Red Dot-- Sold!

It's official, my Pages #3 piece has been purchased by the University of Rochester and will become part of the Gleason Library collection. This is my first piece in a public collection so I am touched, thrilled, appreciative, proud and even more motivated to get back to making new work. What could be sweeter than making a piece that will be viewed and enjoyed by hundreds, maybe thousands of students over the years and maybe even inspire some of them to work with textiles as an artistic medium? What a satisfying new home for this piece!

The day started on a less exciting note. I've researched and gathered so much information about letterforms, typefaces and calligraphy and suddenly started feeling confused and unsettled. I wondered whether I needed to embark on a whole new learning curve to become proficient in both eastern and western calligraphy traditions as a skill-set to inform my own marks. In considering this, I recognized that to become really skilled at either would take years of study and practice. Having already spent the past 14 years developing expertise as a surface designer, the idea seemed discouraging. Luckily I called a wise and helpful friend rather than sign up for a weeklong workshop at a bookmaking center. Talking my concerns over with her helped me realize I don't need expertise in traditional calligraphy, I just need to keep developing my own original marks and "language" forms.

So I went back to my studio and returned to fleshing out the new fabrics and combinations of techniques and tools that I want to develop next. I completed this new piece at my studio yesterday. To try out the idea of containing the gestural letter forms within the size of the rectangle, I marked the outer edges of these large scale "pages". I'll know if I like this once I cut these and lay them out with varied values of smaller size pieces around them. I will also do a piece where I fill the whole surface with gestural "writing" and then cut those apart and compare.

As soon as I finish writing this, we're heading off for the weekend to our cottage on Panther Lake, north of Syracuse, NY. Two new kayaks will go with us and I'm looking forward to learning how to use mine.