On the passing of an artist

I learned today that the author Madeleine L'Engle died or September 6 at age 88. She is perhaps best known for her award-winning children's book, "A Wrinkle in Time," which won the John Newbery Award in 1963 and has since sold millions of copies. She also wrote many books for adults, some of which deal with her spiritual life. She was an Episcopalian (my team) who was devoted to both her faith and her craft. She was at one time Writer-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Last year I read, "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art," and found it more than just interesting--it was eye-opening. It's from her that I first heard the idea that art, made in a spiritually open way, has the ability to place the artist into the role of "co-creator" with God. Amazing stuff, and just what I needed to read at the time, as I struggled to find balance in my own life.

Eighty-eight years is a good long run. Can I mourn the passing of someone I didn't know, who lived a thoughtful and productive life, and died peacefully? Perhaps not, but I think I harbored some small idea that someday I might meet her, even though she was no longer making public appearances. I suppose that meeting will have to wait.

Labor Day weekend in Rehoboth

Dan & I are spending Labor Day weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware with our friends Howard & Patrick and a whole cast of other close friends and dogs. The weather's been beautiful enough to make me almost forget rest of the scorching summer. It's been temperate, breezy, and sunny since we arrived Saturday morning. After three days at the beach my freckles are starting to coalesce.

Time here is pleasantly unstructured, but it's always anchored by morning coffee and newspapers on the front porch. The newspapers don't seem to get a thorough read until later in the day because this initial perusal is always accompanied by politically astute, extremely liberal, terribly erudite, and witheringly witty conversation. It's 4-8 gay men in their 40s and 50s holding forth on politics (local, national, and international) Washington gossip, theatre, film, literature, food, and of course the lives, wardrobes, and foibles of friends. It can be a bit intimidating at times, but always interesting. I've heard a lot of ideas expressed on this porch over the years: love, happiness, frustration, anger, but never hate. I think that says something about the shared values of my family of friends.

It's been a nice time to catch up with friends, eat and drink a descent amount, and do not too much of anything else. I always bring things to read and they almost always go untouched. I've done a few overdue e-mails to friends. Now I'm writing this from the front porch, enjoying a few moments of late afternoon solitude. By sunset they'll be 4 of us left from the group of 10 yesterday. It's the beginning of a quiet end to a quiet weekend before we return to work on Wednesday. Not bad. Not too bad at all.

Tonight, fewer words and more pictures

A piece that's nearing completion

I don't know if I have a good picture of an earlier stage of this piece, but it's a bit of printed cloth I brought back from Peters Valley. When I started working on it again the yellow and green areas were printed. I did some hand stitching with black embroidery thread to add a little detail in a few areas, but that wasn't giving me what I wanted. So, I used a free-motion couching foot on my sewing machine to add the back yarn outlines. You can probably see that better in the detailed picture below, or by clicking on this one to enlarge it. The black lines helped a lot, but then I was troubled by the white background, so I scribbled in some color with a few caran d'ache water soluble crayons then blended with diluted ProFab extender and a bit of brown paint. Very fun and a good effect.

In this shot you can see circles of couched yarn that I used to fill in some of the open circles. I started out as a kind of weak green--nothing that I little dye wasn't able to fix. I think I might be dying some more cotton yarn soon. A this point I just need to do the final trimming and binding. Right now I'm letting it rest for a while to see if in needs anything else.

Other pieces in work

Here's somethings else that came from Peters Valley. I like the big red square, and there's something good, but perhaps a bit weak going on with the other colors. The small red squares are a awful. This is the before shot. Since then I've screen blocks of brown over the whole thing and now I think I'm ready to start discharging. I've very hopeful.

This one's a batik from a few weeks ago that I pleated, clamped, and over-dyed with turquise to reduce the contrast. I'm tempted to cut it up, but I really like the overall linear pattern and think that I can make something out of it as the background for whole composition. There needs to be more dye and I'm thinking that some applique might be in this one's future.

After a busy weekend, at the start of a busy week

Yes, busy is the name of the game these days, but it beats the hell out of bored. Let's see...where to begin. Well for starters Dan's Mom, Cynthia, rang up last week and said she figured that our calendars appeared to be in one of their rare states of alignment, and shouldn't she come of a visit over the weekend. Of course Dan and I were both delighted and set about the task of clearing piles of my junk out of the guest room. We picked her up at BWI on Saturday morning and spent the lovely 100-degree day museum-hopping in Baltimore. Cynthia's a quilter, and as luck would have it, we were able to assemble a very nice fiber-focused itinerary.

