“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!

Meggiecat is back! This was one of my favorite blogs for years - then she vanished. I guess that we all need a breather. But Meggiecat is back with wonderful articles, tips and all kinds of visual treasures. Do yourself a favor and drop by - but do plan to stay and browse through her archive of links that extends back until 2004.
Spoonflower On-demand fabric printing is one of Meggiecat’s recent finds. This is the brainchild of a fellow Chapel Hill-ian (whom I have yet to meet!), formerly of Lulu on-demand book printing. When Spoonflower is up and running, we can all have our own fabric made to order:

“Meggiecat wrote the other day to ask the most obvious question about printing fabric on Spoonflower, which is “what do we need to do to prepare designs?”

Image Size:
You can take an image of any size (240 dpi or greater) and repeat it to create a pattern. Alternately, you could create the pattern repeat on your own computer and then upload a large file equal in size to the amount of fabric you wish to order. For example, the fabric we will be using is 44″ wide (112 cm), so if you wanted to order a yard you could create an image that is 44″ x 36″ (or close to that). We have not yet determined if we will need to impose a size limit for files.

Fabric Size:
Once Spoonflower goes live you will be able to order a swatch (8″x8″), a fat quarter (18″x22″) or any multiple of a linear yard. During portions of the beta period we may limit these options temporarily. We will always recommend that you order a swatch of your design before ordering a larger quantity. That will give you a chance to examine the colors firsthand to make sure they printed as intended.”

I love the patterns from the Arts and Crafts/ Art Nouveau era. Chronicle books has recently released a 19th century pattern book, Plants and Their Application to Ornament A Nineteenth-Century Design Primer By Eugène Grasset Introduction by David P. Becker. What makes this book special is that a plant is beautifully drawn on one book plate. Then the next book plate has that same plant interpreted as a design motif, with several variations. In an interview, David Becker explains the concept of the pattern book:

“This type of book is really a ‘pattern book,’ (sometimes called ‘model book’ or ‘ornament book’) the illustrations of which are used by other artisans and/or designers as ideas for works in various media. They are related, but perhaps slightly different, than books of anatomy or expression expressly meant for artists to use in their paintings, tapestries, or sculpture….

What is the history of the ‘pattern book’? DB - Pattern books actually began in the medieval period, even before printing was invented, when artisans themselves would sketch out their repertory of designs in small sketchbooks to show potential customers the range of objects they could produce. Eventually artists began inventing design motifs and reproducing them in prints, from which other artisans could produce objects. This is a huge category, including furniture, jewelry, silverware, fans, clothes, architectural motifs (interior and exterior), landscaped gardens, and so on. This specific type of book did change somewhat after the Industrial Revolution, when the more corporate ’sales catalogue’ came more into use, displaying ready-made products—but it didn’t disappear.

What would be our modern equivalent to this type of book? DB - I think the ‘pattern book’ still survives, if not exactly in a book form. For instance, catalogues from Home Depot or other do-it-yourself stores present hundreds of different doors or kitchen counters for the individual consumer to pick from and assemble, in any variety of paint colors. Finally, the Internet is, I believe, a logical continuation of the pattern book…”

Chronicle obtained the book from the Boston Museum of Art. While I would dearly love to have the book to hold and read in bed, I am cheap. I discovered that the BMA has which has decent resolution, large size (800 x 800 pixels) individual plates from the book available online. I can’t read it in bed before I put out the light, but it is free, which is always good.

Fiberarts magazine has a new editor, Marci McDade. She has a broad background, though not necessarily in journalism:

“McDade has never demonstrated a shortage of creative passion. Born and raised in Gary, Indiana, she was a member of the first graduating class of that city’s Emerson School for Visual and Performing Arts. She studied visual art, theater, music, and dance in the school’s seven-year program, and was recruited by Columbia College, where she earned all but one credit of a B.A. in film and video in 1994. (She came back and completed the single missing credit in 2001 to officially earn the degree.)” Columbia College, Chicago

McDade seems to have used some of that creativity in an exploration of embroidery as a drawing medium. One outgrowth of that was the “white boy” series a set of portraits of men that she “had crushes on.”

Beyond her own work, McDade has caught attention with shows she has curated. She describes a recent show, Girl on Guy as

“a love letter to men, the ones I’ve known, the ones I never will. It’s a love letter to Chicago, my home for the past twenty years. It’s a love letter to all of the artists who have inspired me during that time to think harder, look more closely, be a better person. Above all this show is my loud and gushing heartfelt declaration in the belief that loving men and being a feminist is not a contradiction.” Girl on Guy catalog (pdf)

Could be some interesting articles ahead!