Rolling out the Fiber Art: Conventions, Receptions, and Inspirations

The past few days have rolled out a lot of fiber art. From May 1 to 4, my buddy Carol and I participated in the annual convention of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) http://www.saqa.com/, a 3300-member international organization for serious art quilters,  in Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington, DC.  A mere two hours after arriving back in Hartford, Carol and I got in our cars and drove an hour to Norfolk, CT, in Connecticut's northwest hills, for a reception for the Connecticut Fiber Arts Collective's group show, Northwest Corner, in the town's public library. http://norfolklibrary.org/
 http://ctfac.blogspot.com/2014/05/ctfac-reception-at-norfolk-public.html

 The SAQA convention was exhilarating and exhausting, inspiring and intimidating.  Seriously.  As exhilarated as I was by meeting so many other quilters and looking at some exquisite fiber art, I was also exhausted by almost nonstop socializing.  As inspired as I was by looking at the work of some of the best fiber artists in the country and world, work unique in its vision and stunning in its use of color, I was also intimidated by the high standard of artistry and workmanship...and by conference speakers' advice that we art quilters start thinking like the CEOs of our own businesses.

On the inspiration scorecard:  here are a couple of socks-knocking pieces, which I offer as examples of the dozens of art quilts at the convention, in galleries and on slides. 

Take a look at Mary Pal's work.  She works in--can you believe this?  stiffened and hand-sculpted cheesecloth.  http://marypaldesigns.com/new-index/

Avo by Mary Pal

And look at this waving fabric sea grass, or kelp, by a fiber artist named Natalie Shudt, http://www.theartleague.org/content/shudt_2014, whose three-dimensional fiber creations we saw at the Torpedo Factory, an art center combining artists' studios, classroom space, and a gallery.   http://www.torpedofactory.org/

So you can get the gist of the double-edged inspiration and intimidation emanating from this work.  Some of the conference message was intimidating, too, in its focus on the business side of art.  True,  that kind of talk was appropriate to the theme of the conference, Capitolizing on Fiber.  It's a pun: the conference program offerings focused on the business side of fiber arts--or capitalizing one's art--and the meeting took place in the nation's capitol.  Right?

One of the speakers told us to put on our CEO hats as soon as we got up in the morning.

I'm not there yet.

Still, there was fun in socializing with established friends and meeting new ones.

Here I am with the gang from Connecticut.  That's me, second from right--you can see my waving hand and a slice of my head.

I went to the conference for the networking and the schmoozing and the learning, but also for the opportunity to meet with some folks with, and for whom, I've worked, remotely, for years, in my capacity as a free-lance writer for the Society for Human Resource Management, (SHRM) http://www.shrm.org/Pages/default.aspx.  SHRM is headquartered there in Alexandria, and so, once I sent in my conference registration, I made arrangements to meet face to face with Margaret Clark, a SHRM employee who, like me, is a lawyer, a product of a Catholic upbringing, married to a Jew, and a resident or former resident of West Hartford, Connecticut. Margaret and bonded around these things, and around parental late-life care issues, over dinmer at Alexandria's Taverna Cretekou http://www.tavernacretekou.com/

After my dinner with Margaret and exhilarating but exhausting experience at the SAQA conference, my travel buddy Carol and I flew back to Hartford on Sunday May 4, arriving around noon.  After a two-hour pitstop, we drove northwest into the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains to Norfolk. CT, where, as part of our membership in the CT Fiber Arts Collective, http://www.ctfac.blogspot.com/ Carol and I were participating in a fiber art show, Northwest Corner, at the Norfolk Public Library.  http://norfolklibrary.org/

It's a real privilege for our art to hang in this lovely old building. 

Take a look at this barrel-vaulted ceiling, this custom woodwork  When's the last time any of us saw a public library built of such materials and with such an expansive use of space?

One of my favorite features of the library: the Latin inscription on the mantel,

Inter Folia Fructus.  Among the leaves, fruit.  Another pun:  the leaves are leaves of books, and the fruit is the product that the reader gleans from them.  Also, in nature, fruit does grow among leaves.  Right?

Sometimes I'm glad I studied Latin.

Here are six of the ten members of the CT Fiber Arts Collective, those of us who were able to get ourselves to Norfolk for the reception.  Front row, left to right, Karen Loprete and Antonia Torres.  Back row:  Rosalind Spann, Christina Blais, Diane Cadrain, Carol Vinick.

Here are the library volunteers who made the reception a reality.  Thanks, ladies!

L to R, Leslie Battis, Mary Ford-Bey, Angie Engle, and Sally Briggs.