We started off at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) to see the NUNO exhibit. I read about NUMO (a Japanese textile manufacturer) in the last issue of Surface Design and was delighted to find an exhibit practically in my back yard. It's cool stuff, and the thought and design process behind it is fascinating: things like wrapping up rayon with wet rusted iron plates for a couple of weeks, sandwiching feathers between layers of dyed silk, and reproducing the look of rubber bands scattered on a windowsill. The presentation was beautiful. It was a small room in a quiet part of the museum and each piece was presented as a hanging 2-3 yard length of plain cloth. No fuss with binding or the like. It was very much an "art cloth" style of presentation. I came away with a few ideas: rusty nails for one.

For me no visit to BMA is complete without stopping to see the fantastic collection of Matisse in the Cone collection. I'm utterly convinced that if Henri were with us today he would be a fiber artist. We talk about artists who do surface design having a "painterly" style. Well, I look at some (not all, but enough) of his work and I see painted/printed cloth. Yes, of course he painted on canvas, but I mean some of it I want to cut out of the frame and curl up with it. He even include textiles in his paintings--detailed rugs and wallpaper. I'm right about this. He's one of us.

After a little nosh at a greasy-spoonish sort of diner along Howard Avenue we were off to the Walters Art Museum. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm ashamed to say that I never knew this place existed and it's right in the heart of the city (even in a good neighborhood!). We only left because they threw us out when the place closed at 5. It's a beautiful small-to medium sized museum with a lovely and well-curated collection of paintings and an impressive collection of a Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Etruscan, etc. objects. Cynthia managed to find a mummified cat! (Hillary's sitting on the table as I write this and I just can imagine wrapping her up like a buritto and keeping her around for all eternity). So, the fiber connection: it was the second-to-last day of the show "Gee's Bend" the Architecture of the Quilt." This is the second Gee's Bend show and I enjoyed it as much as the first. Just as with the first show, which I saw at the Corcoran a couple of years ago, I was struck by the fact that these women, by their own admission, were trying to keep their families from freezing. They needed to cover their beds. But, even in the midst of that intensely practical concern, even after a day of hard work, their God-given spirit and creative vision found expression in these quilts.

It's late. I'll write more tomorrow if I can manage. I've got pictures of evolving work to share. In the meantime here's a teaser. This one's of you Rayna. I screened that deconstructed blue and chino piece (see July 31) with thyox. There was a stem an a few leaves of wisteria stuck to the screen. I'm really pleased with the result. Not sure what comes next, but I feel that this piece needs to stay together as a whole cloth. Time will tell.

Disconcerting discernment

I have to admit that the novelty of the blog has drawn my attention away from my private journal, but I returned to that sorely neglected volume this weekend and have been thinking about what I wrote ever since. I've spent the last several weeks focusing my energy and attention on my art, leaving the issues of discernment and call fallow--partly with the intention of seeing what develops and partly as a much-needed escape from that particular arena of self-scrutiny.

As I was writing this weekend I was struck by the phrase "Follow the money." That's what they always say in TV crime dramas: follow the trail of the money associated with a crime and it will lead you back to the bad guy. For me, the parallel thought that followed was, "Follow the energy." Perhaps this is pathetically obvious to those who know me well, but for me it's something I'm still coming to terms with. What if I look honestly and critically at myself and ask the question, "Where is my passion and energy?" Is it for ordained ministry within the church? Is it ministry of another kind through art? Can that other ministry be within the church? Is it exclusive of ordination? Honestly, just don't know the answer, but for about 2 months now I've been leaning more toward finding some form of non-ordained ministry and I've started to face up to the fact that it's making art that really gets me going. Strangely I'm finding that change in perspective hard, possibly even disappointing. I've spend a long time getting my head around the idea of possibly being a priest. Now I feel as though I need to disentangle myself from that line of thinking (even if only temporarily) if I'm going to figure out what the real answer is to those questions.

As I read back over it, the preceding paragraph sounds so wishy-washy and tentative, but I actually feel like it's progress. Maybe some of us we need to take a while to figure out what we're not going to do before we can figure out what we are going to do. And, interestingly enough, that line of thinking harks back to Parker Palmer's book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation, which I've read twice and found challenging each time. He makes a strong case for not doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

On the up side, I've taken a yard of cloth that I printed at Peters Valley and begun working back into it with hand stitching, machine couching of yarn, painting. I have a plan to do a bit of applique work and quilt the whole piece. I hope to have something to show (prior to quilting) in a couple of days.

