhat disappointed that he still seems very remote (and maybe that is the real character of the man), a couple of things stand out.  First, that as soon as he knew what painting was, he knew he had to do it.  He kept painting even when he hated what he was being taught, even when he had no money and no overcoat in a frigid Paris winter.  When he proposed to his wife, he told her that while he loved her dearly, he would always love painting more.  Second, he painted what he saw, and refused to make it pretty by adding fashionable floral embellishments and fluttering cherubs. (I'm suddenly taken by the idea of plunking a couple of putti into one of his dark gray-green still lifes.  We could call it "Matisse loses a bet to Bougereau")  What he saw was so strongly influenced by the area where he grew up and by his instructors' perception that the grays and browns of that landscape comprised the only appropriate palette for an artist.  It took years and years to begin to perceive things in color; being a romantic, I think that his wife's consistent love and admiration added much to the widening of his vision 

The thing is, he couldn't just start slapping red and purple paint onto the familiar vases and crocks he painted over and over.  We think that would be an easy thing, but that's because we've grown up seeing Matisse and Picasso and Pissarro and Cezanne.  He had to start to see/think the color that other people could not.  I'll learn more about this in the second volume, subtitled "The Conquest of Colour."

So now I'm trying to look more carefully and to describe what I see.  It changes the process; I've often reacted to the materials in front of me rather than seeking out materials that reflect an idea.  "What can I make out of this?" rather than "What fabric best shows how I feel about the ocean?"  It's time-consuming.  Fortunately, working with watercolor is way faster than fiber art and messing with color in this medium is infinitely more flexible.  Also, there's this cool crossover--while it's difficult to render texture  in paint, it's a snap with fiber!  Preparing for the show next fall is starting to seem very exciting.

Years ago I asked my engineer friend Gene, "Just what is engineering?"  We were on the way to the Los Alamos Museum near Albuquerque, and Gene was really eager to get there, while I thought it would be  . . . well, boring.  (I was wrong; it's a very good museum and Patrick, who was a museum guy, enjoyed it just as much as Gene did.)  "Oh," he replied, "engineering is planning and preparing for production."   I've remembered that frequently, often in frustration.  Planning is not my strong point when it comes to art work, which is why I end up stitching teeny strips of fabric to almost finished pieces because I didn't cut the backing generously enough.  Often the most difficult aspect of a fiber piece is getting it to hang straight, especially when embellishments like beads or stones aren't evenly placed--of course, this happens after the fact.

I am taking Gene's definition to heart, increasingly.  Yesterday I coped with a slow and frustrating email reception by doing something the computer recommended (don't remember what it was, some kind of reset, but it worked!)  And I backed up files on a thumb drive, something I've resolved to do for months but avoided because I didn't know how.  That worked, too.  My computer "production," such as it is, now goes more smoothly and if the aging machine crashes I will have the files to put on a new one.

All that gave me courage to face my nemesis, the vacuum cleaner.

It didn't work.  It didn't suck, and that sucks.  This is all Pat's fault; he was the guy who did the vacuuming, so I never had to deal with it.  Now, he's been gone for more than two years, so that means I've been, well, not vacuuming for that long--I've been making do with the even more ancient "electric broom," which does an OK but not a great job.

In cleaning out boxes in the studio I found the original manual (I had also downloaded the manual from the web, but somehow it didn't feel the same).  I took that machine apart and cleaned out everything, washed the filter, pulled out enough cat hair to knit a sweater.  Let it dry overnight, put it back together, and by golly it worked.  I vacuumed the hall and living room and felt proud of myself.  I suspect it never occurred to Pat to clean out the filter--certainly I don't remember him ever doing that.

So now I am resolved to do more engineering.  I'm committed to a one-person show in October-November of 2015, requiring the production of more  and smaller pieces that would be likely to sell.  I need to plan for finishing before undertaking the pieces, make the size appropriate for home display and standard enough to be mounted on stretcher bars or canvases.  My usual mode is to let the materials dictate the size, which means I end up with pieces appropriate for exhibitions but not for homes.  I foresee some conflict in this change, but I'll keep you posted.

What's interesting, I think, is the planning vs. instinct friction.  I could characterize it as head vs. heart (there was emotion wrapped up in that vacuum cleaner) and recognize my real talent for procrastination, but it's not entirely that.  I think I just resist standard sizes, standard rules (what's the big deal about square corners, anyway?), fashionable color schemes, focal points.  I'm sitting here typing and my brain is transmitting "No!  No!  Leave me alone!"  But there's some virtue in discipline and order, you know.  Not total virtue, but some.  It's nice to  have an appliance that runs properly.  It would be nice to sell some art, although thank God my food budget isn't dependent on that.  Engineering.  I can do it.

Today I visited friend Barbara, a retired art teacher who does beautiful work with paint, fiber, paper, beads and stuff.  She has a trained eye and sees potential for art in all sorts of everyday (and not so everyday) shapes and textures.  We were meeting to talk about Matisse, among other things, have lunch and just enjoy each other.  Barbara showed me some okra pods given her by a friend; they had dried out a bit and really weren't edible at this point.  But several of them had the most wonderful reddish color, and they were curling up dramatically.  In addition, Barbara had picked some branches of beautyberries, thinking they were worth consideration.  I hadn't heard of beautyberries, but here's what they look like:

They are bright chartreuse when young, then ripen to this vibrant magenta.  The berries are faintly sweet with a prominent seed.  Barbara warned that they can have a laxative effect.

One of the okra pods, showing its curve and reddish color.

We played around with these materials, rearranging them and looking at the colors and shapes, and Barbara thought we should try doing a watercolor study of them.  I've never done watercolor and had grave doubts, but after all she's a teacher--and what's the worst thing that could happen?  A clumsy attempt, a waste of a sheet of paper.  Big deal.









