Drawing and Fire

Calling on all powers of patience, of calm. Remembered to meditate tonight. It does help. My weekend just blew up. Sigh. Oh well. Such is being a parent. I will deal. The next two weeks are kind of a mess anyway. Why not drag the weekend down into the morass? Meditation helps me deal with all the crazy uncertainties, all the things for which I cannot plan. I’ve never been good at the not-planning part. I like to know where I’m staying, when I’ll be eating (which is so much more of an issue now apparently), what the plan is. There is so much uncertainty in my life that I am always looking for the certain, for the dependable, for the things I can count on. I tracked my blood sugar all day. Interesting how drastically different it is from a year ago. I’m not happy about that. That’s something I don’t want to deal with right now and I have to deal with it. So I will. Growl.

So I could have ironed the bird tonight and been done with that quilt. But I was watching interesting television (The Amerikans or however they spell it…) and felt like drawing anyway. I just wanted the thing done. So I did it…here’s the top section, which I started drawing on December 10, continued on the 14th, and finished tonight…

The middle section was started on February 17, and then continued on the 20th and the 25th…that’s a pretty big gap between the top section (which is interesting in itself), but remember I finished some major quilts in that time period.

Then I started drawing the bottom on February 19, continued on the 28th, and finished (?…still not sure that part is finished) on March 11. I’m not copying it yet, so I can add to it if I want to. You wanted to know how the drawing goes, right? Assume an hour or two each night, so that’s 9 nights, somewhere probably around 15 hours. Wow. I used to be able to crank out a drawing in 2 hours, maybe 4. Of course, those were one-page drawings.

I seem incapable of one-page drawings at the moment. This sucker’s got a lot going on in there. What’s it about? Menopause. Loss. Pain. Grief. Anger. Genetics. Aging. Me.

Fun stuff.

I drew during the union meeting too (AND took copious notes. Because I am amazing like that)…

I am really trying to take deep breaths and go with the flow. Every day there is something else that someone needs from me, something else I need to manage. I’ve decided the classified staff at the high school are idiots. There are issues at my school with testing. A giant cart with 38 Chromebooks showed up in my classroom today. There was no room for it where it needed to be; suffice it to say that I had to make room for it. Higher-ups don’t consult staff. I think it will be OK though. I’m looking forward to being able to use technology whenever I want, and not just when a cart is available. I will have to migrate everything I do onto Google Drive though. That might be my summer project. Better yet, maybe I pay the boychild (with my nonexistent funds) to do that. Funny that. AP exams are coming up…between the two kids, they are taking 7 of them…at $89 apiece. I emailed about a fee waiver. Seriously, is there not a bulk discount? You can only be smart if you are rich enough to take the tests apparently. By the time we get the scores, boychild will already have acceptances and rejections and will have picked a school. What’s the point again?

An old friend of mine bought a quilt from me back in I think 1995 or 1996, somewhere around there. This was before I was doing art quilts really…I had taken a class in that watercolor technique, where you used squares and tried to move the shading from dark to light. I actually have two or three finished quilts lying around here like that, and this was one where I did that in the background, but then appliqued this bridge on top; if you drive north on I-15 from here, you see this bridge over the freeway north of Escondido…and then I did all these silk-ribbon-embroidery flowers in the border and at the bottom. I had a studio space downtown, and was working downtown at the time. It was very convenient, before kids. I would leave work and go screenprint at the studio afterwards. I loved that space. I probably couldn’t afford the rent now…it’s all near the new ballpark and probably horrendously expensive. But back then it was cheap and kind of unsafe at night, but it was all artists, and we would do Open Studios during ArtWalk, back when ArtWalk wasn’t just crappy stalls for blocks in Little Italy. And my friend, who was another editor at Harcourt, where I worked, loved this quilt and put it on a payment plan (you don’t even want to know how little I sold it for), and she bought it. And then I left Harcourt and had kids and we lost touch, but I’m pretty easy to find, apparently. She emailed me two years ago to tell me that she had been living somewhere back when the wildfires of 2007 were blasting through San Diego County and the quilt was in the fires…

Seriously. It survived, but only barely. I don’t even have digital photos of this quilt, it’s so old. I plan to document it sometime soon, when I can chase her down (and a decent camera…working on that…)…but it was actually in the San Diego Quilt Show in 1995…

This is before I had kids…I think I was pregnant with the boychild that year. I was. I was so sick, I was off work from early June until late August or September. Ahh…pregnancy. Ugh.

Anyway, she wants to know how to preserve it…and my understanding of burning is that it leaves the fabric so acidic that there is really nothing you can do long term…but even in terms of storing it? I personally would frame it under plexi or glass and let it continue to deteriorate until gone…but anything else? I’m not sure what to tell her.

