Arriving Home from Vacation: Where the Sublime meets the Quotidian

I'm just back from two weeks on Cape Cod, trailing clouds of its glory, trying to keep  the shimmering light alive in my mind, but immersed in reconciling myself to the quotidian practicalities of life in West Hartford Connecticut.

As I face both backward and forward at the same time, my mind on the Cape but my body in my kitchen, I'm thinking of contemporary art quilter Nancy Crow, who, in a recent manifesto, stated that she goes to bed early, gets up early, spends 10 to 12 hour days at her art, bans phones from the studio, and spends 30 minutes a day on the computer.

Her words are especially poignant to me right now, as my need to create art has disappeared behind piles of laundry and mail.  I envy her focus and find it inspiring but intimidating.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to sneak some time for art on the side.  For example, though last Sunday's New York Times still sits on the kitchen table, I'm compiling all my photos that are filled with Cape sky and putting them into one file, which I'll call Cape Light.  I'll install that file on my digital frame and play it all winter.  Examples:

How can I continue to sit in this room at this computer and live with the knowledge that scenes like this are available a mere four hours away by car?

By hoping that these images, played on my digital frame, will take me there.

I'm also compiling another photo file of sand ripples.  These, I hope, will get me through the winter by providing artistic inspiration.

I've had good luck working with these sand ripple images in the past.  They speak to me.  So strongly that I would like to throw this computer out the window and do nothing  but create sand ripple images all the livelong day until the day I die.

Can't do that, though.

Instead, on arriving back home from two weeks in the sand and the maritime light, I had to readjust to quotidian exigencies, not only unpacking and putting away, but also reestablishing the normal order of grocery shopping, cooking, and yes, even working for money, in my role as a free-lance legal journalist, a gig that I greatly enjoy 

But aside from practical responsibilities, I still want to carve out time for art, even if I can't focus like Nancy Crow.  I want to start with new Cape images.  But it seems to me that before I can turn to new work based on my inexorable affinity for sand ripples and fog, I should finish work on projects I already have going, for goodness' sake.  Don't you think?  Like this one.  Is it worth finishing?  If so, should I not finish it before doing new Cape inspired work? 

Or what about this little sand ripple image, which I created with Inktense pencils while I was on the Cape last week:

It's not done yet--not to my standards, anyway.  Should I finish it?

Should I even be working on this blog, when I could be creating?

I know what Nancy Crow would say.  Crow, a respected contemporary quilter, had an exhibit at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont last summer.

http://shelburnemuseum.org/exhibitions/nancy-crow-seeking-beauty-riffs-on-repetition/


I visited the exhibit with my husband Joe on a trip to see our daughter Lucia, who lives in nearby Burlington.  As part of that show, Crow posted the following description of her stringent work habits and the genesis of the exhibit, called Riffs on Repetition:. 

In case you can't read the photo, and just to rub it in, I'm going to reiterate Crow's manifesto here:

"I am walking the walk.  Totally focused.  Paying attention.  To bed early.  Up early.  10-12 hour days.  Dedicated computer time reduced to 30 minutes per day.  No phones in the studio.  All necessary preparations predicated on efficiency.  Wet studio organized.  Using the fewest tools to facilitate mark-making and drawing.  Stack of fabric prepared.  Corralling black thoughts.  Going forward.   Making mistakes.  Not looking back.  Learning.  Loosening up.  Feeling the thrill.  Day after day.  Keeping the routine.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Over and over.  Riffing on repetition.  Seeking beauty.  Believing.  Self-portraits of who I am. "


Now, I'm telling myself, is not the time to berate myself for the gap between my work habits and Crow's.  After all, everybody, even Nancy Crow, has extra work to do on arriving home from a vacation.  And I must admit I do like the part about making mistakes, learning from them, and loosening up.

Meanwhile, I'll take the rest of her words with a big grain of sea salt.

Today in Art: What Would Woody Say?

Today the Connecticut Fiber Arts Collective, a vibrant art quilt group of which I am a member, mounted a Woody Guthrie-themed show in the back gallery at Hartford's Theaterworks.

Our show was conceived and designed to correspond with Woody Sez, a musical production on the Depression-era troubadour whose wandering ways and everpresent guitar inspired a long line of  blue-jeaned American singers from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen...and whose social commentary informs the conscience of generations.

Check out the Theaterworks production:

http://theaterworkshartford.org/content/current.html

Here's one example of the work we hung today, Toni Torres' American Troubadour.  Wow. 

