Summertime and the living is easy...

Lisa, my cousin, visited from Kansas and came to play in the studio with me.  She is a new quilter having been spurred by the birth of Tutti, her first grand child a year and a half ago.  We had so much fun catching up and hanging out! So much fun that the days following when I was again creating alone, I almost didn't know what to do with myself. 

I've been beading on a recycled quilt cut into 3 6"x6"s mounted onto a canvas frame...(you know what has been said about idle hands).  Beading, like hand stitching, offers space for quiet meditation for gaining clarity in thought and returning to my center.

and it was Marla Jackson's photo  on her facebook page that pushed me to finally try ice dyeing after months and months of seeing snow dyed and ice dyed fabrics on blogs.

These are 6 small pieces that were layered in a parfait.  They were placed in wet.  When I return tomorrow or on Thursday I'll try it with dry fabric to see if it gets a sharper crystalline pattern.

I'm considering overdyeing these with ice  with orange and aqua marine dyes. 

 

If you're in the city, stop by Kore Gallery this month to see more of my work as the featured artist.

 

 

 

 



Art therapy...

Slinging dye-paint around today felt so good!  Colour therapy at it's finest!  My only intent was to use up the last of the thickened dye.  I laid a piece of  wet soda-ash soaked cloth down and went at it until the cloth was pretty saturated then  I covered that piece with plastic and laid another piece of wet soda-ash soaked cloth down over the first one and slung dye-paint again. I did this 5 times and will leave them to batch at least til Saturday. 

When I got to the last of the dye-paint, the very last of it...I took a notion and brushed it on thick water colour paper.

Do you think I should roll it in newsprint and steam it? then give it a good rinse and hang to dry? The paper didn't receive any soda-ash but there is some residue of it in the dyes.  I left the paper hanging from the clothes pins like you see here.

I still have some more dye concentrate to use up and I think I'll just do low-water immersion and then get back to sewing for the month of June.

Fabrics of the Week

These are the 2 successes thus far...

this one is 2 sides of the same cloth

The Art of Dating

Whew!!! so relieved that my mojo just took a short vacation!  Good actions breed good actions!  This mornring Peter and I headed to the Y (first time we're doing this together, say "ahhhhh"), then we left there and went to see the art work of G.C. Coxe at the Kentucky African American Heritage Museum.  There are only a dozen or so pieces from private collections but I'll be going back several times to study the work before it comes down in August.  It is such an honor to see his work hung together and I believe a first since his death in 1999.  This is my favorite piece, Totem Pole with Little People, (oil on canvas, 49"x64 5/8") because of the transparency and that the geometric figures in black represented "people" for Coxe in the same way the shape in the following photo represents people for me.  It made me feel in excellent company.

 

 

Below is the state of the dye session as I left it today...a screen with dried thickened dye and fabrics in reds and greens dye juice in plastic containers.

 

 

The other delightful treat was to go see Form Not Function exhibit!  I love every single piece in this year's show, but my vote for Best of Show would have gone to Units 27: Sunburst by Benedicte Caneill and my personal favorites were Letters to Myself-Page 2 by Denise Linet and Soliloquy I by Peggy Brown.  The exhibit doesn't allow photography but there is a catalog that accompanies this exhibit.  Will be making more trips to see this exhibit as well.

High Steppin'

The last group of marbled fabrics are in the washing machine and today was devoted to cleaning up the marbling table and preparing to make it a dye table.  Dye concentrates were mixed and before I left today I sat out 2 quarts of print paste so when I return tomorrow I can roll right into it.  I did forget to wash my screens so I'll wait until next week to use them and will primarily stamp and make direct hand marks with the dyes.  I might even put my foot in it (African American colloquialism which translates to doing one's best, topping it off with one's best, taking the extra step, etc)