Interesting to finally see it. I’ll have to poke around for photos of it pre-fire. They would be actual PHOTOGRAPHS. I know. Weird, huh? I didn’t have a digital camera back then.

So yeah. That took about 10 seconds. I have a shoebox in the bookshelf in my office that says “Stitching/Art photos.” Guess what I found? Really CRAPPY photos of the original…

And a closeup of the hand-applique of the hills (which look surprisingly like breasts to me now)…

And the embroidery…

And there is one of my very early “art” quilts. See? There is a process…I did evolve. This was April 1995 (that’s what the photos say), almost 20 years ago…the month I got pregnant with my now-18-year-old. Kinda looks a little different from what I do now, eh? I was such a different person then. It’s not all bad. I think I’m much more of a fiber artist now than I was then. Then I was a screenprinter for the art, and the quilting was more of a hobby…just trying stuff out and messing around with fabric and fiber techniques. I took lots of classes with famous teachers and dipped my feet into a lot of techniques (Hollis Chatelaine, Ellen Anne Eddy, Laura Wasilowski)…it took me a while to find my voice, my place, in fabric. I was lucky in that I had already found it in drawing and screenprinting. It took Joan Colvin and Wasilowski to help me figure out how to do it in fabric…that was probably around 1995 or so. Maybe soon after.

Anyway. It’s an interesting story of a Nida quilt. Next step? See it (and its owner, more importantly) in real life.

Past the Deadlines…(sort of)

I practiced meditation at school again today. In class. While teaching. Well, supervising independent work today. We do that. I also practiced a feminist rant…OK, I didn’t practice it…I just did it. Sometimes I think the kids need to see that…plus the kid saying that men were better at everything than women were kinda got my goat. It’s OK…I kinda did it as a gospel moment; I think I even hallelujahed. The girls appreciated it and some of the boys did too (although most were probably frightened). I don’t just teach science, people…

I taught. I breathed deep (actually not so deep…it’s either the allergies I technically don’t have or something pretending to be sick). I went to the emergency union meeting and took notes. I went to the girlchild’s soccer game where the asshole coach (oops, did I say that out loud) wouldn’t play her (long story…it’s finals week and she chose academics over soccer). I went to the gym and read an entire book (it was a graphic novel…they are a quick read). I prepped tomorrow night’s dinner, which now has to stretch to feed 7 instead of 3 (one of which is a hungry teenaged boy). I cleaned a bit, because apparently now there is a sleepover at my house tomorrow night (I wonder if they will mind my tracing Wonder Under on the giant-ass light table while they watch bad TV and gossip late into the night…yeah, I know. I will probably have to give up my Friday night plans).

I ate dinner super late. I picked TV that I should not be watching in the mood I’m in. As always, I don’t know what governs the moods. Is it being tired? Is it work frustration? Is it a chemical imbalance in my brain? Who the fuck knows.

At the soccer game, I almost finished this guy…

It was dark, though, and I was trying to do Pekinese stitch on top of the blue things and largely failing (I got one done), so I stopped. Some schools have crappy stadium lights.

I am definitely beyond trying to predict how many games it takes to finish any of these. I will have time in cars on Saturday and Sunday, though. I could potentially finish quite a lot. Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. They just are fun to do…the embroidery stitches are interesting. Sometimes even relaxing (minorly).

The book I finished is the graphic-novel adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children…

(real book on the left, graphic adaptation on the right)

I read the book last year and really liked it. The graphic novel was eh. The art didn’t move me. I felt like the story was chopped up by the pictures. I had a better imagination while just reading the words (there are a few photographs in the original book).

Like I said in my review on GoodReads, I need a graphic adaptation (or a movie, for that point) to ADD to the fiction, and they rarely do. Mostly they just mess with the images I had in my head.

I do have a plan for tomorrow night’s artmaking. Actually, I will need to do some more of the crossing-off the post-it-note crap. I crossed off two things today (woo hoo!). I know. It’s amazing. So maybe I can cross a few more off tomorrow. And I do have another quilt top in here that I could work on. In fact, I think there’s another QUILT in here that has been pinbasted for like 3 years. I obviously care a lot about it. So there’s no shortage of stuff to be done. It just feels better to start something new sometimes…to have that sense of excitement (pretty toned down in the current Kathy state) about new. Different. Moving on.

So I numbered the big quilt…

It’s about 350 pieces. That’s tiny. I mean, the quilt itself is good-sized…it just doesn’t have a lot of pieces.

By the way, I got my evaluation back from Road to California…shockingly, the uterus quilt did NOT win an award (I am so shocked…I’m still minorly amazed that it even got in), but the comments were interesting…they said it could use more quilting (I know KPM did not say that…), which is par for the course when you put an art quilt in a semi-traditional show (Road embraces art quilts…but there are still traditional judges), but they did say the imagery was interesting and the storytelling was effective. Nice to know. I guess. It’s been so long since a quilt of mine has been judged like that…they always say not enough quilting. Whatever.