And how about Carol Eaton's The Plains, showing an empty windswept kind of place like Texas or Oklahoma, where Woody grew up and came of age:

Carol Vinick has Woody singing at a union rally:

and Linda Woods shows us a Depression-era jalopy:

Karen Loprete depicted one of Woody's songs, Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree:

My own piece, What Would Woody Say? juxtaposes illegal Depression-era travels in boxcars--and the hardships that compelled people to live that way--with the contemporary flood of young people from Central America entering our country as they flee drug-related violence and anarchy. 
In each corner of this map of the United States, I've juxtaposed photos of illegal rail travel in the 30s with those of people coming illegally into the country now:

The map of the country is sewn onto a background of headlines about today's Central American immigration, printed on red.  Around the perimeter of the map and the blocks of headlines, I've attached the words to This Land is Your Land.  When it gets to the following verse, I trail those words right across the map to a photo of Woody singing them out from the top of a boxcar:

"In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people.  By the relief office, I seen my people.  As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, 'was this land made for you and me?'"

 I mounted it all on ticking, some of it really old vintage ticking, to give the piece a Depression era/jailhouse/orphanage look.

It took us a couple of hours to get the show up.  Here's the hanging crew:

L-R Linda Woods, Diane Cadrain, Carol Vinick, and Antonia Torres.

Our full complement of CFAC members was not present for the hanging today, but we all hope to have a reception for our show,  in conjunction with one of the free hootnnanys following the Sunday matinees. If  we do that, we'll let you know!

If you're planning to go to Woody Sez at Theaterworks, stop by the back lobby and see our work!

Five Fiber Friends: The Denouement

We Five Fiber Friends saw our long-planned art quilt show come to fruition a week ago, with a reception at Fair Haven Furniture's River Street Gallery.  I remember it as if it were just last Sunday, August 3, 2014.

The food was good...

the entertainment sparkling...

...and good times were had, especially by me, for a number of reasons.  One was that I sold a piece of art at the reception.

I have to say that Low Tide, First Encounter Beach looked great where it was hung at the Gallery:

The second reason why this event was so rewarding for me was that it served as a mini-reunion for a group of my high school friends.  We went to Sacred Heart Academy in the New Haven suburb of Hamden, Connecticut, graduating in 1967.  Here we are after the reception at Adriana's Restaurant on Grand Avenue in New Haven:

L-R Diane Cadrain, Rita Shair, Sue McNerney, Gloria Hudson, Paula Forni

Love ya, ladies! 

And some of my Unitarian Society of Hartford art buddies traveled all the way down the state to see the show.  Love you too, my USH art partners!

L-r Tina Davies, Martha Bradley, Diane Cadrain. Sheri Williams

Today in art: Sunprints, Shibori, and Grape Leaves

Tomorrow, I'll be at a reception for the opening of an art quilt show in which I'm involved, Five Fiber Friends:

Gallery art director Kate Paranteau invited us fiber artists, as part of our show, to make pillows to put on her gallery's sofas. 

So I'm making pillows.  And food for our reception.  More on the food later.

Here's one of the pillows:

The central motif on this one is a simple sunprint made with Pebeo Setacolor paints, a few confetti stars, and a few pieces of arborvitae.

When we Five Fiber Friends were hanging our show, Kate liked to tell us how the pieces we hung together could "tell stories" to one another.

If this pillow were telling a story, it would go something like, "On a quiet night, as the stars were just starting to come out the air was still warm enough to hold the smell of the sunlight on the pine needles."

Or, what about the jazz standard, "Quiet Night of Quiet Stars?"

I like that story.  Here are a couple of other sunprints that continue it:

I gave these two sunprints each two borders:  narrow ones of white linen and wider ones of shibori-dyed Pima cotton.  I like what the shibori does for the sunprints, and vice versa.  As Kate would see it, they're telling the same story. Or different versions of the same story.

I used shibori fabric for the backs of the pillows, too:

In addition to these three sunprints, I'm also going to include  another pillow I made, this one with a central knitted motif:

If this one told a story, it would be, "There was once a twining vine, and it tried and it tried and it reached and it reached until it reached every place it tried to go."

I know a vine like that.

In between making these pillows, I've also been working on some finger-food type snacks for tomorrow's reception.  Somebody else was already bringing cheese and crackers, a veggie platter, and a fruit platter.  What was left?  Nothing healthy that I could think of, except...

I do have all these grape leaves growing on the garage...(lovely, aren't they?)

...so I suppose I could make stuffed grape leaves.

They're a lot of work, but they're exceptional:  my recipe has wonderful ingredients, pine nuts and dill and currants in addition to the rice.  They're so much better than those served in restaurants, which feature mainly rice and certainly not pine nuts or currants.  I can't take credit for my recipe, which is from a cookbook.  All I do is follow it.

So I did:

Grape leaves drying off after their one-minute trip through boiling water

Look at the yummy ingredients in that stuffing!

 Finally they get cooked in a low slow bath of olive oil, lemon juice and water.

They're gonna be good!   And so is the reception.  So please come!  But if you can't come, the exhibit will be up until September 21.