Abstracting the West

In January I wrote a post about some pieces I was working on in response to an upcoming call for entry.  The pieces were finished before the end of 2015 but the call for entry didn't happen until spring.  I didn't want to say anything about these pieces until I knew if there were going to be restrictions about posting artwork that was accepted.  Happily, my work was accepted into the show and there are no restrictions, so I'm free to share.  

The Laramie Art Quilters group is hosting a show titled Abstracting the West.   The show will be on exhibit at the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site, which is part of the Wyoming State Parks system. The facility is best known for housing Butch Cassidy during his only stay behind bars. An historic treasure in Laramie, WY, the park welcomes over 29,000 visitors each summer. Their new exhibit hall will house Abstracting the West from July 1, 2016 until September 30, 2016.  The reception for this show will be on June 30th.

These three pieces came together so easily for me that I began to wonder if they lacked legitimacy.  It's funny how we can come to feel that "real" art only happens where there is a struggle involved.  I'm choosing to see this experience as an indication that this type of mixed media stitched work is what really makes my heart sing.  It is hard to tell from the photos, but there is more paper than fabric in these quilts.  

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Colorado: Harebell

42" x 30"

(sandstone, blue sky, sunsets, wildfires, India Paintbrush, purple mountains, wildflowers)

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Colorado: Aspen

42" x 30"

(Colorado forests of aspen and pine)

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Colorado: Columbine

42" x 30"

(columbine flowers, aspens and pines, mountain lakes, starry nights)

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Colorado: Aspen - detail

(In this detail image you can more clearly see the white organza applique that I used to create the focal images in all three pieces.)

Two shows!

Everything seems to be happening at once right now.  I have artwork in two different shows that are both having artist receptions tomorrow night.  I am happy to announce that my piece Reflections will be shown at the Art Students League of Denver.  I took at class last year with the wonderful Jo Fitsell, who invited me to participate.  I honored that she thought of me!

Summer of Art: ASLD Students’ Exhibit

Invitational- Faculty & Students
Exhibition Dates: May 25 – June 22, 2016
First Friday Artist Reception:  June 3| 5:30 – 8pm
The Art Students League of Denver is an inclusive and inspiring art community where artists of all abilities are guided by professional artists to reach their highest potential. This exhibit highlights the talent of beginning to advanced students chosen by their instructors to represent our artists’ community at its best!

A couple of years ago I took a class with Katie Pasquini Masopust.  The class was about painting canvas and then cutting it up and reassembling it into painted canvas quilts.  I was so inspired by the workshop that I went home and painted several canvases.  Unfortunately I was not struck by inspiration at the time and never came up with any ideas for what to do with these painted canvases.  Until now!  40 West Arts announced a call for entry with the theme of Drip!  My painted canvas had been largely painted with dripping paint so I knew this was the time to get those canvases out and make something.  The following piece came together and I'm excited to say it was accepted into the show.  It is titled Polychrome Rain.  The reception for this show will be at the 40 West gallery on June 3rd, from 5:00 - 8:00 PM.

24" W x 43" H  Painted canvas and silk, collaged papers, acrylic paint, gold cord.  Machine stitched.

Urban Rhythms Show

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Earlier this year I created this piece, titled All Dolled Up.  This is theoretically part of a series, the first of which is my piece Reflections.  I have in mind an ongoing series about feminism.  All Dolled Up explores the ways in which women feel obliged to remake themselves into perfect dolls in order to be "good enough" in a society that worships youth and has very narrow and unrealistic ideals of beauty.  The number 10 on one of the mannikins probably speaks for itself, but I thought I would explain that the other numbers on and around the other two mannikins are the first several numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence.  I'm no mathematician so I will just say that these numbers represent a ratio that is often seen in nature and is considered visually pleasing.

