Layers of Meaning
commentary on design, fiber art, & modern embroidery from Serena Fenton
I have a fetish for old buttons. I have several jars and tins and like to pour them out just to look at them with family on friends. I have been known to covetously browse the button auctions at ebay. Last night I came upon the most amazing piece. The description reads: "old button mosaic depicting a church with steeple, grass on the lawn and brown road at the bottom. Also in this scene is a sunrise or sunset and the outline of what looks to be a large palm tree. As you can see the mosaic is quite large it measures 23" X 48" and indeed is heavy weighing in at almost 10 lbs.!!" A label on the back reads "2280 buttons, Nora Musser, June 16, 1955."
I think the pictures speak for themselves. And, if you are wondering, the final price was $127.50!!
NPR's Susan Stamberg recently reported on a new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago entitled Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" NPR has an recording of this radio piece, which is well worth the four minutes of listening.
Stamberg makes the revelation that pointillism and the pointillist style is not refering to dots of paint. Instead point in French means stitch. The word was coined to describe the tapestry-like effect of Seurat's paint as it played across the canvas.
The artcyclopedia explains: "Pointillism is a form of painting in which the use of tiny primary-color dots is used to generate secondary colors." Which ties in neatly with the Art Institute of Chicago's explanation of the inspiration for pointillism (birth of color theory): " These early paintings were informed by the law of contrast as articulated in the writings of M.-E. Chevreul. A noted 19th-century color theorist, Chevreul observed that just as dark and light oppositions enhance each other, any color is likewise heightened when placed beside its “complement”—located on the opposite side of the color wheel. When the complements red and green are put side by side, for instance, the red will seem redder and the green, greener.
Seurat was also aware of how the optical mixture of colors in the eye was different from their mixture on the palette. Juxtaposing related shades of a color on a canvas (yellows and greens for example) will create a more vivid and luminous effect than if the colors had been mixed on the palette."
A page of selected works viewing of the study cards that Seurat used in composing the painting.
If you would like to apply pointillist theory in fiber art, you might want to begin with some exercises written for painters, but they could be done in thread or fused fabric, for example: Tapestries of Color by Tina Tammaro or Create a pointillist painting from Keppel Union School District in California.
In the world of small miracles, I discovered that one of my former students, Charles LeDray, has become famous! Not just slightly famous, but really, really famous - "Venice Biennale, Chelsea gallery and traveling museum retrospective" type of famous. Best of all, I still find his work as delightful and funny as when he was a charmingly sneering 15 year old at Queen Anne High in Seattle (he once grew tired of the requisite realistic drawing of a soda cracker and so he posted his final work: the actual cracker glued to his drawing paper.)
Charles works in miniature in a variety of materials, but the works that caught my interest are the sewn pieces. The Seattle arts community has embraced him as a genius son, after LeDray's New York success. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote of his 2003 show: "Hungering to own one of Seattle artist Michelle Clise's antique teddy bears, he decided to make his own fake antique teddies. Thus he jumped the gate from blocked painter to magical conjurer of craft-based art objects... After getting a job as art handler at the Jack Tilton Gallery, he showed the director, Jenine Cirincione, one of his jackets for a teddy bear ("Mourning Piece," 1989). She hung it in a group show hours before it opened.
After that, his career took off. Instead of being the undereducated innocent he appeared to be in his hometown, he turned out to be a sophisticated innovator capable of making history in New York. He represents the revenge of the handmade, the triumph of domestic skill over costly corporate spectacle, the raw over the cooked, the heartfelt over the glossy.
"S.A.M." from 1994 is a replica of his museum-guard suit, slightly bigger than his hand. It's what he wore when no one was asking him anything more taxing than directions to the bathroom. Hanging on the wall on a hanger he made, it carries its own madcap narrative with it, a rumpled, lived-in story of the born to be overlooked.
"What I hide by my language, my body utters," wrote Roland Barthes in "A Lover's Discourse." LeDray's suits of clothes are bodies, really, unable to conceal the meaning of their lives. "Becoming Mr. Man" from 1992 tells the tale of desperate intellectual, pockets stuffed with poems and lapels unfashionably wide, the bulk of its frustrated desires battering the fabric."
Excerpts from an ArtForum review reminds me that LeDray's high school years occurred when Linda Barry was the reigning queen of Seattle angst: "What makes him more than just a highly skilled maker of miniatures is the density of personal and cultural anxieties and elations that he puts into his best work...public eroticism, the power of the handmade in a machine-made world... a gothic display of pain, guilt and anger, the wonder of a cosmos without a providential deity--all of these things are part of our moment," and, Taplin says, "LeDray is packing them into his objects."" I think the moral here is that workmanship counts, but it's all pointless without the emotion behind it.
For the true fans, Charles even has his own retrospective book out.
The National Gallery of Art recently organized a retrospective exhibition of the art of Romare Beardon. This exhibit will be traveling through April of 1995. Currently the exhibit is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has created a multimedia Flash-based presentation that uses film, music and reproductions of the paintings. Many of the artworks are accompanied by spoken commentary on Beardon's technique and significance.