Mo will have 2 surgeries on her knee Wednesday...she inherited my father's knees, poor thing.  I don't think she has given thought to having/needing to give up her stiletto stomps...or at least the wisdom of doing so....my Mama always said you can wear cheap clothes but you can 't wear cheap shoes.  There is no substitute for a good shoe that supports your entire body and not just look good on you while you're standing still.  But mind you, when I was 23, I too loved my heels but I equally loved my earth shoes and Bass sandals.  At 52 I've totally given up the heels...yet, there is nothing like a solid, new and well worn earth shoe or "earthy" type shoe.  At 18 I was guilty of walking across campus in my my pointy toe stilettos but the more I studied feminism, the more self assured I became in walking (pun intended) away from anything designed to exploit my body in the name of pain.  Mo tries to convince me that today's mile high shoes do not hurt the feet when walking....yeah, if its to the mail box and back.

studio shoes

 



For the next few weeks, I'm going to suspend the weekly accountability and just "flow" with it.  We'll be pitching in to help Mo and the grand babies anyway we can after her surgery.  My time in the studio will be catch where catch can.

John 14:2

Celebrity sightings all over the city, but I am home after a long productive day.  The thought briefly rolled through my head to go out on Central Avenue (the main entrance for Churchill Downs) and hang a sign around my neck "buy my art"...you know I heard Langston Hughes sold his books from the trunk of his car at one time in his career.  Gotta love grass roots marketing eh?!  

But with that said, Archeology, (apologies for the poor photography)

is hanging in Churchill Down's new development, "The Mansion".  It can be seen on this video at the 40 second mark and again at a minute and a half in the background.  At the 42-3 second mark, another textile artist, Ramona Lindsey's work can be seen in the background on the right.  The pieces were selected from the walls of Kore Gallery and also included 10 pieces by resident artist Donald Cartwright.  The work will be there for 100 days.  Kudos to Churchill Downs for selecting art by local artists to enhance their space.

Today I was at the top of my game! I was up early before Peter left for work and decided to have him drop me off at the studio.  We are down to 1 car but I am giving praise and feeling grateful because the other car was totaled in a wreck 2 weeks ago and no injuries were reported.  He was coming home from work on a Friday and a mile from home when a young man ran into the back of a van and the van ran into the back of Peter and he had to slam his breaks to keep from ramming the car in front of him.  The young man was speeding and had a baby in the car but at the time of the accident no injuries of all involved were reported and for that our inconvenience is like water off a duck...no big deal.

But I was in the studio at 6:45 am, no, make that 6:45 AM!  take a peek at what I did inside my own mansion....

 

 

 

America

 I will take the above photo and draw some aspect of it 3-5 each week until I feel I can see enough to  begin it on cloth.  This is my first day and what I did was to outline shapes.  From here I'll add looking for changes in value.

I doodled feathers.  I finally have a quilt where I think feather quilting will be enhancing.  I've never quilted feathers other than practice.

And the below images are fabrics that I designed yesterday and today...

It is this last piece that it hit me why I love marbling...not just the process which is fickle but the out come...it achieves the same ethereal appearance that encaustic art has.  I've decided to let the notion of experimenting with encaustics go...(just not prudent) and let the marbling be my encaustics.

 

 

And she's off....

to the studio and readying for Derby Dye Fever!  Today I prepped for marbling, dye painting and screening, and will add painting on silk in my experimenting for the month of May.  I made 3 strengths of sodium alginate thickener, 1 for painting, 1 for screen printing, and another for breakdown printing should the weather outside get hot enough this month.  I also made up a batch of Alum and marbling size using metho-cyl.  Last year I used carrageen for the size and had a time with getting the paints to float and I used everything from fluid acrylics, inks, air brush paints, to prepared paints for marbling.  I did get some good results but still had a lot of loss of paint that sunk to the bottom of the tray.

I use a blender to mix my urea water and thickner.

3 strengths of thickener from sodium alginate (seaweed derivative)

 

Since my fabrics have been sitting for awhile, I decided to scour them again to remove dust,...a combination of various pfd (preferred for dyeing) silks and cottons.  The silks are washing as I type.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This past week I was at the studio and gallery for a combined total of 19 hours.  On Saturday I did a demo for my ART Going Postal(c) postcards while gallery sitting.  The visitors were few but I enjoyed the company and conversation of fellow artist Dennis Shaffner. 

