Rebirth and Renewal

     

Before and After.

Easter weekend at El Ceilo came with a layer of ice -- sleet piled up on all the new spring growth, swirled around the deck, turned the cedars once more into a sparkling magical forest. Since our last freeze date around here is supposed to be March 15 or so, it was a big shock to the system. But, now that the weather has gentled again, it appears that only the basil may have suffered freeze damage. The ground must have been warm enough to protect most everything else.

This kind of ground-up protection seems to operate at a soul level, too. Some of my protective, powerful inner archetypes -- even rather bratty ones like Miss Priss, or the rather terrifying Dragon Lady Crone -- provide that kind of earth-tied protection when the icy winds blow and unexpected sleet pours onto tender growth.

      

Bobbe Nolan ironing, Donna LaMonico in process, Cher Solis and Mary Ellen Hardy finding fabrics. 

 

During the weekend's Calling All Archetypes workshop/retreat, we pondered, shared, and meditated, took work into new directions, made rebirth a theme and recovery the starting place for art quilts. Some of the archetypes who appeared were rather frightening, others made welcome appearances from earlier lives. Working from resources and exercises from Women Who Run with The Wolves, The Vein of Gold, and Sacred Contracts, each of the participants left with a project in tow -- and material for more. Although the weather was hardly the springtime exuberance that I had anticipated (no walks, no outdoor picnics), the fireplace was cosy and a couple of us even made it out to the hottub, until the sleet started raining down on our heads. The trip into Bandera for the Courthouse lawn Sunrise Service was canceled but I think we all had a sense of spirit, of celebration of Christ's rebirth, as we allowed ourselves time to reflect on our own journeys as women and artists.

Technically speaking, I showed newcomers to printing how to make a thermofax, and also demonstrated printing with water soluble crayons using gel medium, a technique that allows for wonderful spontaneity of drawing, and adds its own interesting twist as the colors dissolve and blend as one prints repeats. This little Easter image shows how the colors morph and blend, with each print changing as you work your way across the fabric.

        

Art and Quilts and Art Quilts, Part 2

 

This is my life on wheels: stuffed full of papery piñatas, careening along, headed who knows where.
What is success for an artist? Or more precisely, what does success look like for me?

If I am not willing to make some definitions, to set some, dreaded word, goals, will I get "there?"  If I don't have a clue where  there is, is it enough to "follow my bliss?"

For a few years, charting a new path in the domestic dimension of my life has determined most of the path I have been trekking: selling a home, buying a new one, moving and balancing a new kind of daily life, different than my city life of King William. The rest of the time was defined by other almost-automatic steps, once the new house and studio were in place: starting my workshop/retreats here at El Cielo, closing Textures gallery. And the rest of my time has been taken up with the things that are on automatic repeat status: the teaching stints at Southwest School where I am an established adjunct, King Ranch Art Camp for a week in the summer, being an active member (now President) of FASA.

Then, last fall, two consulting projects came along that seemed a good fit for my life (and my rapidly diminishing savings account): Dora and Diego's Garden Adventure and the Botero Family Days at the branch libraries. My friend and partner in art ed stuff Zet Baer was available and off we went. And then a crazy plan to spend three weeks in Italy!

Now, mid April, nearly, all the chickens are heading home to roost. For the next four months my calendar is chock full of activity - weekends blasted, travel bleary, wild woman on fire. So, success. And money, at least a bit, coming in. And time squeezed in here and there in the studio. Even art in a few local and regional exhibits (but note, these opportunities to show my work came to me -- I didn't apply or send out a proposal or write any letters, I just said yes).

I figure I can either continue the mode of planning/notplanning that has gotten me through these last two years, or  imagine some active, precise images of what I'd like my life to look like in five years. I'll be 59 in about three weeks, 60 seems an almost impossible age to be, but I am counting on it!

Deep breath. It's scary to write outloud about goals, don't you know. "Someone" is going to think me big-headed. "Someone" is going to think I have a lot of nerve. "Someone" is thinking you gotta be kidding. And "others" are going to wonder why I would ever tell everyone reading this blog about my plans. And "they" are going to think I am some kind of idiot.  (Did you hear the Drudge report on NPR about "the someones" in Katie Couric's interview with the Edwards?) So, despite all that from the arena, here goes, 5-year targets:

Art/Quilts -- I will make more art and sell my art. I will see my work in a couple of national exhibits a year, including some of the prestigious juried shows. I will have a solo show in a good gallery somewhere. I will see my work published in national magazines and journals. I will earn $25,000 a year selling art. (NOW that's a leap, my inner critic is yelling.)

Teaching -- I will have eight successful sold-out workshop/retreats a year here at El Cielo. I will continue teaching at Southwest School of Art and Craft, but with fewer on-going classes. I will teach at three prestigious national schools, conferences or events each year -- places like Arrowmont, Split Rock, QSDS.

So what gets in my way? Fear. Saying yes to things that don't add up. Being disorganized with time and money and paperwork.

Intermission

Multitasking is too kind a word, and, to be truthful, inaccurate. I have been skipping/skidding/surfing/sliding and surviving different world-ways-and-means since my last entry:

Nose-to-the-sewing-machine production to meet exhibit deadlines (Anyone in the Kerrville vicinity in April is invited to see my work at the 1550 Gallery). (Note- the quilt "altar" in the photo below is one of the Borderlands series that will be featured at the gallery.)

