A Successful Class at Arrowmont

My new class, Abstract Art for Quiltmakers, which I've been developing since early Spring, went down very well at Arrowmont Art and Craft School last week. I had an assistant, Karen Hamrick, who has photographed many of my quilts over the years, and it was so great to be able to hand over to her some of the multiple tasks involved with a dye/design/construct class. Thank you so much, Karen! Now I'm completely spoiled!

Most people composed at least a couple of dozen designs and some did even more!  Of course not every design is going to work well, and you can't be critiquing them as you do them. Nothing annoys the Muse more than having somebody breathing down her neck saying "well that looks awkward!" and "how on earth will you construct that?" or worse yet: "that's Boring!"  It's important just to get into the Zone and the Flow (yes, at the same time!) and just sketch away.
I have lots of ideas for starting points, so the ladies in the workshop had actual directions to follow but they were not so rigid that they all came up with the same thing.  In fact the sketches were all remarkably different and reflected the style of the person making them, not me - which is always my aim. I'm not like that poor old sheep in England, I don't want to be cloned!!
And here are some of the designs:

Nina-Marie's beautiful circles were not sideways but I can't persuade blogspot to put them the right way up!  However you can see it's an image full of joy - also it's all quilted!!  Just needs the  edges trimmed and the interfacing added.  On the side are a couple of her other designs, and she was well on her way to having a second piece completed that alas I did not get a picture of ..but I know it will be on her blog soon!

Connie made a couple of super pieces....this one is based on a wonderful artwork in Arrowmont's gallery.  It's such a great inspiration having a gallery with almost a hundred amazing pieces just outside the studio door...one of the many ways in which Arrowmont reigns supreme!   Unlimited photocopying in both black and white and color AND with enlargements is another real boon - plus an superb library full of art and craft books and all the latest journals.

Here are some  of Connie's other designs...

I love this frieze quilt that Elaine made....she was so busy designing after that she neither made another quilt, nor even pinned them up!!  But I'm going to be checking up on her!!!

Liz made this beautiful clean, elegant quilt - I would love to see it done Very Large - but it's gorgeous just as it is....

 Linda's wall of designs....all excellent, plus that lovely little landscape already completed in the middle - a very Abstract landscape by the way.  Abstract art can be all the way from pure nonrepresentational to abstracted from some existing source and we covered all of it.

another piece by Liz - such movement and still elegant, I love the gradation of blues.  As you can see Liz is a Very Fast worker!  And her style is so crisp and clean too.  

 Elizabeth (yes we had three Elizabeths in the class!) made this lovely shoreline piece  - it's quite wide - maybe 4' or more - and I like the mystery of it..part driftwood, part ocean...

Kathy not only made great designs, and a super start on a geometric piece, but she also had this crowd of cheering onlookers!!  She's going to make those shapes much more abstract and I think it will be a lot of fun.  Also I love the circles...and they were very painterly and textural..and I know she's going to do More!

Look at the power  of this deceptively simple design by Mary....There are all sorts of nuances to it too when you get close.  She wisely edited the sketch - it just didn't need the fringe.  Great economy!! One of the hardest guidelines to follow.
Mary was working on a really interesting piece that I didn't get a photo of and I hope she'll send me it!!  Plus those circle designs have great depth and I think they'll work really well.

Gay whipped out this beautifully balanced indigo piece...great depth - from across the room it felt really dimensional - and she had many more designs that had great flow to them....as you can see from the small one at the top here...

Marilyn made this very strong piece in a complementary color scheme.  I love the repetition of the black and white bars...and the use of negative space.  A very intriguing little quilt that I think would work in any orientation - I hope she makes more!

 Cindy had never made a quilt before - there were three complete newbies to quilting in the class plus a number of folk who had never dyed their own fabric (as you can imagine, they are totally hooked on hand dyeing now!).  This little quilt is really well balanced, but continuingly interesting - every time you look at it you see different relationships between these quadrilateral shapes AND  when you get close there's hand stitching  on some of them, like the thin white lines of an elegant pinstripe!  Very very nice.

Carmen had also never made a quilt before...she finished this amazing piece (it's all quilted, just needs the interfacing) and had many other designs, PLUS a start on a very large version of the little colored sketch below.  Carmen really knows how to use space in a quilt and I love her unique style.  It was also a lot of fun to introduce her to free motion quilting!  Within minutes she was galloping away with a big smile on her face!