 



 

 

I haven't made new postcards in years.  I used designer silk fabrics from a sample book.  I'm going to make these as warm-up exercises on a weekly basis until I exhaust the fabrics.

Poetic touch stones have filled by day...started last night with Proclamations of Forgiveness by Estella Majozo.  This morning Cherryl Floyd-Miller shared the link to this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. And the radio show On Being posted this poem on their FB status and I ended up listening to the podcast.  I'm still feeling strong and joyous...gonna ride this vibe as far as I can!  Peace!

Accountability Sunday

or should I say 'back on track'.  One fourth of the way through this year and I was thrown off track by the move of the studio, illness, and a busted laptop where I tracked my goals for the year in Excel.  I'm feeling well, studio is in place, laptop still busted.  Oh, and so far, the only casualty from the move is a misplaced iPod. 

I gallery sat for 10 hours and was in the studio for 9 hours sewing on bottom sleeves on some quilts for more stability in hanging.  Here are snapshots from my space...

comfy chair

curtain of shells

front room rearranged already

print/cutting table/ironing/shelves

stabilizers/wax papers/fusibles/freezer paper/ etc

misc.

Some of these quilts will eventually move over to the co-op gallery.  When I unrolled what I'm calling the doorway quilt, I realized it was too small and underwhelming.  I was able to catch the IQS-Cincinnati on Saturday and the SAQA exhibit Seasonal Palette wowed me.  For one, the impact of the size and the consistency of them hanging hit me!  They all were 32"x78".  For a passageway to have it's impact on the viewer, I want to offer the feeling that you can walk through it and unless it is a doorway for small children, of which it is not, its not working.  I'm going to complete it though and try to recreate something similar in the fall.  The doorway quilt in on the far right in the snap shot below.

This coming Friday is the Derby @  Mellwood and Schalfy Trolley Hop for FAT Friday.  Come out and park your car at Mellwood (plenty of free parking) and check out the Male High School trios and over 200 pieces of art throughout the Center. Chris Mudd will be playing light jazz on the keyboards inside the Kore Gallery and Jisun Mudd, his mother and one of the featured artists will be present also.  See the update here.

When May begins, I'm going to begin dyeing, marbling, printing and painting fabrics for the summer as my main focus.  The quilts that I'll make will be small ones that I'll wrap about a canvas frame.

Hanging out

Being at the studio on Black Friday was a very odd thing...it didn't feel any different from any other Trolley Hop except it was an all day affair...the amount of people on Frankfort Ave and at Mellwood appeared even lighter than a regular Trolley Hop...just don't know that small businesses and art galleries can compete with the big box stores on that day.  That aside, I really don't retail anything from my studio and use days on Open Studio to field questions from wondering visitors about what I do and hang out and connect with friends with a little art making in between.

Brittany came yesterday to hang out with me.  She saves shells from mussels and was interested in dyeing or painting them.  We experimented with acid dyeing with procion mx on a few and gesso and paint on others.  Brittany also makes purses from re-purposing fabric and hand embroidering women on the front.  Here is the start of one of them...

I've known Brittany's Mom, Deborah, since elementary school and we reconnected in the late nineties after we ended up working for the same organization.  

I completed most of the quilt lines on Oliver Lewis, The Jockey and tried to work on the Mid-wife but the day was wearing on me by then.  Tried to pick it back up today but couldn't concentrate well enough to do without making mistakes.  Something occurred yesterday at the art complex that greatly bothered me...another occurrence in a long line of crass and crude behaviors by leasing staff.  There is only so much Ass-holism I can let slide off without it effecting me while there.  This particular thing even found itself into my dreams last night and was on my mind the first thing when I awoke...not good...my head space is too precious and time too short.  If I'm still bothered, and even if I'm not, by Wednesday, I will at least voice my view to the appropriate person.

On another vibe, I was accepted into the SBA's Access to Market program for artists, designed to help artists market their work to a wider audience.  It is a pilot program that is funded via a federal grant and only took 50 artists across the state.  

Fabric of the Week

Hard lesson learned #7450

Just look at the wash out here! I used Jacquard's No-Flow and Dye-Na-Flow.