Anyway. I’ll be up there on Saturday to see the ones that DID win awards and have enough quilting. People, if I wanted to quilt the body parts, I would, but then they wouldn’t pop out so much.

Then I thought I should probably pick one of the smaller ones too, and I had a real hard time with that, because nothing was really reaching out and grabbing me, so I just picked the smallest one, which is also breast-related (I’m on a roll), but is only about 10″ square…

It has 150 pieces or so in it. I don’t know when I’ll get back to working on these…it kind of depends on what I end up doing tomorrow night…what I feel like doing. I kinda feel like going with my mood, with whatever makes me feel better, more at peace, is totally the way to go with my art at the moment. I’ve spent the last 6 months really getting through some have-to’s as far as my art is concerned. I had what I originally thought was four pieces that had to be done by deadlines (actually 6, if I count the two small ones), and so it’s been All Deadlines, All the Time for an awfully long time… maybe I should give myself a break for a while. I’m thinking I can work on whatever I want until Spring Break (which is late this year, mid-April), and by then, I should have a drawing for the next invitational quilt that has to be done in November and another big piece for the summer…not as crazy as the Earth Stories one, but one that is impactful and strong and meaningful and will celebrate me, the artist, next summer. I feel like I’m going to need some of that Me Celebration by then. Maybe. Who knows. It will probably still be painful and emotional and full of sturm und drang, but it will be mine.

Wow. That sounded almost hopeful and maybe even a bit I am woman, hear me roar. So much better than the godawful mood I was in earlier. It’s silly that something as mundane as numbering two drawings can be mood-altering…at least minorly. I really should just quit my job and make art full time. (ha. like that’s an option) I should probably finish crossing things off the post-it note list before I abandon all deadlines, though. Yeah. Gotta be a little bit responsible.

Resting in Uncertainty…

From last night at an awful hour: “My god, I feel like I’m drowning in tears. I went to bed early because I was so exhausted, and now I am wide awake and crying. WTF? The brain and the body are so disconnected they can’t work together for a common goal: mending me.” So tonight, I’m up late, because my brain won’t wind down. It really isn’t a healthy mix of behaviors. I did go to the gym tonight…left school as early as I could (tutorial) and left a recipe and ingredients for dinner, but said I would deal when I got home. Girlchild has lots of schoolwork this week…but she was starting to cook when I got home. She really is amazingly good at it, and she’s forced me to be a better cook too…using ingredients and trying recipes I wouldn’t have tried before. It’s so strange how creativity that runs in families actually manifests itself. Maybe the next generation will include a clothing designer or a creative architect…you never know.

I forced myself to enter a show this morning; then cried all the way to school and barely got it under control crossing the parking lot. I wanted to make sure I did something art-related after last night. It was a good thing to enter. I don’t remember what made me cry…I often don’t think it’s anything logical. A piece of music, some lyrics, a reminder of something somewhere. Whatever. Logic is not in play at the moment. It’s all about emotion.

Jake keeps going to the door, expecting to be taken back to his house…looking for his daddy. Poor guy. He’s restless. He has been behaving though…no jumping up or biting. Good boy.

My school day was ruled by technology management…iPods with dying batteries, bad cords, learning iMovie on the iPod and phone and how to move files from there to here, setting up my new school computer, trying to set up my new tablet for school…you end up having multiple Google accounts, multiple YouTube accounts, just to manage school and home lives separately. It gets confusing and overwhelming. The new Mac plugs suck, by the way…the part that attaches to the laptop itself is a pain in the ass to use. When is everything going wireless? My life would be so much easier if we could charge everything wirelessly…I spend so much time plugging things in and managing plugs and charging stuff. In other Apple news, one of their commercials made me cry tonight. Then again, I cry at the drop of a hat. No, it didn’t have any jewelry in it. Those ads just annoy me…same with the car ads and the shaver ads. Christmas this year is a little rough. I need to shop for stuff, but have no free time away from kids, due to the ex being gone and multiple events that a parent should attend. No one to help at all. I think it will be a different kind of Christmas this year…I think I will just enlist the kids’ help…I know they realize I am struggling. As the girlchild told me tonight, I’m a downer. I try. They know. They are trying to keep me up. It makes me cry just to type that. Whoops. I read this morning about why some people have repeating depressive episodes and some don’t…something to do with the brain and how it works. Does it take into account the same damn shit happening to a person? Wisdom comes from experience. I will be a very wise old woman…or a just plain old crazy one.