The reception was gratifyingly well-attended

...and our art was universally well-received.

A woman whose daughter is about to be married at Norfolk's Infinity Hall bought Christina Blais' finely-tuned rendering of its funky old building. Congratulations, Christina!

In addition, Mary Lachman sold her small quilt Sea Grass  & Waves, Karen Loprete sold a table runner, and I sold a string of felted beads.

I also had two art quilts in the show: 

 This one is a view of a folk-art roadside signpost in the center of Norfolk.

This is a view of a rustic Norfolk fence that wends its crooked way past a grassy field called, I believe, the Town Meadow.

And what a lot of skilled artistry from my sister CFAC members.

Here's Rosalind Spann with Stella's Violin:

Here's Antonia Torres with Winter Red:

Here's Carol Vinick, wearing one of her own hand-dyed scarves, posing with her image of the Norfolk Library under a load of snow:

And here's Karen Loprete with My Secret Garden:

After the reception, Carol and I drove back to West Hartford for our real lives: hers as an APRN, mine as a lawyer turned journalist writing for the Society for Human Resource Management.

And we're getting ready for our upcoming shows, of which there are many, starting with Jazz Tones at Hartford's 100 Pearl Street Gallery from June 15 to August 23 https://letsgoarts.org/Gallery.

At the moment, though, I better unpack that suitcase.

Confections and Confetti

I didn't set out to create an image of a rich, calorie-free chocolate confection.  Instead, I set out to do a riff on a  favorite painting by Paul Klee.  But if the project also turns out to imagine and create some guilt free deluxe confections, I'm not gonna fudge it.

Here's the painting by Klee. 

To Klee, this is an image of suspended fruit (Hangende Fruchte).  But to me, the shapes in the lower half, especially the lower left and right corners, look ike layered chocolate truffles.  This kind:

Klee's shapes don't look anything like fruit to me.  Still, I love the painting and its simple, offbeat shapes, its rich browns, and the velvety green of its border.

Brown brings nothing but good association:  Not only chocolate, but coffee, rich garden earth, and Franciscans.

I've been wanting to reproduce that painting, or a portion of it, or a version of it, for years.  Now I have the chance, because one of my quilt groups, Women Against the Grain, is running a challenge activity in which participants reproduce or play on a painting by one of five artists, including Klee, I now have the chance/excuse I've been waiting for:  the opportunity to re-imagine Klee's shapes as rich, layered chocolate truffles.  Without calories.

What I'm doing right now it experimenting with the components of the layers for the truffles.  Some are simple stuffed shapes, created from fabrics that  remind me of rich chocolate:

Others are knitted, based on a pattern in Nicky Epstein's Knitted Embellishments:

I've been having a lot of trouble getting the edges of these knitted shapes to get, and stay, crisp and crisply defined.  The ones above, despite my extensive efforts, still look shaggy and irregular to me.  These were stiffened by first being sewn down to gridded interfacing, then, when the interfacing turned out not to be stiff enough, bonded to a thicker, stiffer project called Pellon Craft-Fuse.  But the fusing process, which involved pressure and a hot iron, somewhat tamped down the knitted texture, while not doing enough to bring crisp uniformity to the edges:

The piece on the right shows the back side of the knitted shape, sewn and bonded to two different ineffective stiffeners.  The piece on the left shows the knitted texture somewhat diminished and the edges of the shape lacking in definition.

Today I discovered a better alternative:  get out a piece of thick foam, get out a piece of interfacing with a grid, pin the interfacing to the foam, trace a uniform shape onto the gridded interfacing, then pin each yarn shape along the traced lines, so each knitted diamond follows the same exact outline:

Once I had those shapes pinioned, I baptized them with a mixture of fabric stiffener and water, applied with a foam brush, and left to dry over night:

The result was a stiffened shape that still retained its knitted texture, especially around its slightly raised edge:

I like this approach much better.

People tell me they think I'm so talented, but my response is that what looks to them like talent is instead a result of my dogged determination to reify the images in my head.  I want so badly to bring my ideas into being that I'll try and try and try and keep trying until I reach as close as I can to a parity between my imagination and its tangible expression.  I haven't even told you how many of those stuffed fabric shapes I made before I found the process that made the best one.  I've been keeping on keeping on with this particular project, off and on, for weeks.

Now that I know how best to stiffen these knitted shapes, I'll be adding these little smooches to them:

These little circular numbers are known as yo-yos, and I've stuffed them to give the appearance of whorls of chocolate.  I think I'll top each whorl off with a yummy-looking bead of some kind.