The instructions call for rinsing the No-Flow out after the paint as been set. I rinsed under cold running water and the paints air dried and were heat set first.  So what the hell is up?

I'm thinking of re-doing the No-Flow/Dye-Na-Flow over this...maybe I applied the No-Flow too heavy.  Maybe I'll give Jacquard a call on Monday.  I really really loved it...still do, but I am pissed over the amount of color loss.

And finally, I'm quilting the first Oliver Lewis piece.  I decided to start with the spires to warm me up.  I'll be back at it tomorrow. 

And another FINALLY....I received my last box of colored pencils giving me a grand total of 500 PENCILS!  (How you like me now Beverly?  That would be Ms Karoda to you!)

Power in the Chitlin' Circuit

Yes, yes, yes...thank you Lord (stomping feet, head bowed, right hand held high, left hand over heart)...yesterday I was feeling the power, (I GOT THE POWER...hearing the voice in that song that I can't name...anybody???).  I held up to a long day at the Chitlin' Circuit, my studio, and made what felt like progress.

Untitled at this time but finished.

added the color...since this is of an boarded up storefront church, I'm thinking hand quilting, but I might succumb to machine quilting.

another toilet paper insert fabric...my intent was to go with subdued colours...then i changed my mind.

One last thing and then I gotta go...but Enchanted Arts Studio has this hanging outside their door...it is a work in progress.  It took me by surprise when I saw it.

Looking forward to seeing what comes next...paper maiche, clay, fabric...all of the above

Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World by Catherine E. McKinley

Kweli recommended this book to me by way of Facebook.  Being a fabric designer herself she was really provoked to think deeper about the state of contemporary fabric production of African fabrics and the history behind it.  I downloaded the book to my laptop but I should have trusted her judgement and purchased a hard copy of the book, because now for 14 bucks I have it on my computer but for 3 dollars more I could have had the hard copy and after reading it, I wished I had.   Not realizing my assumption before hand, I thought the book would be an informative straight forward historical read, but it was much more than that...it documents one American woman's obsession with Indigo and the reason she is trying to discover why.  On a Fulbright Scholarship she journeys through West Africa looking for authentic Indigo production and use, but the cloth, not being in vogue compared to its past, is elusive.  Her adventure is told in antedotes which helps the book move ratherly quickly, but there are times I wanted more details of the story and wanted to get to know more about her feelings in relation to the people and places she visited.  But it is the search for Indigo that compels the story and the human relationships and geography take a back drop.

When I get taken with a book like I am with this one, I go off on a google search to find out more about the author and ended up requesting a FB connection only to find out she has a friend here in Louisville who I consider a good art-friend and has visited here before.   So I'm hoping there will be a chance to meet her and hear more of her stories sometime in the distant future.

McKinley's book led me to order In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical legacy in the Atlantic World by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff.  I started it last night and I tell ya it starts my mind spinning because I'm wondering if I can create a narrative in cloth around the crows, the faces I've sketched (the old woman who can be seen in older posts below), and botany...so my immediate challenge is to get centered and just listen for a bit.

**********

Yesterday I started a do-over, from scratch...hand-painting with fabric and acryllic paint mixed with Golden 900 vs using thickened dye like I used on the first start.  Its fairly large and detailed for me and I just hope I can meet a mid-November deadline for a regional fine art show.

Remember when I said I was in the studio the day after Davis' murder by the state of Georgia and had the intent of doing one thing and then I heard this phrase in my head?  The phrase was, These are the Boats Carrying Us to Heaven.  I decided to put aside my intent and explore what this could mean.  As a result I have over 200 small "boats" to paint with distinct markings on cotton with a working size of 5 feet by 4 feet.  I would like to hand quilt it as the piece has a RAW art vibe on it.  But no way would I make a November deadline if I decide to hand quilt it.  

Also, yesterday, in preparation to attempt meeting another deadline I sent a completed quilt into surgery.  I wasn't happy with one side but did love the surface...so I removed the facing and, today will attempt to square it up better.

Tuonane baadaye (See you later in Kiswahili)