Here's the arrangement we made on the left, and my watercolor on the right.  I am ridiculously pleased with this first attempt.

Last weekend friend Shirley and I decided to drive to San Antonio to see the Matisse exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art.  We had been thinking about the trip for a while, and this was the free weekend for both of us.  We had reservations at the venerable Menger Hotel, right across from the Alamo.   Arrived at Rosario's, our chosen Mexican restaurant, a bit before they opened, so strolled around the neighborhood where many houses are being restored.  This was our favorite:

This charming yellow house has a porch in front, wrapping to the left side, beautifully shaded and inviting.  Rosemary and lavender plants perfumed the air, and there was a huge Pride of Barbados off to the left of the photo.  Whoever manages the gardens is great.

About a block and a half away from the yellow house we discovered the serendipitous highlight of the trip.  In a dusty lot on a corner, beyond the chain-link fence, we spied this:

Patrick and I always loved faux bois pieces.  Mostly you see them in cemeteries, concrete grave markers looking like wooden stumps--"a life cut short".  In San Antonio there are some famous benches and tables in Brackenridge Park made in this style.  It was popular in Europe and South America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  As we wandered among the pieces in the yard, the owner came out and described his work, which he learned from his father and uncle.  Turns out it was his family that made the pieces in the park!  Carlos Cortes is a delightful gentleman who now teaches his techniques to other artists and continues to produce commissioned pieces.  The large round table with four chairs in the right rear of the photo were made by his father; Carlos discovered them and bought them back a number of years ago, and has restored them.  The tall chair in the foreground is his own design.  He makes a lot of garden benches and birdbaths also.  You can find him on Facebook at StudioCortesSA.  He said his son, who is finishing a Master's degree, is interested in continuing the business and designed the Facebook page.

This was just the coolest surprise.  I'd love to have one of his pieces but they're very expensive (and heavy!)

Anyway, then we had a delicious lunch and proceeded to the nearby museum.

The Matisse exhibit was just as wonderful as I expected, featuring Purple Robe with Anemones, The Yellow Dress, and Pink Nude.  The works were from the Cone Collection in Baltimore.  We read every label and were able to get up close and look at brushwork and color without any hassle.  There were a number of bronzes, many lithographs and some linoleum block prints as well as Matisse's artist book, Jazz on display.  At the end (in addition to the gift shop) there was an opportunity to enter a Matisse corner for a photo:

Months ago, I was asked to make a banner for our church that could be carried in the procession at Diocesan Council (and any other time somebody wanted to tote a banner around.)  I wanted an image of the church but was wary of dealing with perspective.  The rector came up with a very nice line drawing that someone had put on note cards years ago.  I fooled around with that in Photoshop Elements, emphasizing details and enlarging the drawing, then just thought about it for a while while I figured out how to proceed. 

Everyone in town knows our building as "the pink church."  I was told that the wife of a past rector had planted pink roses next to the church and insisted that it be painted to match.  It's been pink for many years; nobody has any intention of changing it now.  So I took a bunch of pinkish fabrics over to the church and found a hand-dye that perfectly matches the pink painted stucco.  Traced the outline onto the cloth, ironed fusible to the back, and let it  sit until I felt brave enough to begin.  Found a nice grassy print in my stash, and a piece of cloth that I'd dyed with madder to make the reddish roof.  Added wildflowers, indigo-dyed sky.  Printed the label onto cloth, then painted it and made it into Eagle Lake.  I worked much of yesterday and today on it, and will probably finish tomorrow.

This is the drawing I used.  I darkened the outlines with magic marker so I'd be able to trace them.

I'm pretty happy with how the church came out.  Tomorrow I'll stitch the cross onto the tower and put a backing on the piece.  I used felt instead of batting because it stays very firm when layers are fused onto it.

I'm going to stitch a lot of leaves and flowers into the grassy print also.

And this is the label.  It's so nice to be able to print lettering onto cloth and not have to mess with applique or painting precise text.  Plus, people always ask whether there's really a lake in Eagle Lake.  There is, a pretty big one.  It's a bend in the Colorado River that got cut off by a natural dam long ago; now it's used as an irrigation reservoir, and there are a lot of fancy houses around it.  Also a healthy population of alligators and geese.

The church holds its Pentecost service on the lakeshore each year--I thought it was important to get the lake onto the banner.

So--one more promise kept.  A relief, as it was nagging at me; now I can go make dinner with a clear conscience.

  Las Estrellas Son Para Todos  is finished, folded and packed up for mailing tomorrow.  Now I'm going to go finish Stories Untold , hoping to get that packed up also and into the mail--just a little more hand quilting and it's done.

Next project:  make a draft-blocker for the front door (ooh, now that's exciting!)  I have Saltillo tile in the front hallway, and the door has gaps where the tile is grouted.  Not that drafts are a problem in the Texas summer--but mosquitos are, and they're getting into the house each evening and driving me itchy-crazy.  Unlike Minnesota mosquitos, which are the state bird and grow to the size of eagles, these are tiny and hard to swat.  It's complicated by the appearance of a floater in my right eye that leads me to think there's a mosquito beside my head almost all the time--I sit here swatting like a crazed woman when there's nothing there.   So I hope that filling a cotton tube with beans and putting it at the foot of the front door will block the nasty little critters.

Son Phil just called to invite me to share a soup dinner tonight.  "You just have to bring something."  "What's that?"  "Bring three bowls and a ladle."  They have been renovating the kitchen for months and all the utensils and bowls are in storage.  "It should not be too much longer," we keep telling each other.  "This has to get finished soon."  I remember feeling the same way when we were working on my house. Don't these things always take longer than expected?  And don't they always get more complicated?