As I work on these, I think about the name of the piece.  I'm not going to call it "Suspended Fruit" or "Hangende Fruchte".  I'm going to call it Chocolate Confections by Paul Klee, or, in Klee's native German, Schokoladenkonfekt von Paul Klee. Doesn't that sound important?

Once I get 10 or 12 of these  diamond shapes layered together, I'll put them on a rich green velvet background and call them a box of confections.

Confetti.  In addition to confections, I've also been working on confetti lately.  Specifically, I've been using a technique called entrapment to bond confetti-like scraps of fabric to a background.  First the fabric is cut up into confetti-like strips:

then the confetti is bonded to the background with a product called Misty-Fuse, topped with a piece of tulle to hold the confetti down.

Here I am trying to cut some tulle, a process made difficult by its insubstantiality and near-invisibility .

When a hot iron is applied to the tulle, the Misty Fuse underneath it melts, trapping the confetti between the tulle and the background.

I'm using this confetti to embellish a photo of an iconic fence in the Litchfield County town of Norfolk.  This is for a show at the Norfolk Public Library, presented by the Connecticut Fiber Arts Collective and called The Northwest Corner, after the section of the state that includes Litchfield County and Norfolk.  The librarians in that lovely town tell us that many library patrons, who may also patronize our show, have weekend and vacation homes there, and love images of their bucolic town.  Thus, this image of an iconic fence in the town, which the librarians named in their list of notable Norfolk scenes.

Here's a look at that piece, which is now completed, along with its entrapped confetti:

So, confetti and confections.  Those two words are related.  Did you know that?  They both come from the Latin root conficere, to make.  Every once in a great while, my five years of Latin come in handy.

Exhibitionist Diaries

You know how aspiring artists need exposure?

Well....

My art quilt friends and I are budding exhibitionists these days.  Look what we've been up to:

My own solo show, Natural Inspirations, was still on the wall at Hartford's Town and County Club when it was time to hang another show, Spring Thaw, at Bloomfield's Duncaster Retirement Center.  Spring Thaw is an undertaking by the Connecticut Fiber Arts Collective http://www.ctfac.blogspot.com/ . It went up on Saturday, March 1.

We had a lovely hanging crew, left to right (please supply name), Paul Sessa, and Judy Wawro.

And we CtFAC quilters had a stunning display of the best of our art:

Roz Spann created this lovely appliqued fish

I had three pieces left aside from the Town and County show with the intent of putting them into Spring Thaw:

Frost and Flame, a convergence quilt inspired by Ricky Tims' Convergence Quilts

Sand Ripples, inspired by low tide on Cape Cod Bay, Eastham, Massachusetts

Entrance, inspired by the Metacomet Trail, Penwood State Park, Bloomfield, Connecticut

We had a lovely reception on Sunday March 2, and if you follow this link, you can see some highlights of that day: http://www.ctfac.blogspot.com/

Two days after my Connecticut Fiber Arts Collective buddies and I hung Spring Thaw, it was time to take down my solo show at Town and County.  The reception for that show, on Friday February 7, had a noisy, upbeat vibe and resulted in the sale of six of my pieces. 

This is a video taken by my daughter Leah that night, but I'm not sure it's going to play for you.

With that show down, I was in the process of re-integrating my work into my home,  deciding which pieces to hang and which to put away, when I got a call from Sara, the woman who arranges the art exhibits for my religious congregation, the Unitarian Society of Hartford.  http://ushartford.com/  Sara said that though she'd arranged for an artist or two to exhibit work in our building during March and April, those arrangements had fallen through.  She asked whether I would be willing to show my work there:

And of course, most of my work was still waiting to be sorted through and either hung on the wall or rolled up and put away, so with it all out and available, I figured it would be easy for me--once again--to load the Honda Odyssey van,

 

 take my work over to the Unitarian Meeting House, with its stunning sanctuary,

...and hang it in the ambulatory, which is what we call the circular passageway around the indoor perimeter of the building:

L-R The Blue Hour, Salute to Grandpa Ott II, Trout Brook II

L-R Sweet Potato and Supertunia, Two Ways of Looking at Seaside Goldenrod

Lunch Among the Cabbages

Jack O'Lantern Mushrooms, Fall Field II

Cape Cod in the Footsteps of Thoreau, Fall Field I, Hanging Grapes II

Seeking a Path

Many thanks to Roy, Marion, and Jenn Cook for coming to the Meeting House and helping to get this show on the wall.  Thanks, folks!

Meanwhile, once again, the walls in my house are looking bare and pathetic.

Bare.  What else would you expect from the home of an exhibitionist?