Visiting the familial home  in Waco (including a tornado watch with my 80-plus year old parents, my sister, Linda, my niece home from Zambia Peace Corp service, the neighbor boy with two really pissed off cats and me hanging out for a couple of hours in the interior hallway stuffed with pillows and a mattress)

Texas springtime gardening involving the neighbor's Bobcat and very large rocks

 

Mingling at the Southwest School of Art and Craft All-School exhibit opening, a command attendee gratefully accepting an award as " teacher of the year" 

So, Part 2  of success saga story will just have to wait until I get my breath. Meanwhile, here are a few pictures from the former contexts-in-conjunction. 

Sirena: Falling or Flying

Art Quilt, 84" by 60" 

 

P.S. No tornado materialized, though conditions looked really favorable and the sirens were a-wailing 

Art and Quilts and Art Quilts, part 1

Lately I've been following some discussions about the field: the art quilt in the fine art world, the shortcomings and advantages of entering juried quilt shows, the path of the artist to success. These discussions (which I suppose take place among artists of all sorts) are certainly stirring my brain dust.

Principally, I have been following the thoughtful discourse on the blog of Lisa Call, whose quilt work and writing both I admire, Rather than recap her remarks and that of those commenting on her posts, I invite you to look in on the conversation. Perhaps you will find them as delightully disturbing as I did.

First,  I need to  tell myself (and you if you stay with me) my story as an artist. Warning: this may be far more than you want to know about me, but in order for me to get to where I am trying to go with this "success" discussion, I really need to succinctly chart where I have come from.

My path into art quilts is a bit odd. I was always an arty kid -- hand me a crayon and I was one happy kid. My parents enrolled me in an innovative and creative art/theater program at Baylor University, after I had won and had to leave behind a scholarship to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts school.  A bit later, I earned an art degree (B.A.) from a liberal arts university in the late '60s -- about the time that even conservative universities were throwing out some of the traditional curricula and giving students a rather freehand in their education. For my senior project I sewed a room full of paper bag sculptures -- no one really got it. And, as a young woman, I was still (in 1970) living in a rather patriarchal world where it seemed pretty impossible to be a "real" artist. (I never learned anything about how I might make a living as an artist at university!)

Continuing within the construct of an arts-in-education research and teacher training foundation (the outgrowth of that childhood theater program) I made art banners/tapestries. I was inspired by Martha Mood, whose work stirs me, and Becky Crouch Patterson, whose wonderful  fabric wall art dances in my memory when I sit down to work. I also ran into Sister Mary Corita (Corita Kent) though work with several of her students who taught me the  joy of found imagery, to cut rather than draw, and to make a mean alphabet stamp. My personal art work was mostly within the context of community art projects, collaborations with children, using a variety of media for installations, exhibits, art works and experiences -- Happenings, books, banners, and performance events. Some of which took place in quite prestigious settings -- the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Blaffer Gallery at U of H, to name a few.

 

Ten years after that art education career had morphed into journalism, and then to work as a designer of interactive exhibitsmostly for children's museums -- I found myself wanting desperately to make art of my own. I added art cloth techniques and a devotion to making it via study with Jane Dunnewold. Then I took a weekend workshop with Sue Benner and WonderUnder was the answer to a question I hadn't even figured out to ask. Jumping into the world of art quilts with the mentoring of Jane, of Beth Kennedy, of Judi Goolsby, of Leslie Jenison and many others who worked and talked and shared ideas and techniques at Art Cloth Studios, I have in the past 8 years slowly  but steadily found my voice in cloth, in art. Through conversations and our Complex Cloth sales booth I discovered the Houston International Quilt Show, that there was such a thing as an art quilt, and that maybe that's what I was making. Along the way I had joined Fiber Artists of San Antonio, (intentionally not-a-guild group, but still with some guildish qualities, like juried exhibits).

You notice, there is scarce mention of quilting or quiltmaking in any of this. And hardly anything about sewing, except that I had to learn to do it in order to keep the WonderUndered edges in place. I didn't even know it was called raw edge applique. So now, 13 years after taking that first complex cloth class, I find myself a fulltime professional artist and teacher. And not quite sure how to define success, or at least not the NEXT success.

 

 I haven't entered any national art quilt juried shows -- but, yes, have had work in local and regional fiber arts exhibits. I've been part of several invitational shows or exhibits put together at the sort-of co-op gallery that I was part of for three years. Part of my reluctance to enter the big time national quilt juried exhibits is that I really don't have the precise sewing skills that seem to be highly valued in such venues. To tell you the truth, I don't really care about burying my threads or making a perfect mitered corner (I avoid the whole binding issue by just edge-stitching around the edges.)

So, this is where I've been. Next, where to go? It seems I've gotten here without much planning -- I just knew eight years ago that I did not ever want to have to take a fulltime job working for someone else. I've managed that. But now I need to chart the next ten. And as I turn 59 in a couple of weeks, my sense of time is certainly not what it was when I was 35 or 45.

I still feel awfully new around here. Only since I've been reading some good blogs by quilt artists, have I even begun to fathom the pathways and pitfalls to "success" in this in-between art world. I still bristle against the capitol A Art World that, to me, has often worked itself into such an elite language, that the work fails in approachability. I see a place in the world for this level of visual art work -- but for me, and I think to many people, its relationship to where we live daily is the much the same as that of string theory or particle physics. Perhaps it's important that someone is doing that work, but it doesn't touch me much, and I'm not really aiming at being in a contemporary art museum anytime soon. I have a parallel and equally passionate devotion to the teaching part of my life (a vocation I have followed since age 12). I'm not sure whether I make art to have validity as a teacher, or teach to have viability as an artist. So where am I headed? Stay tuned for Art and Quilts and Art  Quilts. part two. And maybe, if you are an artist, you might try this same  map charting exercise. What got you here?