I spent all day at school repeating “seriousness will occur.” Sometimes I wonder what the people in charge are thinking when they say things like that…seriously. We aren’t allowed to show any movies or do any celebrating of anything this week, let alone finishing the damn performance tasks, or in my case, their Project Fred is due tomorrow. No food, no parties, nothing but serious work. We’re all a little loopy, especially the teachers. There is apparently video of me dancing on one of the iPods. Hey. Whatever gets me through at the moment. But dammit, seriousness will occur. (I don’t know when, and if it does, you can’t blame it on me…I will be the goofy one with the Santa hat)

The kids found a new timesuck: Quiz Up. This app will suck up all available time if you let it. That’s the UP in the app name. I’m beating college students, though. I feel really really good about that (no I don’t). I’m really good at walking away from these types of time sucks. The boychild is reasonably good, unless it’s role-playing games (although if he has actual schoolwork, he does prioritize well…just don’t ask about college apps, because I might scream). The girlchild? She sucks at it. Seriously. These things take her down. Brain chemistry. I guess mine is ruled by the artistic bent…hers by procrastination and distraction. I wonder how much of that she will grow out of and how much she will fight for the rest of her life.

So, after yesterday…well, I always learn stuff about me after really bad days (weeks, months)…I learned that I need to make art. Every. Fucking. Day. So I did lots of it tonight to make up for the lame crap of yesterday…I cut stuff out…

mostly flesh and thorns tonight…lots of big fleshy leg pieces…

There’s all the scraps. The pile grows.

Girlchild left this lying around…

Apparently if they send all these postcards to Macy’s, they’ll donate money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. She did one card about her AP Bio grade and another about snow in San Diego for Christmas. Good luck with that, child.

I also quilted tonight…because the girlchild was in one room doing homework and I didn’t want to disturb her by watching TV and cutting stuff out, so I did the other art quilt task that is hanging over my head…

Although I did have a thought about whether it was better to have this piece be finished in January 2014 rather than December 2013…for one thing, I could show it longer…but then I would have fewer quilts finished in 2013…which wouldn’t really matter in the big picture. Who’s looking at that as a matter of my success? Well, except for me, and I can just get over it. I’ve finished 8 quilts in 2013, although two were small and none have been finished since September. It’s OK. I rarely finish anything between September and December.

The cats are all adjusting to Jake’s presence, which means Babygirl is perched up higher than normal…it’s hard to move the mouse when she sits there.

I asked her to deal with the computer backup issue, and she just stared at me.

Girlchild came to school yesterday so we could get to her soccer game. I left her alone in my classroom for 15 minutes and she started writing song lyrics on the board.

I left it up to entertain my students this morning.

I finished this book today…Blackout by Connie Willis…

It’s one of two books that I’m reading for a book club…the second one is on its way via the library system. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, like for the first two thirds of the book. It was mostly WWII historical stuff, although it’s about time travel, but then it got more interesting when the system stopped working right. I’m not a history fan usually, and even less so of wars, but this is less about the war and more about people’s reactions to what was going on in England during WWII seen through the eyes of people from the future. The second book, All Clear, is really a continuation of the story, so we decided in the book club to read both for the months of December and January.

Meditation…it was about change…about being thrown off course and maintaining one’s position, resting in uncertainty…I think that’s what I’ve been doing for 6 months now. It doesn’t feel good, but that’s not because of the change itself…it’s because of how the change happened, which sort of created a reaction in me…this sadness, grief, depression now I think…I think it has moved into that, because I can’t shake it. I mean, I do shake, like a dog, and bits and pieces fly off, and then I get angry and pull pieces off and throw them far away from me, but there are so many clumps that are clinging to me and just hanging on and I can’t shed them. I was so much better at this post-divorce. My anger at the situation was so much stronger and I was so much stronger, and I just jumped back up and into living and forcing myself to be something. Now I just don’t have the energy or the drive for that. I don’t want to do some things over again. This is why the girlchild labeled me a downer. And my counselor says I purposely do some things to push people away, and I say, but those people that are pushed? I don’t want to deal with them anyway. I’m not going to stop being an artist to please the majority of people out there. I’m not going to start wearing makeup or high heels and cute little dresses just because people expect women to do that. I’m not going to start being like the majority of women out there just because that’s what women do. I just don’t care enough to do that. If that’s what your expectation of me is? Then fuck you. I want to make more art. I want to get into more shows. I think I might want to write a book or seven. I want to be at peace. I want to be happy. None of these will be under the Christmas tree this year. This year is all about survival…of the fittest? I’m not sure I am the fittest. I don’t seem to be. I seem to be pretty messed up. That said, I am pretty damn strong. Strong enough to keep getting up, to keep creating, to keep trying to make it better.

Resting in uncertainty…it’s an uncomfortable place.

