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!

A Creative Boost arrived today from the HOW design newsletter:

“Ray Bradbury is the author of more than 500 published works—short stories, novels, stage plays, screenplays, TV scripts, poetry. Exploring become his oxygen and the secret of his prolific creativity. Bradbury told Jack Foster that he had read a short story, an essay and a poem every day since childhood.
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines and music,” Bradbury said, “you will automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry period in my life because I feed myself well.”
Make an exploration list for your life. Fill it with readings, films, music.”*

As visual artists, we need to be stuffing ourselves with inspiring treats for the eye: paintings, photos, textures (cloth, yarn), images that are surprising and amusing.

*excerpted from “zing! Five steps and 101 tips for creativity on command” by Sam Harrison

Flickr is a place of great inspiration! It can be a moment of refreshment in a hectic over-committed day. Whenever I need a quick break I head over to see what my ‘contacts’ and their ‘contacts’ have posted today. The visit lends itself to free association wandering. I may start out on a page of embroidery, but find myself wandering over to photos or paintings.

Today’s visit took me to a nature and children’s book illustrator, Kathleen Holshek Pequignot. Beautiful illustrations with nice detail, but not rigid or fussy. Her work is even more amazing when you realize that she has done most of it in a Moleskine notebook.

Kirsten Chursinoff is another contact that I like to check out regularly. Lots of contrast, color and imagination in her works. Her web site give a glimpse into the creative process that is intricate and allows her to create evolving works.

Somehow, in my wanderings, I found myself awestruck by a passion flower photo by Ken Hircock, a British walker, who records his surroundings for those of us stuck at a desk. Then, off for a brief, vicarious hike through the Columbia Gorge with Anne. I feel refreshed. I’m ready to start writing my nest class lecture… maybe even grade some papers…. get that exam posted online….

One of my favorite Flickr features is the ability to mark photos as ‘faves’. These then are aggregated into a collage in my Flickr space. I can drop in and take a quick revisit anytime I want. The collage also helps me to clarify what images are holding my attention right now. These images serve as prompts for visual ideas that I might want to explore on my own later…. in my copious free time….

gapingvoid: has published a short list on how to be creative
“So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job….”

There are more, plus a couple paragraphs explaining each part of the manifesto. I like it. It’s good to keep focused on the journey, not just the prize.

In the introduction to her book, In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, Linda Weintraub poses four key questions that any artist should be asking themselves:

• Why am I an artist?
• Who is my audience?
• How can I communicate with this audience?
• What is art’s function in society?

These are great questions. Weintraub’s book,  (reportedly – I have only skimmed parts online) never answers these questions, but instead looks at artists work for the answers.

Hugh MacLeod, in his blog Gaping Void, has provided one answer to these questions of why make art and how to sell it:

“If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives.

Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it’s the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not just nice things to have, they are essential survival tools.

And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important than the stories we tell other people.

Ergo, marketing is not about selling. Marketing is figuring out where your product stands in relation to personal narrative.

So where does your product fit into other people’s narrative? How does telling your story become a survival tool for other people? If you don’t know, you have a marketing problem.

Narrative gaps. It’s all about the narrative gaps.”

image: sheep embroidery by Serena Fenton 8″ X 10″

With school out, I am playing around with Photoshop a bit these days. Here are a few free sample chapters which demonstrate what can be done in Photoshop beyond just getting rid of red eye in the family photos (all are in pdf format; you will Adobe Acrobat reader). Most of these chapters use photo montage techniques. A few are just general Photoshop tutorials.

Understand How Color Works in Photoshop by Bruce Fraser, David Blatner contains essential information on Photoshop and how computers digital manipulate color and images. This is from Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2 I hate to be a spoilsport, but if you don’t have a solid understanding of this topic, you really should begin with this. Think of it as eating your spinach before going for the Chocolate Mousse!

O’Reilly has, over the past few years, released a series of books by French artists displaying what they are doing in Photoshop. The images tend to be of earthy mysteries, full of symbolism and hidden corners. From Woman to Angel From Creating photo montages with Photoshop: A Designer’s Notebook Translated by William Rodarmor. Bloody Mallory from Photo Retouching with Photoshop: A Designer’s Notebook, Translated by Marie Laure Clec’h, demonstrates, using a technique similar to the glass painting of past centuries, how to creates a vaporous haunted churchyard.

This next resource isn’t exactly a sample chapter, but the images are well worth viewing for inspiration. Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams

Layers are your Friends from Photoshop Masking and Compositing deals with the obvious issues of using LAyers in Photoshop. It is all too easy to skip using layers and rely on the undo – redo buttons, but there is much to be gained in really using layers. I promise myself that I will integrate this in my very next project.

If Layers are a totally new concept to you, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 H•O•T’s chapter on Layers might be a good beginning point. With lots of images and some good demonstrations of what each tool can do, this is a good intro to both Layers and many of the Photoshop tools. (note: this is written for Photoshop Elements, the economy version of Photoshop.)

Cut and Paste is a wonderful, and small, web site that looks at Photo montage and its history. There are lots of examples from the past century.