Beardon's work seems to be of significance to fiber artists through the similarities of collage and building up of textures and meaning. In the 1960's Beardon was using photographic techniques to insert images into his collages, much in the way that Laury brought to the art quilt world. Additionally, SFMOMA cites Harriet Powers' Pictorial Quilt as an influence on Beardon's image making.
The Art of Romare Beardon, by The National Gallery of Art is an online exhibition that has fewer broken links and technical complexities than the SFMOMA's site. It is possible to view the pieces at a more contemplative pace. The work selected seems to enforce the similarities of Beardon's work to quilting, such as in Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1966/1967 (right).
Chapter 3 of Robert Shaw's wonderful book, The Art Quilt, has been re-published on the internet. This chapter covers the beginnings and evolution of the art quilt. There are no illustrations, but this being a linked medium, there are some interesting and quirky links to people, places and things mentioned. One example: "Laury entered the quilt in the 1958 Eastern States Exposition, where it attracted the attention of Roxa Wright, then needlework editor for House Beautiful magazine." This exhibition is a long way from the Quilt National in Paducah.
This chapter, and all of The Art Quilt, are a great refresher course in why we are pursuing this medium and where we are going.
I regret to report that I am turning off the "comments" feature for this blog until I can some up with a better way of managing it. I've been spending time each day deleting the 3-5 spam 'comments' that accrue. If you have a comment, please send an email. I'd be delighted to hear from you all.
"For the past few decades, 52-year-old East Hampton, N.Y., artist Christa Maiwald has been sending up the social mores of privileged urbanites in paintings, sculpture and video. About a year and a half ago, she took up embroidery. No Grandma Moses she, Maiwald uses the quaint activity to explore feminist themes, much as Rosemarie Trockel did in the 1980s when she used knitting to create charged cultural symbols like the Playboy bunny. At MOCA, Maiwald sticks her needle into teenage angst -- mostly girls confronting their emerging sexuality and the good-girl/bad-girl conflict." from a special to the Washington Post
"For the past three years, Maiwald has been photographing adolescents and creating embroidered portraits of them, first on small linen handkerchiefs, then on larger pieces of cotton, and most recently on pillows. The exhibition will include three large pillow installations and a selection of digital photographs." from Florence Lynch Gallery
This is an artist who seems restless and determined to keep exploring new territory. A photo of her recent work, is not so controversial - and this shot is clear enough that you can see the detail! Maiwald's gallery has a page of perhaps the most intriguing work: the "Learning to Draw Series" and some sculptures. Unfortunately, the detail is lacking in the web site photos and the links to the larger images don't work. Art in America offers this evocative review of the series: "Christa Maiwald's recent oil paintings and gouache drawings, collectively titled "Learn to Draw," offer comic scenarios, often depicting instances of artistic coercion. Sometimes the pictured events are summed up by their titles: the teacher scolds the child in You Better Learn to Draw!, the aspiring artist faces a gallery's rejection in Sorry Nudes Are Out, Bugs Are In.... In You Better Learn to Drawl (1997), a small child in a classroom lined with children at easels is confronted by a shrewish teacher with a masklike face, a distorted hunch back and Medusalike hair. Maiwald's cartoon style engages with aspects of abstract picture-making in a black arch that seems both to be part of the wall and to form the teacher's back. Throughout this exhibition, Maiwald seems to delight in a certain kind of dark humor, one which perhaps expresses her frustrations with being an artist."
The Washington Post has an article about the new Pandamaniacs "art" bears that are popping up all over Washington DC. What they have to say is not good, optimistic or cheery. But I think that there are some parallels between their criticism of fun art and what we are willing to accept as fun art in the quilt world.
A quick quote from the article: "A few weekends back, most of the newly decorated pandas sat gathered in an empty office building in Southwest Washington, pending their stampede across our cityscape. There was "Paisley Panda," covered in psychedelic swirls... There was -- no kidding -- a panda reworked to look like a chocolate-dipped "strawbeary." Not one of these beasts or any of their brethren reminded me -- even vaguely, even in passing -- of the kinds of things I've been asked to look at in art galleries and museums across the country, or around the world, made by artists working now or in the far or recent past. They don't link up to the kinds of creative challenges significant artists have to face and overcome. They're not about artistic innovation, or about addressing real issues in the world or in the history of art."
Here's some insights from the art intelligencia in DC:
""Art in public spaces need not be dull and 'official.' It can be delightful, even fun. But I am not convinced that painting tourist-style images of Washington on inflated teddy bears is either challenging or inspirational as art -- more like panda-ing to the public."
-- Julian Raby, director of the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler art galleries
"Here we have world-class museums putting shows together, and they might get a footnote compared to the attention the pandas get. . . . I look at them and think, 'These are for the kids.' What's missing in Washington is public art that can have a serious philosophical dialogue with the community."
-- Robin Rose,leading Washington painter "
I have never lived in a city when one of these public art-animal programs was going on, but they do seem delightful, and they do engage the public and sell books, posters and little china figurines. All of which is good. But this article brings up a point - couldn't we do public art (or art quilts) that do both: make one feel good and challenge the intellect at the same time?
Oddly enough, just before reading this article, I had been reading an old review of a Chicago Funk school exhibit at the Corcoran. Fun? yes! Thought-provoking? yes! What can we learn here? When, as fiber artists, do we begin to have our "serious philosophical dialogue with the community"?