Reviewing IQF Houston 2013

Yes, I took pictures. I’m never very logical about it. Sometimes I take pictures because the piece speaks to me…sometimes it’s because I want to complain about it. I try to stay away from the latter, but there are a couple in here. I don’t take a whole lot of traditional quilt photos, mostly because I find them boring. I suspect there are traditional quilters who walk right past the art quilts in the same way. So this is Kathy’s highly selective (I take fewer photos when I’m tired!) reconstruction of maybe 1/32nd of the International Quilt Festival at Houston, 2013, remembering that she had already seen West Coast Wonders and the Dinner @8 exhibit in Long Beach, and somehow she missed the placemats completely…I SAW them…I just didn’t have the mental energy to photograph any of them. My bad. But since most of you don’t come here for my quilt-show reporting, I’m not going to worry too much about my lame-ass reporting style.

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry (sweetie, it’s too many names…I get why you’re keeping all of them, I really do, but please…maybe just calling yourself Caryl would be good) has created a series of thirty 30-inch-square pieces that celebrate her thirty years of quiltmaking, referencing her past work, themes, etc., and using her fabric collections to complete them.

So. Here’s what I think. First of all, the more power to her. She has a strong body of work that is well-liked by many, the exhibit already has 8 venues it’s traveling to, and she definitely has the technical ability to be showcased like this. I liked being able to look closely at her insane stitching…

(Electric Ellipses #2)

Especially in the more cellular-looking pieces and the two beach sand pieces.

(Casting a Long Shadow #2)

That said…why redo ideas from the last 30 years? I don’t get it? I know it might be hard to put a retrospective together if a lot of your work has sold, and I do get what you’re saying about the exhibit being pulled together by all of them being the same size, but…eh. Make New Work. Put some old work in the show. I don’t understand. It was popular, though, so apparently I am in the minority. I want to see new work, though. You have a new life…how will that change your art?

Bodil Gardner had at least 4 pieces in Houston…with two in the SAQA: People and Portraits exhibit with mine. I’ve always liked her work…it’s quirky and graphic and slightly off, but Martha Sielman mentioned something in the People and Portraits Walk and Talk that I’d never really thought about…her work is inordinately cheery. There’s never a sad moment. It’s just nice and joyful and chaotic and happy (unlike my own work).

This is Santa Lucia and that is one BIG and happy spiral-eared dog. Maybe I need to channel some Bodil. Maybe she’d let me come stay with her for a while. One of the pieces in the People and Portraits exhibit had a large central female figure, like her pieces (and mine) often do, and there was a coffee cup balanced on her shoulder, like I often do. Sielman said that Gardner says it refers to how women often share a cup of coffee (or tea) together as part of their socializing, and that if she were doing men, she would probably do a beer stein instead.

Another featured artist in People and Portraits is Sonia Bardella, whose faces have a particular quality to them.

This is Venice’s Carnival, which takes place near where she lives.

The best part is the detail she puts into the clothing in contrast to the skillfully painted faces.

Dianne Firth made four elements pieces for an exhibit, with Wind currently showing with the traveling Quilt National exhibit. This is Fire…

Which, like Wind, is much more stunning and vibrant in person…and was based on the volcanic eruptions in Iceland in 2010.

Betty Busby curated an exhibit of quilts called A Walk in the Wild, a SAQA exhibit of artists from New Mexico. Below is Busby’s piece, Desert Fox.

All the pieces were similar sizes…this is Where Earth and Sky Meet by Susan Szajer.

Her work deserved a detail shot…there are even tiny beads in there…

This one…Eight Ravens by Judith Roderick…was one of my favorite quilts in the show.

Her silk-painting technique adds a lot of interest and depth to her pieces, which have that graphic quality that I love, coming out of the printmaking world.

And the subject matter of the ravens is also a favorite. This piece glowed in person.

There were two dinosaur pieces by Shannon Conley that I liked…S Is for #4 is below…

Coelophysus bauri is the dino depicted in both quilts, apparently was thought to be a cannibal until recently. In the quilt above, Conley shows him in his Triassic-era habitat, with S Is for #3 below showing him in modern-day New Mexico.

Conley is a scientist who put real teeth on that first quilt…hopefully not valuable fossils (naw, they’re polymer clay). Here’s a link to her posts about these quilts.

Kathy York is one of my favorite brightly colored artists…you’ll notice I photographed lots of bright-colored quilts (a dream? hope? wish?). I posted York’s video of populating this quilt, Park Place, a while ago…

You can see it here on her blog post where she writes about making this quilt…

This is Stella in Yellow by Joanell Connolly.

Stella is the dog in the raincoat, rescued from the animal shelter. I love the contrast and the pattern, with the pitiful-looking dog off to the side.

Both Stella and this one were part of a pet exhibit, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs, bringing awareness to saving animal lives. This is One Cat, Two Cat by Laura Bisagna.

Bisagna had been feeding a stray gray cat, and every day it would come out and eat, then go behind the house, and seemingly come out and eat again…until she realized there were two gray cats.