Enough for now...more than enough.

Thoughts about critique

A few weeks back I read an interesting and thought-provoking article in Jane Dunnewold's HeArtCloth Quartly titled "The Art of Critique" (Winter 2007). The general thrust of the article is posing and answering the question "What are my responsibilities when seeking or offering criticism?" Jane includes a detailed discussion of the tools of artistic critique. For example a well-rounded knowledge of color theory, design, etc. are essential to offering a productive critique. She also stresses the need for ethical, detached feedback--not getting into personal attack. I wasn't surprised by any of these points, and frankly it's nice to have a gentle reminder every so often. The point in the article that struck me most was the responsibility of the artist to be clear with themselves and others about the nature of the criticism being sought. In particular there is a clear difference between asking for feedback on a finished piece and asking for assistance in resolving issues with a work-in-progress. This has been kicking around in my head ever since I read it. I recently (i.e., 15 minutes ago) had the experiencing of asking a very open-ended question (mistake #1) at the wrong time (mistake #2) and probably from the wrong person (mistake #3). To be specific: I asked Dan his design opinion about a piece I'm working on when he was trying to eat. It seemed like a perfectly fine time to me. I mean, gosh, I'd gladly talk about art with my mouth full! I value Dan's opinion, but perhaps this particular situation might have been akin to him asking my opinion about which brand of motor oil I think he should put in the car. My answer probably would have been something like, "Oil? I thought they ran on gasoline?" An exaggeration yes, but it makes a point. It's no reflection on Dan. I keep wanting this to be his thing, but it's not.

I wish I could say this was a great learning experience, but I've made this mistake before and I still haven't learned. I'm going to take this as another good motivator for me to connect with some other local artists for this type of support.

Rainy Friday

Yesterday we woke up to a crystal clear blue sky; today it's solid gray and light rain. Dan's half way through his second book and I'm not all that far behind. Yesterday we did end of driving back up to P'town and had a nice walk out across the breakwater. We decided that with the cool temperature and breeze it might not be a good day for the beach, which was an unfortunate mistake. Once we made it through the dunes to the beach we it was an almost perfect beach day. Oh well. we had a great walk out an back. The breakwater is a line of large granite boulders stretching about a mile across the hook at the tip of the Cape, which helps protect the wetland and harbor. The walk is not only a decent workout, but also affords some great views of the town, the wetland, and the intertidal life on the rocks.

This is the view of the marsh from the breakwater looking toward the dunes. The tide was going out. I think that the best time for this walk. It takes about an hour to walk out and back. In that time you see more and more of the wetland and the rocks exposed and the color always seems to be changing.

I'm not sure why, but I never seem to tire of photographing these views or the details of the breakwater.

Part of the appeal is the quiet and the sense of open space. Another part has to be the color palette and the texture of the scenery. The marsh grass, the water, the sky, the rocks, even the human textures of harbor towns like this speak to me. I don't particularly care for how artsy and contrived that sounds, but I'm at a loss for better words.

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Steam heat

The weather channel says that DC is suffering under searing heat. Here on the Cape it's all about rain, fog, and serious humidity. Yesterday was so-so, but today was absolute yuck. However, as I write this the clouds have broken, the humidity is improving, and there's hope for a fine day tomorrow. We're talking about going to the P'town to continue our walk, pick up some lunch, and head to the beach. Last night we went to the movies at Cape Cinema and saw "Becoming Jane," which is great if you're a Jane Austen fan. If you're not, it's still a nice story, but as biographies go, I think you lose something by not knowing the back story. In this case the back story is recognizing in the persons of her parents, sisters, relatives, and acquaintances the traits of the characters who people her novels. Now, as for the theater, it's very cool. It's an original single-screen theater that dates from the early 30's, complete with a beautiful art deco mural on the ceiling. The seats are individual arm chairs with upholstered seats. I thought they were very quaint until about 60 minutes into the film with my butt started really hurting. Oh well, I guess that's just part of getting old?

