For more than 20 years Judith Hoyt has parsed the human figure in metal and mixed media. Beginning with a salvaged scrap of metal, wood, a book, or other material with a history, she fashions solitary or paired figures, often with a surprised or pensive mien, She is a metallist to the extent that fabricated metal forms provide a ghostly surface on which opaque paint is sparingly applied. The scale is intimate, even in the large wall pieces. Tightly clustered on the studio wall their dialogue buzzes with the silent hum of human voices. To share space with them is to hear their cacophony of silence. ganoskin

BeGallery offers this perspective on Hoyt’s work: “Judith Hoyt creates works that are akin to short stories. Materials at different stages of abuse, disintegration and decomposition come into their own again. One can look at them for long periods of time and wonder about the figures and imagery in her work and how the prior uses and lives of the materials have fused with her vision. And yet, the materials have their own history, with Hoyt creating a sophisticated visual environment for the second “telling” of their stories…

Hoyt explains her process: “The figures in my work hold the pain, pleasure and spirit of the human condition. They carry a psychological edge — that thin line between sanity and madness. Each piece evolves through trial and error with the shapes and colors of the materials often guiding the development. I find metal that is in the process of being reclaimed by the earth along the road and in dumps. The metal is discolored, corroded and misshapen by the random process of history. This history gets passed on to the figures. These figures feel primitive but have a relevance to the present.”

More examples of her work are avaible online at tabboo studio.

I am finding myself moving from pure textile/quilt art into multimedia, assemblage and mixed-media art. The textiles often play strongly in the mix, but the ideas that I am finindg in these other fields greatly widen the view. One great article on the introduction of humor and pop art into the craft vocabulary is Celia Ben Mitchell’s article: Heart and Head, The Life and Work of Don Tompkins. The article provides an overview of the career of Tompkins, with an emphasis on the motivations and growth:

“… This first pendant is a tableau, the inscrutable parts of a short story, a fable, a private mythology. A world. In this work, and more fully in the mature series that soon followed, Tompkins crashes the party’ of American Modernist jewelry, bringing eccentric materials and new techniques, social and political satire, the detritus of popular culture, private histories, bawdy good humor, and just plain good fun to the workbench.

… Including the first medal-like pendant, there is a record (likely still incomplete) of 25 commemorative medals. Naturally, some are clearly richer, more cohesive and visually dynamic than others, such as Henry Miller (1968); Patriotic (Fuck Communism) (ca. 1969); Nixon (1969-72); Janis Joplin, Minnesota Fats, Martha Mitchell and Jack Zucker (all 1971 , quite a run); Jackson Pollock (1972); what must be considered his masterwork, Banting and Best (1972); and Iran Karp (1974). These medals possess the visual grace that Tompkins brought to his earlier traditional jewelry, together with biting parody, balls-to-the-wall social commentary, often a full-­blown wit and at turns a tender, personal touch.

Jack Zucker (ca. 1972) is one of the gems and comes out of a terrific story. Zucker, a Philadelphia union organizer, was a friend of Betty Tompkins’s parents. Along with so many intellectuals of the 1950s, lie was called up before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s specious Un-­American Activities Committee and asked to defend himself. He said, “Senator McCarthy, I have more patriotism in my little finger than you have in your whole body.” Tompkins commemorates those words in the work, along with an etched portrait of Zucker, an American Federation of Labor pin, and a kitschy cast charm of a dancing girl, all wonderfully balanced in the grid format. A terrific tribute.”

Lark Books seeks excellent images to publish in a juried collection of quilts for 500 Quilts, the latest in their 500 Series to be published in Spring 2010.   The announcement reads:

Both art quilts and traditional quilts are welcome in fabric and other media. Diverse designs, materials, and techniques are desired, from traditional to cutting edge. We accept high-quality transparencies, slides, and digital images. There is no entry fee. Important note: Lark Books will only publish photos of entries containing text and images that are free of copyright, or for which the artist (or approved institution) holds copyright.

Artists will receive full acknowledgment within the book, one complimentary copy, and discounts on the purchase of additional books. Artists retain copyright of their work.
Entries must be postmarked by October 24, 2008.

Guidelines and entry forms are now available on Lark’s website:
<http://www.larkbooks.com/submissions/artist-submissions>

“What I’m really interested in is the future and what it looks like” and “in inventing a future through history and material culture and art.” - J. Morgan Puett, designer and artist. Puett elaborates further on this philosophy: “It’s not about nostalgia or re-enacting,” she said. “I believe that all of these time periods and histories are pressing in on us at once.” These quotes are from a NY Times article, In Her Own World by Alastair Gordon. Be sure to view the related NY Times slideshow.