This piece was deceptively simple-looking until you studied it up close. This is Winter by Laurie Weiner.

The piece is whole-cloth, hand-dyed, and trapunto, but the quilting is what drew me to it…

Intense pattern and texture makes up this piece. I saw a lot of this close, patterned quilting and I’m always attracted to it, which is amusing, because I so don’t quilt like that…but it’s true that type of quilting would not lend itself to the images I create…so I am happy to admire it in other people’s work (and call them insane behind their backs…while they say the same about me and my 2000-piece quilts).

The sky drew me to this piece…In the Bleak Midwinter by Ruth Powers.

Being a Southern Californian, we rarely see winter landscapes such as these.

I always like to show Tanya Brown what pieces hers are hanging with…so there’s Under the Gingko Tree…

featuring her painted whole-cloth work and crazy tiny stitching…

As well as her boy actually standing still…a minor miracle in itself.

This one drew me to it with all the crazy detail…It’s a Crazy Life by Gail Thomas.

Gail’s own beautiful, long white hair was used to quilt this piece as she recovered from health issues…

Her painting on the fabric is very colorful and detailed.

This piece drew my eye because of parts of it…overall, I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I liked the faces. This is You Are Here by Victoria Findlay Wolfe…

The people are from digital photos manipulated in Photoshop and printed on fabric.

It’s an interesting use of a traditional pattern with modern tones to it…I’m not sure I like the whole thing (the silver lamé really bugs me), but I liked those parts.

This quilt had lots of funky details in it…and I kinda like how it’s just all globbed together…

And the use of pattern in the fabrics is really interesting too…

This is Japanese Calendar by Fumi Kido. The Japanese do often have a certain feel to their quilts…

I’m not sure what that’s about…because they often use American patterns, and it STILL feels Japanese to me. This one has a different appeal to me, though…very stylized but with those details.

I do hail from an applique background…and this one was beautifully done. This is Four Loons and Friends by Patricia Sellinger.

The symmetry and design in this quilt are stunning…and she embellished the birds with beads as well.

This is an original design.

I liked this one because of the flame-like blobs wandering across the design. This is May Your Burdens Be Light by Kazuko Covington. This is an original design using New York Beauty blocks, made after the tsunami that destroyed her hometown.

Those blobs now look like tsunami waves…

This one won best of show…Chihuly’s Gondola by Melissa Sobotka. That’s $10,000, people. It’s a beautiful quilt, but it is from a photograph of Chihuly’s installation in Texas from a few years back.

So tell me this…is there a difference in the art applied between Sobotka’s copy of another artist’s work (is this a Sobotka or a Chihuly?) and the Jane Sassaman (original design) below? I think yes…but I wasn’t a juror in this show (and probably never will be invited to be one either). I think Chihuly deserves a healthy percentage of the prize.

This is Jane Sassaman’s Illinois Album, also an award winner, but in my eyes, a much more deserving one.

You decide.

Another Bodil Gardner happy piece, this is I Arise from Dreams…

Sheila Frampton-Cooper had two of her graphic, colorful pieces in the show…this is Lair of the Amethyst Deva…

I see legs…Sheila’s another tight, detailed quilter, which suits her big, bold, abstract work.

Nearby was another somewhat controversial piece…yes, it’s abstract; yes, it’s colorful, even pretty…Roses in the Window by Carol Morrissey. On the surface, an original design from a photograph she took…but how did she get all those circles? Is it the same place my mom gets her circles? Where is her hand in this quilt?

Does what equipment we use to create a piece make it more art or less art? You’ll notice I have no pictures of quilts with digitized photos where the artist has printed it out full size and just stitched over it. I need to see the artist’s hand in the work…I need to see what they’ve changed or made their own. Feel free to BE a photographer (there was a great photography show at IQF), but if you’re going to put it on fabric, make sure there is a purpose to that. Why fabric? Why not just print a photograph on paper and frame it and be done with it? It’s something to think about…

Another Kathy York…this is You Are What You Eat…

Speaking of having your hand in your artwork, York made the batik flowers herself.

This piece…I still need this one explained. The graphic nature explains why I like it, but there is some weird stuff going on in this quilt. This is Alice’s Kitchen (obviously Alice in Wonderland) by Miki Murakami…I love that this is so NOT typically Japanese.

All she says is that this is how she imagined a kitchen in Alice’s story, even though there wasn’t one. I think I want to talk to this woman.

Sue Bleiweiss makes wonderfully graphic and deceptively simple pieces. This is Tutti Frutti City.

This one intrigued me…it was just plain weird, yet cool. This is The Birders by Suzanne Marshall, an original design inspired by a 1565 manuscript…ahhh…there’s why it’s weird.

I’ve taken pictures of her work before…liking the weird medieval qualities to her work…

Just look at that unhappy face.