Live from Harwich

Dan and I are in Harwich, MA on Cape Code for the week visiting with our friends Randy and Brian for a couple of days, then house sitting for them while they're at the ACC show in San Francisco. It's always a treat to be here. It's peaceful. I've yet to encounter any place that's quite like Cape Cod. Even though it's crowded this time of year, there's something clean, clear, and refreshing about the air. The guys have also made such a wonderful home for themselves. It's more like visiting a private garden and getting to stay the night in the quirky, beautiful craft museum/workshop that happens to be on the grounds. I guess that's what happens to avid creators and collectors: their homes become venues for presenting the collection; places to live with the art.

By coincidence Sunday was the day of one of their rare studio sales. Here's front entrance to the barn early in the morning as the frenzy of setup is just winding down. I assume that it was a frenzy. I slept through it.

Look at these amazing scarves. Of course the photo doesn't come anywhere near doing them justice. Spectacular weaving, color, composition, and texture aside, what blows me away about this particular image is presentation (I hate to say merchandising). This is spectacular wearable art hung from hooks next to the rough-hewn interior surface of the barn's interior walls. What you don't see in this picture is the rest of the room and the canopied back patio filled with scarves, dresses, vests, jackets, and more, all presented and lit in a way that creates a sense of unpretentious drama and wonder. At least for me it did.

So, while all this was going on, Dan and I made ourselves scarce so as not to be under foot while serious money-making business was being done. We went to church at Christ Church Episcopal in Harwich Port, which was small, lovely, and very welcoming. Because we were visiting they gave us a little loaf of cranberry bread. How cute is that?

Then we had a little nosh on our way to the big flea market at Wellfleet Drive-In. There were some really scary people there buying tube socks and XXXL irregular T shirts, but there was also a whole area for vintage/old/antique/junk stuff, which was pretty cool. We bought an old white painted cabinet with screened doors--most appropriate for a kitchen, but we're thinking it might get incorporated into the master bedroom or guest room redecorations planned for the coming year.

I also bought what I went there hoping to find: 2 really cool trivets to use as batik tools, and what I believe is a genuine wooden tjap (also for applying batik wax to fabric), although the vendor said she thought it was for block printing wallpaper. Either way I'm delighted. The tjap (shown at left below) is about 5" x 6". One of the trivets is shown on the right

We had lunch at Clem & Ursie's in P'town (fish place out on Shankpainter Road). Dan has had his lobster roll fix, although there will probably be a need for another later this week. This place is expensive for what you get, but the food is undeniably delicious. After lunch we had a little stroll down part of Commercial Street before heading back to Harwich. I love P'town and miss it, but I think I might really be missing what it used to be like.

P'town was the place where two guys or two women could hold hands walking down the street and be greeted by smiles, even an occasional lusty grin, but never a look of scorn. It used to be a sort of gay sacred ground. Now, there's a tourist trolly that runs families around for 40-minute tours, and auto traffic is restricted on Commercial for part of the day. I can only assume that's to address the problem of double-wide strollers that don't fit on the sidewalk. The place hasn't lost it's gay people, but it seems to have lost some of its edge. It's even like this at night. I know it makes me sound old, but I remember when the families fled at sundown because they were afraid their kids would see a man in a dress, some guy with his bare ass hanging out of leather chaps, or two women kissing. Assimilation may not be all it's cracked up to be.

Picking away

I'd love to say that I haven't been posting because I've been too busy dying one fabulous yard of cloth after another--no such luck. Work's been crazy, then there was the new Harry Potter book that demanded to be read immediately (and it was worth it!). I do have a couple of things in process.

Here's that same old batik piece. I got frustrated with it because it was just too high contrast with those damned white circles. I grabbed a dirty screen (and I'm talkin' drips and smears of dye that I forgot to wash out) and deconstructed it with a not-too-strong mix of Pro Chem Chino and thickener. It's way better and could now be either a background for something more or at least something to cut up. I'm kicking around some ideas.

This next one was me just wanting to play with dye and beak-in a new screen. I grabbed whatever dye I happened to have mixed up, and once again a dirty screen. I think I deconstructed the blue then added the light brown (leftover Chino) the next day. Again, I'm not sure where this one's going. For now I'm having fun looking at it. It's making me think of Caribbean beaches.

So, this weekend I'm flying to Providence, RI to meet Dan, who's currently in CT on business, then we're driving out to stay with friends on the Cape. They're both artists so it makes for great conversations. I'm going back and forth with myself about whether to take recent work to show then. On one hand they're both role models (working, well regarded craftspeople whose work I respect and admire); on the other they're intimidating, at least in this regard.

I love the Cape. I'm taking a sketch book, a novel, a camera, a couple changes of cloths, and not much else.