I just finished re-decorating my bedroom with mustard-colored and ivy-covered painted walls, faded floral curtains and a blue floral strip quilt. The room reminds me of the comforts of my grandmother’s house in Wichita, when I was growing up - but it is not a direct quote of her 1920s/30s prairie heritage. The room instead reflects a collective memory of comfort and coziness, while still being part of the 21st century.

Then this morning, I read the NY Times article and realized that what Puett was creating is what we should all be doing, making a place that is an “ongoing experiment in art, design and aestheticized living”…The house is filled with Ms. Puett’s and Mr. Dion’s eclectic collections of art, antiques, hundreds of books, stuffed birds, skulls, outsider art and ephemera. It’s at once a private, family space and a public, multipurpose environment, as Ms. Puett describes it. “This is not my dream house,” she said. “This was designed as a central community kitchen and reference library.”"

The web site for Puett’s space, called Mildred’s Lane, defines the project as: “Mildred’s Lane is an artist-driven project for the rethinking of the contemporary art complex, which is tucked away in the woods of Pennsylvania, on the upper Delaware River. It is a large-scale collaboration between the artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion who have lived and worked on this rustic 96-acre site since 1998. From the beginning there has been a desire to critically re-imagine the space between environmental practice, artistic domesticating, and socially engaged research. By hosting and supporting international cultural producers, organizing informal residencies, developing site sensitive projects, seminars, dinners, research think tanks and more — they have made Mildred’s Lane a significant but invisible center for new forms of cultural practice.”

Puett’s web site offers glimpses of many more of her installations, including grafters bee shack with embroidered veil and miscellaneous bee-related textiles; the nurse’s uniform, which covers the uniform’s history and future (intergalactic nurse); and a collection of wonderful shots of her (former) NY store, when it was in Soho.

Becky Stern demonstrates how she created a lily pad embroidery piece that responds to motion with blinking lights and sound. “I’ve been working with Leah Buechley’s LilyPad Arduino, and in true embroidery sampler fashion, have composed this circuit to see what I could do. The embroidery uses traditional floss and techniques mixed with lights and sounds generated by the onboard software. The amount of light sensed by the sensor changes the speed and pitch of the lights and sounds generated. Move your shadow or hand over it to experience the changes.”

If you want to create a simpler electronic embroidery of your own, Stern has posted a video tutorial at Craft zine: “Using LEDs and conducive thread, you’ll be able to create your own embroidery of a frog with light-up fireflies.” On her web site, Stern has posted a set of photo-based directions and list of supplies and suppliers - including where to find the conductive thread!

O’Reilly has a new book, Fashioning Technology, by Syuzi Pakhchyan that gives a deeper exploration of the current melding of technology and textiles. “With this new palette of materials, we can now create objects infused with magical and mysterious qualities. The first book of its kind, Fashioning Technology is just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.” Watch a video of Pakhchyan explaining her book, her background, her inspirations and some future visions. This all goes way beyond the ipod and sneaker embedded chips!

From the National Encaustic Conference, a list of questions asked by Kay WalkingStick in her  workshop (as reported by Linda Womack). These are wonderful questions; questions that I wish that someone had asked me 20 years ago - and then asked them again annually. These are questions that cut to the heart of making art and why we do it.

1. Do you spend at least a couple of hours in the studio every day? (about half of the people in the room were able to say yes, but Kay said that was better than she thought it would be.)
2. What is your goal for your art career? (Have your work shown in a museum, pay your bills and feed your family or somewhere in between — it’s all valid)
3. What are you looking for when you go to look at art? Does your work fulfill that need?
4. Who is your favorite artist and what do you expect their art to do for you?
5. What subject do you want to investigate?
6. How to do conceptualize your work? How do you begin (through color, image, idea)?
7. How are your pieces related to one another, if at all?
8. What symbolism are you trying to convey?
9. Who is your audience? What do you want your audience to see?

In reading Kay WalkingStick’s own artist statement, she reflects a little on these questions herself:
“I initially painted landscape in the mid 1980s. My question then was, what does landscape visually imply? What does the earth convey to us metaphorically, and how can I use this visual trope to express my personal take on our late 20th c. experience? I continue to explore these questions but their meanings have seemed to change as I change.”