 Elizabeth's second piece - also going to be huge and so fresh and new...as you can see she had just completed the first three rows of the sketch...I think these strips were at least 5' long!!  Nothing daunts these new young quilters and it's great.

I do love the mix of folk you get in an Arrowmont class - people with 20 years experience and Quilt National acceptances and folk who've never ever made a quilt before.  People in their prime, and others still young and beginning their careers in art.  We also had professions from a travel agent to a rocket scientist (wonder if they got together on some advance planning?)

I was so pleased with my Abstract Class that I plan to do another version of it at Falmouth, Cape Cod in October (see the side bar for Linda's phone number if you're interested - there are a couple of spots left).  I'll also be teaching it at Alegre in April, for the West Coast people.

And now to see if I can make something myself!! 
If you have been, thanks for reading!!  And do please comment - comments make my day!
Elizabeth

Abstract Art For Quiltmakers at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, TN

Having a great time in the Smoky Mountains at the famous (100 years old!) Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg, TN - yes , we were told, it was here before Dolly Parton - actually before Dolly Parton's grandaddy was born!!

Here is my quilt hanging in the main gallery: - the tiny little orange and green thing at the far end - very well lit though!


And here are some pictures of the class hard at work:

probably gossiping - but we won't comment on that!!...

However, look at all the designs up on the design walls:

Linda and Elaine working on their designs...

Cindy deciding which piece of many beautiful options to make..

Liz on the sewing machine hard at work....


it's a great class, I know they're going to get a lot done.and look at all the wonderful space in the Arrowmont Textile studio...no sitting squashed up at a small table in the dark....
yesterday we designed all day, today we dyed gradations of black or navy and tonight a small monochromatic piece will be made.  Tomorrow we'll burst into color!! (if not song!)

My next workshop will be in Falmouth on Cape Cod in October.....Abstract Art for Quiltmakers: Design and Dye.
So, if you have been, thanks for reading!!  And do check out Arrowmont, they have some wonderful classes (arrowmont.org) or if you're interested in the Cape Cod workshop, (there are a couple of places left) give Linda Gallagher a call.  (there's a link on the sidebar, or email me and I'll put you in touch with her - there's an email link to me on the sidebar too).   Elizabeth

Immersed in Abstraction

I've been putting together a new workshop on Abstract Art for Quiltmakers since the beginning of the year - I'm excited to be teaching it for the first time next week.   The poor students who are signed up for the class don't realise that I now have a semester's worth of notes and material for them!!

The more I look at abstract work the more I fall in love with it..though not, of course, those awful chain store "home decor" monstrosities!! Home clutter and ruination is more like! There are many many different kinds of abstraction - I'm hoping it's a subject you can never come to the end of.

I'm beginning to think that abstraction is a perfect fit for the medium of the art quilt.  People look at a painting and expect it to look like something! yes they do!! but they don't expect that of a quilt. With a quilt they're happy to enjoy a harmonious but intriguing balance of shape and color.  Also, in fabric we can bring out so many other nuances - not just color and shape, but texture and stitching, softness and hardness.

Kirk Varnedoe posited the question whether abstract paintings were pictures of nothing.  Actually he wrote a whole book about this! He described how the first abstract artists were hoping to
reveal absolute and universal truths with this new style- they reached for a new spirituality, a Utopia.  But then along came the horror of yet another world war(WWII: 1939-1945) - six long years of terror and misery.

After the war, the new artists interested in abstract art were young Americans with very different goals.  They felt that abstraction was grounded in the unconscious.  Painters like Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Frankenthaler found new ways of getting paint onto the canvas working from instinct and raw emotion. They sought art without words.  Pollock threw and dribbled, flung and sprayed paint forcefully so as to make sure there was no obvious drawing.  "A forceful expression of chance - an anti-composition."  Jasper Johns restricted color but organized his canvasses - very often into quilt like grids - as did Lee Krasner in many of her paintings.  I bet these artists were very familiar with the grid organization of the traditional quilt - and perhaps their unconscious reverted back to childhood memories.  As children we spend a lot of time just Looking and we really See all those details and they're etched deep into memory.  As adults we have very little time to look, and usually we just see that authoritarian "To do List" threatening us!!