I'm a bit behind the 8 ball in sharing that this piece was,accepted into an art show being held at the Art Gallery at the DPAC and Backstage Coffee.  The venue is a nice cafe at the Denver Performing Arts Center, which is a really high profile venue for all the artists involved.  There are a lot of high quality pieces hanging in this show.  Between the great food at the cafe and the wonderful art on display I'd say it's very worth checking out!

Theme:  Urban Rhythm

Urban:  in, relating to, or characteristic of a city or town.

Rhythm:  Movement or variation characterized by the regular recurrence or alternation of different quantities or conditions.

The Art Gallery at the DPAC and Backstage Coffee is located at 1000 14th St. 1B-1, Colorado.  The show will hang from April 24th through July 10th, 2016.

Above & Beyond Exhibition

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I'm exited to announce that my piece "Reflection" was accepted into the SAQA Above & Beyone Exhibition which opens at the Lakewood Cultural Center on January 22nd.  The LCC Main Gallery is a really nice venue for an art show and I'm certain that the pieces on exhibit will be excellent.  This show is all about the vast variety of techniques and approaches that art quilters are taking with their work.  I submitted "Reflection" because the techniques include an image printed onto silk with my home computer and printer, unusual materials such as Lutradur and acrylic paint and fabrics that I had designed and either dyed or painted myself. This medium is so exciting and versatile, which is why I love it so much!

Inspired!

Not long after I took that workshop with Deborah Fell, I heard about an upcoming call for entry for a show that will take place in 2016.  I don't want to say too much about this because I'm not sure what the status of  this show is at the moment, but between the techniques I was using after the workshop and the call for entry, I was hugely inspired!  The "theme" I chose to interpret was my personal vision of Colorado.  There was a ton of leftover material from the workshop that I wanted to use, but in the end I had three large pieces in mind and had to make even more materials.  A surface design superstorm hit my studio when I got out the Gelli Plate, stencils, stamps, and any other mark making tool I could find.  When I thought I had enough collage material I painted some canvas and began collaging.  When everything was dry I cut the collaged canvas into 6 inch squares and combined the colors into the background for a quilt.  I forgot to take photos of the original canvases but I did take some of the second round. Here are some pictures of the uncut canvases and one of the backgrounds that I assembled.

I had 3 thermofax screens made & you can see all 3 image in this photo.

Mixed Media Collage

Last September I took a workshop with Deborah Fell.  The workshop was a blast, and while I'm not sure I learned anything new in terms of technique, I did seem to get a lot of inspiration and I came away feeling like I had "permission" to do some of the work I've always wanted to do.  At the workshop I got started on several different pieces, but no where near finished on any of them.  When I got home I continued to work with one piece in particular.  I mostly took apart what I had begun at the workshop and revamped the whole thing.  Something about this process really spoke to me and I completed this piece in record time.  I began with color washes on a piece of canvas.  Then I collaged papers and fabrics on top with glue.  These collage items were created in a frenzy of mark making and painting until I had two tons of materials that I began randomly tearing up.  So fun!  When I had a collage I was happy with I added batting and backing and began stitching.  There is more paper in this "quilt" than fabric, and quite a few layers in some places but I had no trouble stitching it.  I love everything about this process and I'm thrilled with the result, although not so thrilled with the photo, LOL!  Here is the final piece.

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BOP Abstract 2015

Published!

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I'm so excited to announce that my art quilt Gothic Ghost Tale has been published in the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of Somerset Studio Magazine!  This is my very first full fledged article.  Stampington did a lovely job with the photographs (as always).  They even mentioned my quilt on the cover!  Swoon!

Gothic Ghost Tale

Although I failed to create much in the way of completed art work in 2014, I did spend some time working on projects.  Last June I blogged about a project I was working on that was all about Gothic windows.  I adore Gothic architecture and really wanted to do a piece about it.  I got to this point and got stuck:

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I worried over it, thought about it, took it to both my critique groups, and still could not resolve certain design flaws.  Eventually I decided to put it away for a while and come back to it later.  "Later" became now when I saw that Somerset Studio magazine had put out a call for Gothic themed artwork for a 2015 issue.  The time away from the project was very helpful, as it allow my brain to percolate on solutions in the background and this time I was able to bring the project to fruition.  I will be mailing it off to Stampington and Co. this afternoon.  Wish me luck!  Here is the finished piece:

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Gothic Ghost Tale

I was too busy to work!