Encaustic painting is painting with heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. In an era when collage is being explored deeply, encaustic is a natural medium, since it allows both painterly explorations of color and the possibility of embedding objects and layering. The technique has been around since (at least) ancient Egypt, when it was used to create mummy portraits.

In 1955, Jasper Johns used this technique to create one of the first of his flag paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the process:

“The painting consists of three separately stretched panels of cotton fabric joined at the back: the forty-eight stars area; the seven upper stripes to the right of the stars area; and the long area of the six stripes below. The painting is predominantly in the wax-based medium of encaustic. Johns worked on each panel separately, first laying down the overall flag design in charcoal. After applying a thin ground of unbleached, translucent beeswax, he built up the stars, the negative areas around them, and the stripes with applications of collage: small cut-out pieces of newsprint, other paper, and bits of fabric. He dipped these into molten beeswax and adhered them to the surface while the wax was hot. He then joined the three panels and painted over the entire surface with short, deliberate strokes of more unpigmented beeswax and touches of white oil paint.”

I have been poking around the internet, gathering more information on this technique. The most fascinating bit that I have found so far is a 12 page booklet titled, “Examples of Stencils and Masks” by Linda Womack from the 2008 National Encaustic Conference. Linda is the author of a book on the topic, Embracing Encaustic (which I have not seen yet) and the teacher of a recent workshop at the John C.Campbell Folk School. She has posted lots of exciting photos of the workshop on her blog.

The Second National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat took place June 6-8, 2008. Several bloggers have posted their comments on the conference, including an online presentation of the talk, “Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility” (Thanks to Joanne Mattera for this list!):

• Linda Womack’s Embracing Encaustic: Conference, Day 1; Conference Days 2 and 3; Linda’s Critique with Kay WalkingStick)
• Judy Wise’s blog: Encaustic Conference, Part 1; And Judy’s close encounter with Norman Laliberte
• Deanna Wood’s Artist Emerging blog
• Nash Hyon’s Encaustic Process blog
• Supria’s Encaustic Musings blog
• Daniella Woolf’s Encaustifiberopolis blog, which features an excerpted look at her talk “Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility” She begins, “I opened the door to encaustic from my perspective as a textile sculptor. The encaustic “medium” energized my work, and forever changed me.”

I’m not sure that I am ready to take the plunge into encaustic, but the layerings give me some inspiration for ways to take my acrylic paintings and textiles!

images:
top: Metropolitan Museum of Art via Flickr artist ggnyc
middle: Elise Wagner
bottom: Linda Womack

To stay fresh in textile arts, I like to spend time reading about and doing pastel drawings and paintings. This week I have been going through the painting blog of Nancy Reyner who has a wonderful idea for shaking your creativity loose.

“Turn Up the Volume on the Inner Voice
I discovered an easy and surprisingly beneficial painting warm-up exercise. This 20 minute exercise, performed daily for one month (or even less) will do wonders for increasing your creativity, getting rid of artistic blocks, and finding new styles or shifting your work. I came up with this after reading ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg, a popular book for writers to increase their writing and creative abilities. Natalie suggested that writers should ‘clear their head’ by filling notebooks, and write in a stream of consciousness fashion, by writing without thinking, very directly, and not editing. I decided to transform this freestyle writing exercise to something that would work for painters. This is how it works: First get a pile of inexpensive painting surfaces that don’t feel precious to you. I gessoed some scraps of canvas that I had lying around. Gessoed sheets of paper, or cardboard work well too. Just don’t get too small in size. My scraps were actually around 16′ x 20′. The night before you start set everything up for painting so that you can just jump right in without any preparations. Pick a time, preferably first thing in the morning, and stick to a schedule for a length of time. Pick what works for you,perhaps trying one week to see how it goes, but you need at least 5 days in a row to make a good assessment. Make a commitment to acting out your very first thought. Now here is the key. Your first thought is the inner voice. Your second thought is the ‘parent’. We are so accustomed to paying attention to the second voice that the first is sometimes faint and barely there. This exercise will strengthen that first voice, sometimes called the ‘inner child’. I like using the phrase ‘first voice’ better or I feel like I am in therapy.”

Go to her blog and read the full entry. You may recognize yourself in her tale of shaking free. Reyner also has a new book, Acrylic Revolution, which I’ve ordered and am eagerly awaiting the postman’s delivery!