Above all, Varnedoe felt that whatever the style, it was important that we relate to it on an elemental level:

“between the vague confusions of individual experiences and the authority of big ideas, sign me up for experience first”. Images that stir memories from the past are more powerful, more intriguing. I think the viewer has to find some relationship to the artwork to really enjoy it.

 

But what is abstract art  good for? What use to society are pictures of nothing? E H Gombrich in his book Art and Illusion thought that abstract art was understandable as an extension of decorative pattern making. A very close connection to traditional quilts.  “Timeless universal forms”. At the Ringling Art School summer program this year, one professor gave a talk about Roman mosaics - and there were all the traditional quilt designs we know so well!!

Abstract art has been around now for a little over a century and is very very popular with all artists - I notice that even photographers are now discovering ways of making abstract photographs. Since the movement has lasted this long, it has stood the test of time.  It will last. Interestingly, however, it's evident from an examination of abstract art that much art isn’t the result of totally new discoveries or ideas but rather the result of taking something already in existence and adapting , recycling, isolating, recontextualizing, repositioning and recombining to form new possibilities. and that's just what we're going to do in my next week's workshop!  I plan to teach it many more times, both actually and virtually but first I want to enjoy making some more abstract art myself!!
 

Human beings are wired to make connections, discover resemblances and relationships and also to project meaning onto experience. Gestalt theory - artists use this a lot.  So do advertizers alas!!  And very successfully. (Have you seen those little check marks (US) or ticks (UK) on the tennis stars?  They are grooving right into your brain and your pocket book/purse!

However, abstract art still remains something of a paradox.  Traditional works of art are expressions of feelings, communications.  But what if you what to make a piece that deliberately has no reference?  You can control what is in your mind and intention (to a certain extent anyway - sometimes you need the help of a cognitive behaviour therapist!) but you can’t control what the viewer does and he/she will almost certainly begin to see things into it.  It's difficult to enforce the “abstractness” of abstraction” because of our built in survival instinct to make sense of things, to spot the danger, to recognize the mere outline of the police car behind us!

In talking about one of Cy Twombly’s scribble paintings Varnedoe writes that as we look at it we’ll think of a lot of things it represents but in the end we’ll come back to the thought that the picture is only of itself, “all of the complexity and energy that only it has and that did not exist before”. In Interpreting representational art  one needs to recognize the subject but interpreting abstract art is different, you don’t need to figure out what it is.  While ostensibly rejecting representation, abstract art actually expands its possibilities.  It adds to our visual language by including everything previously considered to be meaningless: drips, stains, blobs, bricks, tiles etc Abstract art actually makes something out of nothing! And in so many different ways!

However because to some extent abstract art is a learned language and is not always easy to understand, it helps to have some knowledge of different artists and different modes.  This can enhance our experience of it.  Many pleasures, says Varnedoe, involve appetites that had to be educated: music, art, sport, books…gourmet cooking. Furthermore, while abstraction might originally have been developed as a way of conveying timelessness or pure expression or spirituality, it is now much more concerned with showing the diversity of individual vision and independent subjectivity.

And - onward to the class!   So, if you have been, thanks for reading!! and do let me know your own personal experiences with abstract art.

Elizabeth

Still retreating but reading as I go!

From the mountains of North Carolina to coastal South Carolina.....



 
....and thankfully, due to excellent wifi here, I'm in communication with the outside world!  It's hard to realise it's just a few years ago that we never even thought about wifi and keeping an eye on the 'net. Now it feels essential.
Books are still the main source of wisdom, however, and I'm enjoying reading some of the ideas put forward by Maria Konnikova in her book: Mastermind: how to think like Sherlock Holmes.  She renames fast and slow thinking (the quick automatic intuitive vs the slower more analytical and considered) as Watsonian and  Holmsian and illustrates all her scientific examples with quotes from Conan Doyle - fun!    Sherlock Holmes instructs Dr. Watson to really observe as well as just see.    For example (don't look!) how many human figures did you see in the above picture and were any of them children?  Is this sunrise or sunset?

             The class I took last week was in Figure Painting which I quickly learned is all about observation: relative sizes, angled and curved lines, values, colors, texture and overall configuration of shape.  Plus' you have to compose those observations into an interesting shape within the outer edges of the picture plane.  I'd often wondered why in traditional art schools the students spent so much time on Figure Drawing - now I know it's not about the figure, it's all about accurate observation.  I can hear the strains of Holmes' violin as he nods in agreement!

