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″

A few years back, I was in an artquilt crit group with a woman who struck me as a genius. I thought that she was far too modest about her talents. After running into a mutual friend, I was delighted to learn that she has been working hard and in turn is getting the recognition that she is due – possibly proving that there is goodness, balance and karma in this world.

The artist is Tricia McKellar. By day, she is an instructional technologist at North Carolina State University. Nights & weekends, she is an artist. Like so many of us, she is fitting together the disparate parts of her life, but she does not segregate them. Her work with technology and fine machines inform her art. Through imagery, photography, McKellar provides beautiful insight into the manmade world. Her media is silk, dye and printer. She explains her quilts and collages:

My shibori is a modern adaptation of traditional Japanese hand-dye methods. Shibori techniques produce patterned fabric with subtle variations. These patterns are natural, organic, complex and somehow, simple.

Digital shibori is my process that involves hand-dyeing shibori fabrics, then photographing and digitally altering, sometimes collaging, the digital shibori imagery. After working for a couple of years dyeing shibori and creating digital images to print on silk, it occurred to me that my shibori would be an interesting element in my digital collages. Sometimes these digital shibori collages are printed on silk and quilted, sometimes they are printed with my archival inkjet printer. Quiltart Gallery

Sadly what is lacking in viewing McKellar’s works on the internet is a sense of scale – many of these pieces are quite large – and of the textural richness of the washed silk. If you are near any of Tricia McKellar’s showings, it is well worth a visit.

Missy Stevens is another American artist whose embroidery will be featured in the 2006 Art of the Stitch, Embroiderers’ Guild, International Biennial Exhibition, Bristol, England. Her work, Blue (shown at left) will be over there, keeping company with some of England’s finest!

Stevens has brought punch needle embroidery into the contemporary vein through her imagery and use of color.

About her technique she says, “When I first saw loop embroidery I was immediately enamored of its dense, plush surface. I felt a jolt of recognition, as if I were meeting a dear, old friend, whom I’d only previously met in a dream. Seeing the tiny, glossy loops of sewing thread filled me with warmth and recognition . . . More than a first encounter, it was a deeply heartening reunion.” The imagery is a dream-like interpretation of her natural environment. hibberd mcgrath gallery

On an unrelated note: I have become intrigued by the work of Danish artist Petter Hellsing. I came across his name on a list of embroidery artists who received official recognition from Pfaff sewing machines. Danish is a complete mystery to me, but the pictures communicate anyway.

kopenhagen.dk has a page featuring Hellsing’s work (scroll down to the middle of the page.) There are some photos of a series of upholstered chairs and hanging screens. The works appear to be political: airplanes, a man in a beret, a mountaintop and rows of bunnies. I don’t know what they mean – or how there are made. I spite of the lack of commentary, the imagery is engaging. Perhaps most important are the flights of fancy that arise from the images: angry, jarring colors, strokes and images juxtaposed onto comfy chairs and wispy curtains.

Oddly, the name Carol*n Dahl is shared by two gifted fiber artists. One is the Carolyn Dahl, book author and quilt artist. Her work is stunning, but not the focus of today’s outing. The other Dahl is Caroline Dahl, pianist and embroiderer. Dahl’s embroidery, Shopping Mall Day of the Dead, was included in the 2006 Art of the Stitch, Embroiderers’ Guild, International Biennial Exhibition, Bristol, England. This is a high honor for an American to crash the international exhibition. Dahl’s embroideries deserve it. They are fantastic embroideries. These are fantastic in both senses of the word: the workmanship and intricacy of the images is stunning, and the imagery appears to take place in the world of alternate reality and magic realism. Dahl’s statement on Fiberscene gives this glimpse into her work:

When you graduate with a B.A. in English, as I did, the time eventually comes when you say, “Now what?” My answer to that questions, after a period of several frantic, tangled years, about which the less is said is better, was to become a musician and textile artist.

I enjoy the balance of these two different activities. Textile art is a solitary, meditative pursuit, with visible results over time, while playing music is active, in the moment, and usually group oriented.

After starting out making quilts nearly thirty years ago, my textile work for the past twenty-five years has been primarily embroidery with more recent use of applique, piecework, and/or beading. I make contemporary narrative textiles that are very energetic with color and pattern. DMC embroidery floss and Kreinik metallic braid on cotton muslin are my materials of choice. My imagery comes from my observations of popular culture and from my experiences over time at my job as a piano player.

Make time to click on several of the links on Dahl’s gallery page. I wish there were thumbnails, so that I can pick and choose the links in a logical manner, but then, the random click has the same thrill as grabbing a random chocolate out of the box: you are usually rewarded and seldom disappointed.

I confess. I threw my back out; it was caused partly through stress; partly through lugging around 20 pound computer textbooks. I will reform. In the meantime, I am getting to spend quality time sleeping on the sofa with the little animals of the house and playing with things that I have postponed for too long. Expect more posts this week – most of them lightweight and fun. I am just not up to tackling the deeper meaning of textile arts.

Three related, definitely crafty entries; all suitable for the Holiday Season and both look to be a good hand-filling projects to take up while lying on the sofa: Stitched Christmas Garlands.

The first is by Anna Maria Horner. She has made her garland out of circles of felt. This looks like a great project for both kids and adults. Steps:
1- get the felt. Horner has used the regular synthetic felt, but I say if you are going to do this, do it right and get some wool felt (Don’t have any wool felt? Stop by the thrift shop and grab some 100% wool sweaters and toss’em in the wash.) Wash hot; Dry hot.
2 – Cut circles (size is your choice, but I would cut them about the size of a fifty cent piece) Horner recommends 60 sets (120 circles).
3 – Stitch two circles together, using a blanket stitch and join them in a long garland.
4- Optional: embellish them with antique buttons.

