Rusty Nails and Inspiration

 

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Maya Angelou

Yes, these are indeed rusty nails, 2” with square heads, pulled from boards in a circa-1905 Victorian home. I just purchased them from an Etsy shop. God bless Google searches.

So why are rusty nails so exciting to me today? They’re a demonstration of how much inspiration fuels my work. At 4:30 AM this morning this idea woke me up. The little rusted hand-made paper and wire sculptures I’m currently constructing could hang from rusted nails instead of bent copper wires. I wasn’t even trying to find a replacement for those copper wires! Now it seems the most perfect way to hang them, so I hope it works.

I love these surprising bursts of insight and inspiration most about being a creative. Do you ever experience such flashes of new ideas when you’re engaged in a project?

Here are some of the works in this installation, now nearing the finish line. Will the rusted nails work? I love the suspense of wondering while I wait for them to arrive in the mail.

The Welcome Return of the What-Ifs

After two sluggish days recovering from a flu shot, which I KNEW I didn't want to get (but yielded to the persuasiveness of my well-intentioned physician), I feel healthy and energetic again. It's great to be back working in my studio; that internal burner is heating up again as one what-if after another starts playing through my mind.

For my reentry warm up, I painted the 24" x 48" canvas frame above and laminated my silk composition to canvas to hold it flat. I'll add some machine stitched details to it, and if all goes well, can mount and complete the piece by Saturday.

I also just painted some silk screens, shown above on my work table along with the drying frame, to try out several what-ifs for layering new surfaces with language imagery. One screen has a light gray patterning on it for monoprinting, the other has dark gray marks and drizzles and lines that have a more painterly quality to them. I'm hoping the results will be helpful in developing some new ideas I have for building layers ; I'll print them when I return on Saturday.

Here's another what-if in process that may or may not prove successful -- painting and printing on lutrador. I want to see what happens as I layer and collage a variety of materials, from silk gauze to rice paper and gel medium transfers, to various surfaces. I have felt inspired to experiment more with mixed media collages recently. I had learned a number of collaging techniques from a wonderful area artist, Alice Gold, at the Memorial Art Gallery many years ago. It was rekindled when I taught next to Fran Skiles class at Fabrications last year-- I loved the results and realized how much more I can do with layers on fabric.

One last experiment is underway today that is a variation of the process that I learned from my first screen printing class with Jane Dunnewold.


Here's a fast print on cotton with aquarelle crayons and acrylic medium that Jane demonstrated in that screen printing class long ago. I'm also trying another screen using conte crayon and will trying overprinting this. I'll share the applications of these experiments with you soon, hopefully.

Of course the ideal outcome will be for each of these techniques to be successful as one layer on multi-layered surfaces and expand the types of marks I am able to make on fabric.

Attempting a Reclamation

Is there a single one of us who hasn't made a piece that just never worked out well? What do you do with yours? While I read often of painters burning failed works, I'm more frugal -- also more optimistic about recycling my materials.

An old, failed project revisited the design wall this week. The original idea, attempted last October and November was to build a surface where letter forms appear to be falling down like rain. One of the other reasons it failed, I decided, was that I just didn't like the letter shapes themselves. I twisted and turned and painted and overworked the surface to death. I completed it and then realized that I basically could never show it in public.

But this week it occurred to me that I could re-vision this "finished" piece strictly as an under-painting, pushing back the original composition to a mere suggestion by layering painted, manipulated cheesecloth over it.


I planned to develop cracks and fissures with elongated Etruscan letters applied along with hand stitching onto the cheesecloth layer -- again referencing age and accumulated layers over time.

But then I went to the hairdressers and saw a picture in a decorating magazine of a painting with an abstracted bowl shape in it. I have been drawing bowl shapes and musing on how to integrate them into my language pieces for two years. When I came home, I drew some variations inspired by the shape I saw and decided to consider the idea of adding abstracted bowl shapes to the surface rather than more letter shapes.


Here's the first effort. I question whether the bowl shapes really integrate with the language forms still faintly visible through the manipulated cheesecloth.

My dear friend and fellow artist Rebecca Howdeshell saw this and suggested the shapes might integrate better if I age their surfaces, which is an excellent idea to try next. What if they have cracks and fissures and maybe even fragments of letters on them?!

So that will be tomorrow's studio agenda, creating ancient, cracked fabrics to cut into bowl shapes and try in place of the ones shown above. If either of the new ideas work, then I will add hand-stitched cracks as line work for definition and emphasis and reclaim this. If they don't, the piece goes deeper back into the storage closet or off to the local Goodwill thrift shop!

Hot Tamales! The Muse Visits

Order of the day yesterday, more experimentation. Another cheapie synthetic scarf got sacrificed to the heat gun to create a strong finishing layer for this 12" x 12" piece, "Notations 9." A few touches of red and golden yellow accents completed it.

Then the day took a surprising turn. I decided to apply gold leaf to a canvas wrapped stretcher frame. You'll find this and other great finishing techniques in Jane Dunnewold's DVD, "Finish It" which you can buy from Art Cloth Studios. Just click the link.

Since finishing a frame this way was an "experiment," I grabbed an old 10" square frame that I had painted with black on the side and then for some unknown reason, an eye popping golden yellow on top.

I applied the gold leaf as per Jane's instructions. While it was drying, I decided to glue some rice paper down to the yellow area to keep it from showing through any textile I might apply over it. While working with the rice paper, I tried to lift it off the surface and reposition it and it began to rip in interesting ways. Intrigued by the ripped edges, I created some more. Rationale? They would disappear when I applied a textile over the surface, anyway, so I felt free to try anything.

Once the gold leaf and ripped rice papers dried, I brushed off the excess leaf and began working brown Setacolor paint in over the sides. As usual, my brush started to wander with a life of its own and reached the rice paper. Almost magically, the surface appeared to age. The golden yellow could be muted or allowed to glow through from beneath the rice paper.

Depth, dimension, visual interest, the appearance of age and deterioration -- lovely. I added a few more colors and some marbled foils for the blue green areas.



With the addition of a few distinct letterforms, this small work will be complete. The question that remains is, how do I want to add them? Painting, printing, collaging? More play and experimentation lie ahead.

It is my first piece totally outside the realm of textiles. Yes, I've seen mixed media works with rice paper, read books about these techniques and seen them in other people's work. I've wanted to try them (obviously, since I have three kinds of rice paper at my studio) but somehow couldn't give myself permission to take that step into another medium. Why? Who knows? When the time is right to take a new creative step, it seems to just happen. I back into discoveries -- or rear end them. Seldom do I hurtle forward in a vintage Corvette convertible at high speeds.

All I do know is that with five boxes of 12" x 12" frames sitting in my studio (5 x 6 = 30!), I'll be able to continue to experiment for quite a while!