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.

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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 Contermporary Handweavers of Texas (1)

    Monday
    Mar302009

    Color Workshop for Weavers

    Friday through Sunday the Contemporary Handweavers of Texas (lots of weavers, spinners, felters and other intense fiber types) met at the Airport Hilton. I was on the faculty -- the non-weaver of the bunch -- with two workshops, The Artist's Journal and A Field Guide to Color. Both were well received and I had fun hanging out on the fringes of another group of texture folks, most of whom have more patience and precision in their little fingers than I have in my entire body. None the less, my workshops went over well and I had some great feedback and suggestions, too, in case I ever run into another teaching op for such a group. Thanks Trish Ashton for the excellent organization for instructors!

     

    Here are a few more pics from the color workshop bunch. I'm sorry I don't remember everyone's names, another of my attention deficit issues, but perhaps they'll leave comments and identify the happy faces. The colors speak for themselves. We did a bunch of hands-on projects, one of the favorite, and a surprisingly simple way to exercise one's color sense and sensibilities is to try to match swatches of color cut from magazine photos. This is good to try after a few basic mixing experiements: taking a hue and adding various ammounts of black, white and grey to make shades, tints and tones; and mixing complements to see the effect of the hues opposite one another on the color wheel. I use student grade acrylics for these paint mixing exercises: a good cadmium red, cadmium yellow, some mid tone intense blue, black and white. It really does surprise everyone at how quickly they catch on to the mix -- this is, I think, the equivalent of a musician doing scales. Just a way to get nimble and quick, to spot the ingredients for mixing coors, even with dyes, which while not exactly like paints, do mix according to their own rules and regulations.

    After we did more color scheme/harmony exercises, each person dyed a couple of silk scarf ties with a color scheme of her choice -- that's the lead photo, today. Leave it to weavers to figure out a myriad of different tie patterns with simple rubber bands!

    P.S. I have my spring and summer schedule for workshops figured out at last. I will post tomorrow I hope, but if you want a copy of the brochure emailed, please send me a message via the sidebar message block to the right. Thanks, Susie.