Have you ever had a friend that moved away?  After a while you realized that you haven't called or written, and you feel so bad about it that you don't know what to say, so you don't call or write?  Next thing you know its been ten years.  That is sort of my relationship with this blog.  LOL!

Lest you think I developed a horrible lazy streak in 2014 I thought I'd fill you in on my busy year.  The truth is, I took too many classes! I was so busy working on projects I began in one class or another that I only got one piece of work finished.  I took classes on dying silk organza, marbling fabric and paper, learning from your own work, deconstructed screen printing, turning a watercolor painting into a quilt, making mixed media journals, and intuitive painting.  Whew!  I came out of all of that with some lovely pieces of fabric designed by Moi that I am excited to use in future projects.  Here is a little collage of some of the fabric I marbled:

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I played in my art journal and spent quite a little bit of time working on a piece about gothic windows.  The windows piece hit a wall I couldn't get around so I put it on hold for a while so I could work on this piece below.  This one was accepted into both the Creation Health art exhibit being sponsored by the Adventist Hospitals and also the Front Range Contemporary Quilters online portfolio for 2015.  This is hand dyed (not by me) cotton, fused and machine quilted.

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I am in the middle of working on a piece that I wanted to enter into a competition but the work is going slowing and I won't make the deadline.  I've also started a piece for a challenge with one of my critique groups.  We challenged ourselves to make something using some of our hand dyed/painted fabrics.  At some point I will find time to take some pictures.  Maybe.

Work in progress

Happy Friday!  I don't work on Friday's so all Friday's are happy for me.  I should write an ode to the flex schedule!

Today I thought I'd write a post about something I'm in the middle of working on.  This began as a result of a call for entry for pieces about arthictecture.  I was not able to get this started, much less finished, in time for the entry deadline, but I'm still working on it.  I decided that my love of Gothic architecture was a good place to start and I began working on this piece about gothic windows.  Here is a picture of an early stage of the piece:

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These are pieces of painted Lutradur.  I have painted, stamped, and stenciled designs in my chosen color scheme and arranged the pieces in order.  One small piece is missing, but it shows up later.  The next photo is further along, after I have stitched all the windows and quilted the whole thing:

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As you can't see, the quilting isn't very visible so I may go over it again to make the stitching bolder.  This is the point where I decide if I should bother continuing.  Actually, I've been wondering that for quite a while as I worked on this piece.  Most of my work hits this stage where I just don't feel like it's going well.  I think most people can relate to going through this difficult process!  I took a mixed media workshop with Lynne Perrella last year and she said that if you don't like what you have done so far on a piece, then you haven't done enough.  Of course, she is a "maximalist" so more is more!  A philosophy I totally agree with.  I decided that part of what I love about Gothic architecture is the busy ornateness.  Since I'm not satisfied with this piece right now, I plan to keep going!  At the moment I'm working on bas relief gargoyles in polymer clay.  When they are far enough along I'll show them to you!

New website and blog!

Welcome to my new website and blog!  After much prodding from a good friend, I finally got around to updating my on-line presence.  It is my hope that the new web site will prove to be a more professional way to present my art portfolio.  I kind of doubt I'll ever be an amazing blogger, but I do enjoy the chance to include more information about what I'm up to than the web site alone would afford me.  So!  On to business as it were!