This one caught my eye because I couldn’t (at first) figure out what it was…I thought maybe it was leaky tubes of paint. Silly me…it’s just Oregon Buoys by Jane Haworth.

I like my idea better…but I guess it caught my eye. Chaos and color.

Another Frampton-Cooper piece, this is Venus in the Garden, named by her sister, who saw Venus Flytraps (I see an angry parrot…that wouldn’t be a nice name though).

This one had a stunning use of color…this is Antelope Canyon by Kimberly Lacy.

And another winner, Tuning Fork #11 by Heather Pregger.

It’s a very graphic piece…she does lots of pieces like this, though. I wonder about that. I guess it’s a different challenge to work abstractly with the same shapes than to do what I do. (It would drive me bonkers though!)

OK, so there were all these cow quilts…something to do with a book. I liked this one because?

Come on. Guess. OK. It’s a cow skelly. How can you not love a cow skelly? Actually, I was walking past this part of the exhibit when someone pointed to the earrings on the cow and said, “Honestly, some of these quilts you cannot use as a QUILT!” Oh my. No ma’am, you can’t (she wasn’t old…younger by far than I am). So. There you have it. It’s a MooSkellyNotQuilt. Actually, it’s Dia de los MOOertos by Patricia Ward.

This one…it’s cute. It’s tiny. It’s beautifully made. It’s a prize winner. This is Masanobu Miyama’s Wind, a picture of the artist’s dog.

The statement talks about an original microfused applique technique. I do not know what this is, although micro means small and those pieces are freakin’ small (I should know).

This one caught my eye because of the fabrics…in the US, we are so into our cotton and occasionally a silk or two…this piece, The Berlin Bear by Marjan van der Heijden, was made completely with leftovers…

That were stitched together sort of haphazardly, but in a beautiful way…

Truly amazing use of fabric.

This Japanese landscape is so Japanese because of the taupe, but the imagery is so American…I wonder what the Japanese countryside actually looks like and why this appeals to them. This piece is A Place to Long For, by Aiko Yokoyama.

The fabric and design is beautiful…I just wonder why it’s so appealing.

So that’s my take on IQF 2013…there were probably quilts I didn’t photograph just because I was tired or in a mood (I was in a mood a lot), so don’t take it badly if yours isn’t here…mine is just one set of slightly jaded, tired, and miserable eyes among 60,000 viewers. I do know that I will miss IQF coming to Long Beach, California, because it was cheap and easy to get to, and I don’t think I’ll be going to Houston again for a good, long while, but I did enjoy some of the quilts quite a bit. I’ll talk more about the experience in general at another time. I do provide artist’s links when I can easily find them and confirm that they belong to the artist. If your work is here and you have a link you’d like me to use, please let me know.

Don’t Think Too Hard…

Some days it’s like I’m watching myself from a distance moving through life. I shake my head, thinking, she should be more careful, she should slow down, she’s not thinking about what she’s doing…as I watch myself walk here, move there, drive over here, go to the gym, buy groceries. Nothing of import. Nothing that has meaning…just the chores. Today was one of those days. I got up at 2:45 AM San Diego time, although it’s possible my brain was on Texas time…hard to say. Then rode two planes, ate some food in between, read a long book and started another, slept a little…and I was home.

Home didn’t feel good…well, it did and it didn’t. It’s my bed. My stuff is here. My fabric is here. I can make a cup of tea without having to hunt down ingredients. Those are all good things. I came home, though, to a pile of laundry, a bunch of dirty dishes, cat vomit (fun stuff), an empty fridge, an empty life.

Well, it’s not totally empty. I make art. I have my kids (I did not see them today…I only saw my exhusband…twice…weird). The cats were glad to see me (lovely to feel needed). But there is too much of the stuff that feels like drudgery and not enough of the stuff that makes my heart soar…mostly because I don’t know how to do that any more. The quilt show…it was OK. I wasn’t comfortable being there. I wasn’t interested in a lot of what WAS there. I had some good moments, but…I wasn’t in the right mindframe to enjoy myself. I don’t know how to shake the grief long enough to enjoy myself. I get to a point where it feels like I’m trying to climb out of my own skin. The closest I get to anything resembling enjoyment is at the gym or when I’m doing art stuff, but even that today was an issue. And that’s not enjoyment…it’s not a rush or a soaring feeling…it’s just like taking a deep breath at the top of the stairs, getting some air.

My emotions are very distant today…a combination of travel and tired and overwhelmed, I think. Mr. Meditation says to be less critical of my feelings…don’t identify with them. It’s not MY feeling or I FEEL LIKE, but just labeling it. That? That is sad. That over there? That’s angry. I recognize those. Even using the words ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ is not meant to be judgmental of the feeling…just a label. I couldn’t get my brain to label anything during meditation tonight. And is SAD unpleasant? I guess so. I don’t like being sad, so I guess that’s unpleasant. Anger is definitely unpleasant. Sad just seems like it’s there. It has a purpose, it seems, as long as you don’t wallow in it forever. I’m sure some people think I am wallowing. I’m not. I’m just not capable of jumping up and yelling Happy! right now. And fuck you for thinking I should be able to do that right now.