Second: How to make yo-yos; a tutorial by Heather Bailey. This is a beautifully illustrated piece for yo-yo making (those circle-y things that were popular for quilts in the 1920s-40s.)

Heather Bailey offers her take on a Christmas yo-yo garland. Her garlands are stitched together at the edges, the colors are less candy cane and more cozy.

Soule mama strung her yo-yos on a piece of red rickrack and hung them around the windows.

Still not inspired? Try the Flickr group: Ga-ga for Garlands for lots of garlands: all colors, materials and for any occasion.

Third: Juju Vail has a cute photo of a single yo-yo with fabric topper turned into a magnet or decoration or… Vail also has a beautiful hand sewn trivet-ornament, which she made sitting by the fire with her daughter. (Sounds wonderful.)

It’s a stitched polaroid popularized by a d.i.y. (do it yourself) group in London. Threadymade has taken stitching to the clubs. While the bands play in another room, Sonja Todd snaps polariods and dispenses stitching kits, complete with color coordinated thread! An evening of (emo? punk?) music and craft together!

Scroll down this page for more sewlaroids.

After posting the entry about Maira Kalman’s textile designs, I came across this page of her embroideries. I have gone back and viewed them several times. I still am undecided about the success of these works. Since I want to like them, undecided is a bad sign. Shooting from the hip, they remind me of my grandmother’s freeform embroideries that she used to do on tea towels. My final conclusion was that there was more to grandmom than I had appreciated before.

Her gallery writes: “Maira Kalman’s second gallery exhibition features a new medium for author/ painter/illustrator and designer Kalman- embroidery. She has created twenty new works which combine image/drawings and texts, including a large four-panel work quoting Goethe. Aphorisms include “seize the day,” “everybody should be who they are” and “good things come to those who wait”. The images themselves are based on photographs from Bellocq to snapshots. Although the text is determined in advance, the drawings are unplanned and embroidered directly on the fabric. The exhibition will also include dress/sculptures made by Kalman.

The interaction of image and text has been at the core of Kalman’s previous work in her many books and illustrations, but the embroidery is something new. “My mother and my aunt embroidered, and I love cloth” says Kalman. She often uses old linens as the support for her works and they have a meditative homespun feeling.”

An article on Kalman’s work in The Villager provides a bit more insight:

Language continues to be the common thread connecting all her artwork, though. When Kalman’s mother passed away over a year ago, she began to sew in her memory. Her embroidery, which she admits expresses darker emotions than her other work, is now on view at the Julie Saul gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 10. At the show’s reception, Saul swept her arm across the span of canvases to indicate a progression in Kalman’s silk embroidery on cotton. Simple stitches trace figures similar to the ones in her children’s book illustrations, but her choice of phrases, like ‘Seize the Day,’ or stanzas from a poem by Goethe, are thoroughly grown up.

‘Honestly,’ said Saul, referring to the sewn fabrics, ‘I didn’t know what to think of this work when I first saw it. It was so different from her paintings.’

For years, it seemed that Maira Kalman existed in the shadow of her famous husband/designer Tibor Kalman. Then she was the grieving widow. Slowly she has become known for her witty illustrations for books (including a re-issue of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style). Now, Kalman is seemingly everywhere. One very exciting release is the translation of her drawings into textiles, available from Maharam (these would be upholstery weight fabrics, I believe.)

Steven Henderson wrote a review of her textiles for the NY Times: “An admitted novice to textile design, the author and illustrator Maira Kalman (above) doodled (and dawdled) for months over her first fabric design for Maharam, called the Story of My Life. Her woven ‘hieroglyphic journal’ is based on pen-and-ink drawings of her favorite things: dancers, pomegranates, Gerrit Rietveld Zig-Zag chairs, rhinoceroses and balls of string, all embellished with curious crosshatches and squiggles. ‘It is a considered stream of consciousness,’ Kalman says, explaining that she compulsively sketches, photographs and files away whatever catches her eye, be it a shoe in India or some Texas tumbleweed. ‘When I draw something, though, it’s never to make fun of, or to say, ‘Isn’t that silly?’ she says. ‘No! I think, Isn’t that sublime?’ Available for $125 a yard…”

Maharam, the manufacturer, offers this insight: “Seeking to explore figurative and narrative themes while capturing unique media and perspectives from beyond the contract textile realm, Maharam enlisted the wit of New York-based illustrator/designer Maira Kalman. Best known for her kinetic illustrations, absurdist humor, and eccentric appreciation of the mundane, Maharam invited Kalman to transpose her playful figures into upholstery.

Aptly titled, The Story of My Life by Maira Kalman presents a hieroglyphic assembly of people, places and objects that delight her. Reminiscent of the iconic illustrations framing many of her children’s books, the fluid contours of Kalman’s silhouettes are rendered on an ultra-fine denier warp, preserving the clarity of her original black and white sketches. Available in five colors, Kalman’s idiosyncratic characters are woven into a rich, dense upholstery, and further embellished with contrasting accents. Composed as an oversized repeat of more than 200 figures, songbirds, elephants, ballerinas, Rietveld Zig-Zag chairs, and wedding cakes all pop on the solid ground. Each spry detail invites a closer look, offering a glimpse into the world as Maira Kalman sees it.” Maharam