The early part of this year I was busy with art journaling and I do not yet have photos to share.  As always, I got back around to mixed media art quilting and this is what I was working on:

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Sorry for the somewhat blurry photo!  I have this opinion that "in progress" shots are not worth setting up the tripod.  I think I need to look into a better camera because if I don't use the tripod with this camera, I get blurry pictures.  Anyway, last year when I took the workshop with Sue Benner I cut out about a million pieces of prefused fabric in blue, gold, and olive green.  Since I had so many left over from the previous two projects, I decided to go for a third!  I did add some fusible to an inner office envelope for variety, and I spray painted through alphabet stencils to create the lettered fabric.  To make the green spirals I took pieces of green fabrics and fused them into a square shape.  Then I used a rotary cutter and cut the square on the bias to make multi colored strips of green.  I've done a little monoprinting and splattering with acrylic paint.  I was considering giving up on this project because my stitching came out much wonkier that I liked, but I've shown the piece to several people and they all think the wonky stitching goes well with the general wonkiness of the piece, so I guess I'll go ahead and finish it.

There is more to come on other projects in process, but one blog post at a time!  Thanks for stopping by.

2013: More catching up!

In April 2013 I took a workshop with the amazing Sue Benner .  The workshop was all about abstraction and we were asked to bring some examples of artwork from another artist we admired.  Sue showed us images of artwork done by past artists who had used artworks they admired as inspiration for further abstraction studies.  The artist I chose for my inspiration was Lynne Perrella.  This was my first workshop with the Front Range Contemporary Quilters and I was hugely intimidated by my fellow students and Sue herself.  In spite of that I had a wonderful time and learned more than I could have hoped to in a few short days.  At the end of the workshop I had two very incomplete pieces of art, but seeing as I would be jetting off to Connecticut three weeks later I was not able to continue working on these pieces when I got home. The workshop in CT with Lynne Perrella and Michelle Ward was one of the best things I have ever done and also left me with unfinished artwork.  I spent the summer working on those pieces and then along came the workshop with Katie Pasquini Masopust and more incomplete art.  Well, I'm happy to say that I have now finished all the artwork I started in these various workshops.  At the end of the Sue Benner workshop my first piece looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

The photo does not do it justice as you cannot really see the lovely sheen of the silks and the sparkly organzas.  My best friend made the little polymer clay faces for me and I just love them!  Wow, putting these photos together is an interesting instruction in photography!  Hmmm.......  

The second piece that I began at that workshop looked like this when I got home:

Sorry for the blurry and off color photo.  Knowing it was nowhere near finished, I did not put much effort into taking a good shot.  I was pretty excited by this piece as it was quite a departure from my usual stuff and I liked where it was going.  After practicing on other things to explore monoprinting and quilting options, I ended up with this:

One of the most important things I learned from the three workshops was that I tend to be much too literal.  I am now exploring ways to take things further and to expand on my original concepts.  Invaluable!  Each of the pieces I began in a workshop last year has led to other pieces of art and more ideas.  I learned new techniques and made friends and I can't wait to do it again in 2014.

Sue Benner Workshop

Well hey there, I'm back!  My life got rather busy for a while but I'm here now to explain some of what was going on.  First of all, I got promoted to a new position at work.  Yea me!  However, I still have to do my old job at the same time until they get someone hired to replace me.  So I'm a bit overwhelmed at work.  I am lucky, in that I don't have to bring my work home with me, but at the end of a workday or a workweek, I'm pretty pooped.

On top of that I have been taking art workshops.  I'm here to tell you that it is totally worth spending the money!  The first workshop I took was in April, with the fabulous art quilter

Sue Benner.  She has been my art quilting hero for a long time and I was so thrilled to get a chance to take a class with her.  The class was put on by the Front Range Contemporary Quilters, of which I am a member.  This workshop was about abstract art.  Sue was incredibly knowledgeable about fine art in general and showed us a lot of great stuff about the development of abstract art.  We focused on the ways in which artists of the past and present have used other artists work as inspiration for their own art.  It was fascinating to see how the other workshop participants approached this idea.  I soon realized that I was taking a much to literal approach to using an image of something as inspiration for an abstract piece of my own.  The results of our first exercise stunk so bad that I won't even show it.  I learned so much from looking at other peoples work.  In the end I started making progress on the piece above but soon realized that I wanted to work with sheers and that Wonder Under fusible just wasn't going to give me the results I was looking for with sheer fabrics.  I decided to put this aside to work on at home, where I have some Misty Fuse.  Here is a detail shot of the part I worked on for a while:

Since I didn't want to continue with the piece above right then and there I started another one (below).  I'm really happy with where this is going.  I plan to make two or three along the same lines so I can try out some different techniques on it, including monoprinting.  I may even print this to both paper and fabric so I can play with it some more.

The rectangles with the black lines are actually paint covered paper towel with black fabric lines fused to it.  I so love to combine paper and fabric!  I took a monumental amount of stuff to this workshop.  Getting ready for it took me two weeks!  When I got home I put away a few things but mostly I just piled the stuff up in a corner and got on with preparing for the next workshop.  I'll talk about that in a separate blog post.

This was my first workshop with the Front Range Contemporary Quilters group.  One of the things I enjoyed most was meeting the other participants.  Everyone was so friendly and helpful.  Some of these women are very experienced and accomplished artists.  We had lovely conversations while working and while sitting together for meals.  A couple of other women on my side of the room were also relatively new to the group and we all got along really well.  We decided to try forming a critique group that will meet once a month.  I've been longing for connection to other people working in textiles and mixed media so I am so happy to have met these people.  Now I feel like I am part of the group and going to monthly FRCQ meetings will be twice as fun.

In parting I have to apologize for the crappy photos.  Since these are "before" photos I didn't worry about setting up optimal photo conditions.  If I wait to have perfect pictures I will never get another blog post done!  When I finish these projects I will work a little harder at photographing them.  LOL!

State of the art '13 fiber art exhibit

I can't believe I didn't blog about this earlier!  I have two pieces of art in this wonderful show!  As a new member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates I was thrilled to have an opportunity to enter something in a local exhibit.  This is by far the best art exhibit I've had the privilege of being a part of, but I do happen to be partial to textile art.  There are pieces from some well known and professional artist in this show so I felt like I was in somewhat exhalted company.  The artwork included everything from pieced quilting to wholecloth quilting, mixed media work and thread painting.  There are even some three dimensional textile pieces. The only discordant note was that they spelled my name wrong on the labels next to my pieces.  Honestly I wonder sometimes if I should just change the way I spell my name, because no one ever gets it right.  LOL!

2nd Place Winner!

I recently entered this piece in the "On My Own Time" art exhibit for State employees.  The exhibit is being shown at the Metropolitan State College, Center for Visual Arts, in the Santa Fe Art District of Denver.  Its a really nice gallery in the major Denver arts district so I am really happy to have a piece of art hanging there for a couple of weeks.  But even better..... I won 2nd place in the fine crafts category!  The competition is a two part deal.  The first part was the current exhibit.  They juried these entries to determine who will go on to the second part of the OMOT exhibit that will hang in the State Capitol building from December through May.  I'm very excited that this piece will be shown in our State Capitol.  My mother took a REALLY bad picture of me holding my ribbon at the reception and since it is my only documentation of the event I will share it in spite of how horrible I look.  I blinked.  Can you tell?

And a close up of the label.  Hey, I'm no where near jaded yet.  Got to document those successes you know!

Published in Quilting Arts Mag!

When my copy of the October/November issue of Quilting Arts Magazine arrived today I about burst from excitement.  A couple of months ago I entered a piece in the "What's Your Signature Color" reader challenge and my piece made it into the magazine.  This is a small 8" x 8" quiltlet made of fabric that I pieced, stamped, quilted, embroidered and embellished.  The squares are fabric-paper edged with gold and layered with small fabric scraps.  Sadly the blurb next to my piece says I live in Lakewood, California when it should say Colorado, but that little error hardly dents my thrill at being published in one of my favorite magazines.