Susie Monday

Artist, maker, teacher, author, head cook and bottlewasher.

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The art I make is the result of a life-long love of pattern, texture and color. How I teach is a skill honed by experience (I started teaching creative arts to younger kids when I was 12). After earning a B.A. in Studio Arts from Trinity University, I helped lead an internationally recognized educational foundation, designed curriculum exhibits for schools and other institutions, wrote and edited for a major daily newspaper, opened the San Antonio Children's Museum and then, a dozen years ago, took the scary but essential (for me) leap to become a fulltime artist and art teacher.

About This Blog

This weblog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise. 

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    Entries in Annie Dillard (1)

    Tuesday
    Sep162008

    Infinite Variety/Creative Choice

    Infinite. Abundant. Words that have both spiritual and material connotations. One of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, speaks of the fecundity of nature in her first book of prose, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek:

    "A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate,without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.a tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling."

    And I worry sometimes about having too many ideas. You may worry about having too few, but my experience with artists is that's its always too many. I suggest that for today, just today, you and I take a page (a leaf?) from the elm and just make what needs making, at whatever stage that is, for whatever purpose, and if the caterpillers come, or the shoot withers, or the bud never opens. Well, there are at least 5,999,999 more to come just this season.

    The photo that sparked this thought  (and, now my desire to reread Dillard's classic narrative of her year on Tinker Creek) were taken on a campus walk with friend Susan on the Rutgers campus. This little garden must have a horticulture department at its source -- the variety of late summer pods, and blooms and leaves, colors and shapes and textures, is enough for a lifetime body of work. Surface design, indeed.


    Does anyone know what any of these flowers are? They were all unfamiliar to me. And If that spiny leafed plant will grow in my climate, I want it. Surely that would be deer resistant!