I’m thinking way too hard about this. When I feel like that, bogged down in the thinking, I go to the gym, I draw, I read. I did two of those today.

Then I had a choice after the grocery shopping (because shopping on a Saturday night doesn’t make me feel like a total loser…OK, it does, and it’s even worse when you run into your exhusband there, who is buying stuff to feed at least one of your kids…). I could work on school stuff or I could work on art stuff.

I bet you know which one I chose…the one where there is some hope of mental rest, of peace…maybe…some days. I cleaned up a little in the office to make room, putting away fabrics etc…and then I started ironing…

I’m missing two toenails…they will probably show up eventually.

Most missing parts do. I had to cut one missing rug piece because it went above and over another piece…so of course, I found the missing piece AFTER I had done that…it was in the next box by accident (I sort them into boxes by 100s before ironing).

This really is a rather simple quilt after the last beast…

I have about an hour 40 minutes in, and there’s about 150 pieces ironed down. A couple more nights like that, and I’ll have it done. That would be nice. The colors are a bit more subdued than normal…at least so far. Interesting. I never really get to see how the colors work together until I get to this stage, since I don’t really have a color pattern…I just sort of color it in my head and hold fabrics next to one another to see if they’ll work.

I knew I would be grading at two soccer games tomorrow, so that helped me make the decision to blow off work for yet another day. I’ll be grading at games for about 5 hours tomorrow…that seems plenty. I should be allowed to do stuff besides work and clean and cook.

I do have pictures from Houston and will get to them eventually. I didn’t take a ton of pictures, though…not inspired, I guess.

I hope some day there is some feeling besides all this sad and blah. It’s wearing on me. I want to be able to just go out somewhere and laugh and enjoy myself, but I can’t get there. The sad is always looming over me, poking me in case I forget about it. Sounds like there will be more drawing this week…let this muggy emotional mess solidify into a drawing and vomit it out on the page. Then I’ll feel better maybe…as long as I don’t think too hard.

It’s Not Easy

First of all, I’ve been awake since 3:30 AM, so anything I write should be suspect. Second of all, I’m in Houston, Texas, home of the International Quilt Festival, where approximately 60,000 people (yes, mostly women) will attend the quilt and vendor show.

Why the hell am I here? I have two quilts in one of the special exhibits, so I came for that. I’ll be doing a Walk and Talk of the show (I will only be talking about mine) tomorrow at 11AM (tomorrow is Friday, in case that’s confusing, because honestly, I don’t what time it is at the moment).

Mom came with me…she will try to record me tomorrow, but we haven’t persuaded her phone to DO such things yet, so I don’t hold out great hopes. I did much better this time…I actually talked to people at the SAQA Meet and Greet (be impressed…I think it’s because I am seriously sleep-deprived).

I woke up this morning thinking, “Normal dreams?” I’m having dreams of a normal life, perhaps even MY normal life…like not sad and stressed and walking in a fog (I have now typed ‘dog,’ ‘fig,’ and ‘fof’), but like normal-feeling. Maybe that’s why waking up is so difficult. Reality doesn’t feel normal. Reality feels bad.

Everything is tainted by associations with the past nine…twenty-two (??) years. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without feeling it resonate with something that now hurts. Airports, airplanes, sitting on a plane, sitting by the gates. Bloody hell, some peace please??? Can I just have something that’s just mine and not attached to all this crap?

I sat there on the plane as mom talked to some other quilter, and I hurt. I read, I stitched, I tried to sleep, and the hurt tied my guts in knots until I couldn’t sleep. Or eat. I turned the music up louder and worked on my stitching callous.

Sigh.

I’m better now. A lot of the quilt show doesn’t interest me…there are lots of quilts that just don’t even touch me (and I’m not being very open-minded at the moment…it needs to seriously catch my eye for me to even get closer). We’ve only made it through half the quilts (saw mine!) and skimmed a portion of the vendors.

One woman told me I should exhibit in Europe because they’re not prudes like the Americans (not her exact words). Another woman told me never to lose my unique style (I don’t think I could do that if I tried). I met some people I already knew and some I’d never met but had known for a while.

I need to go to sleep (mom was down for the count an hour ago). We’re getting up to go to the gym in the morning before the show opens (so virtuous). It’s not easy being here, but it’s not easy being anywhere at the moment, so I might as well be uncomfortable here. It’s not fun, but it’s a change, and change can’t be bad at the moment.

Protected: Time for Art, Yo

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Protected: Going a Little Nutsy Cuckoo…