Lynnwood Solo Show

My solo show is now closed, the pieces have come down and are back in their boxes. It was so much fun to see it all hanging there together and I thought it looked great! What a great experience to apply and get a show all to myself. How nice to have someone else do publicity and hang the show, all I had to do is make art -- almost like having gallery representation, (ok, not really, but I can dream.)

Now the pieces are back at home, some get put back on the walls, but most get put back in boxes waiting for their time to shine. I guess that's just the way it is unless you have 50 feet of wall space. Someone told me "art not hanging in a gallery is a storage problem" I might have to agree.

 

I love putting my work out for people to see, all and any comments are welcome as it is usually the critical ones that help me grow. Now it's back to the studio to put the finishing touches on a couple of pieces and get ready for the next exhibit at Auburn City Hall in June.

Many thanks to the Lynnwood Arts Commission for giving me this opportunity to show my work.

Fiber class January meeting

Our fiber class continues to meet once a month – it’s been six months now and  half the class is still getting together. Although our bond began by seeing each other every week for 30 weeks, it is definitely strengthened as we continue to get together.

This month during the social part of our meeting we found out how one member had gone through two major surgeries in only a few months. Another gal is nursing her husband back to health after a heart attack. Plus mixed in with the “I took a really cool class in metalsmithing” and “two trees fell on my house,” we found out that two out of the ten people there had been severely bitten by dogs when they were kids – the stuff you find out.

We talked about our upcoming show during the business part of the meeting – scheduled for the month of March at Café Solstice in the University District. The details are being worked out, everyone has a task, and most people know what they’re going to create. I think we’re on a roll.

Show and tell is probably the best part of the meeting – when we can show off what we’re doing. Nikki is starting a clothing business for plus size kids. Debra had a really cool leaf print/fiber/stitched piece that had wonderful color and a translucent/transparency quality. Kaylin is almost finished with her newest quilt of purple, magenta, orange fabrics in her tree motif she has been exploring. Barb is working with paper collages and trying to incorporate a grid and transparent fabrics in it. Tre showed a loom/card weaving project she finished, a double sided twill of her own design; it’s a twill on one side, but with very subtle coloring on the other. Louise is playing with leftover Christmas package ribbon – she has a lot – right now it’s stitched together into a fluffy, curly mat, she plans on adding spears to it for our equinox/solstice theme show. I showed more of my burlap landscapes, I had one that was finished, one that was well on its way and one that was just at the start (for the show). I think they liked the fact that they could see the different steps and how it evolves.

Exploring

Since I'm exploring, I thought I would first try to do something of which I think of as "traditional" collage. I ripped pages out of magazines, went through the trash at work and found a few interesting items, and I also found my small stash of paper samples left over from work.

I sat down at the table and cut stuff out, put similar things in piles, tried to come up with something to "say" with what I had found. I thought I would do an Obama piece, but my scrap photos didn't fit together, things were out of scale. I ended up printing pictures off the internet and scaling them to what I wanted and then filling in with cut and torn paper. When I was through, it seemed kind of dumb, it had a message, but I really didn't feel connected to it.

I put together another paper collage with and old RFID electronic tracking tag and an embossed paper sample from work, and some torn magazine pages. Again I filled in with torn colored paper samples. I don't think it had much to say, but was visually more engaging, but the interesting parts were the colored paper textures, not the found collage items.

Crafty Collage

I got a stack of books out of the library and went to a number of web sites. A lot of the books seemed rather "crafty" how to make interesting backgrounds and scrapbook pages, so that was a waste. There was one book ("Collage: Pasted, Cut, and Torn Papers" by Florian Rodari) about the history of collage starting way back with Picasso and Braque that were kind of interesting along with the social and political statements that came later. There was also the Rauschenburg pieces that I really liked, but couldn't see myself doing anything like that, it didn't feel like me. I probably best liked the Matisse stuff where there were simple colorful shapes cut out and placed on the page; that seemed more like me, maybe that was a way to go...

I also looked at web sites, some of the examples seemed kind of dumb to me, but many had a lot of color and texture to them, they could have been made of almost anything. I was mostly drawn in by the color, so if that's collage, maybe I could put something interesting together.