 And now, to practice practice practice - I don't want to get to Carnegie Hall, but I do want to really see and understand and remember what I'm looking at..I want to break from "the autopiloted mind" which is helpful for split second reactions (as in leaping back when an alligator growled at me from where he was hidden under a bush I was approaching last night!) but not good for coming up with original fresh ideas and then arranging them in dynamic ways. 

  One other fascinating thing I read is that motivation really improves performance.  You can ask two identically experienced and talented people to do the same thing, if one is highly motivated they will outperform the other whether it's making art, learning a language or a scientific inquiry.  It makes sense, of course, but it's much more important than I had actually thought.  Motivation also improves memory..now where did I put that book down? !
So, if you have been, thanks for reading!!  Elizabeth

High on a Mountain Top!

 I'm on retreat! something all artists should do - high on a mountain top off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina taking a couple of art classes and thinking about new ideas for the work ahead.  And more importantly talking art art art with like minded folk!
This is sunrise...amazingly beautiful sunrises over the distant hills.....
and the picture below is the "smokiness" of the Smokies after one of the many sudden heavy rain showers..love all those shades of grey.

Alas (or is it fortunately?!!) internet is limited, one has to return to civilization to find an internet cafe which I'm doing right now sharing a booth with a very young couple  and a 3 week old babe who obviously loves black and white - the child has great taste! 

Give yourself a treat...and re-teat a little!
Elizabeth

If they have no bread, then give them cake!

Winter on the Beach

I'm working away (not yet at the beach!) organizing and consolidating my many notes for my upcoming Abstract Art for Quiltmakers class which will debut at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in August (the class is full by the way) and then I'll give it again at Alegre Retreat in April.  I know some other teachers have tackled this subject, but from my research they all approached it differently from me.  It's so frustrating to develop an idea and discover it's a well worn path!!

Dancera (detail)

  As people who take my classes know, I love a five day class where I can get deep into the topic and my research on it in the first day.  I love to learn (and then to teach) real solid information.  (don't worry, it's only one day of five!).

 I'll also be developing this abstract art for quiltmakers class into an online format which I had planned to do some time ago before we had any idea that QU would be coming to a close.  But, good news!
Ruth Blanchet, a former QU teacher, (www.academyofquilting.com) is taking over the quiltuniversity domain name and several of the teachers. The website and overall organization will be different but upgrades in the way the forum and the galleries are handled will please everyone I think.  It will take a little while, of course, for the Academy of Quilting to become as well known as Quilt University which had gained a great reputation over several years and continents.  My classes will be starting at the Academy of Quilting in the Fall soon after Quilt University closes.  I'll definitely be posting announcements.

Waiting for Dawn (detail)

I'm organizing my abstract art notes into definitions, the artists (particularly the female artists) and the processes. I'm turning up some really interesting ideas and concepts.  Research is so enthralling - you can spend days travelling new highways and byways!  

Abstraction can be total freedom from reality.... or the result of abstracting something from the real thing.  It can be free and instinctive as we see in abstract expressionism (Willem de Kooning) or highly intellectual as in Sol Lewitt's geometric abstractions.  Many artists have worked from photographs; Sean Scully's wonderful geometric pieces began with photos of old wooden doors that he's taken all over the world.  

Windowseat (detail)

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But whatever the label, all quilts use scraps of fabric cut into shapes, organized in some fashion by color or value or texture.  It's just amazing how very many arrangements are possible.  When I was a child I was given a "creativity" game but soon discovered that the arrangement of wires and beads was NOT endless - how horribly disappointing that was!  They should have given me cloth!  If they have no video games, give them cloth and scissors!

So, if you have been, thanks for reading!  And do send in your comments - or suggestions!   (for blog topics or classes).

Next two weeks I'm up in the mountains off the Blue Ridge Parkway in NC taking art classes; if the internet gets up that high (!) I'll post from there!

Elizabeth

Experiment and Play: the goal of no goals.

Black and White, No Grey.

How often do we allow ourselves time to just play and experiment? What's wrong with just playing with ideas?  Everything now is goal oriented: both work and recreation. Even the children in school now have to complete so many worksheets, so many specific units of education!   So many of the quilt magazines are about Making a Project and Making it Fast so that it will be Done!  And then you have all those projects piled up in a cupboard!  And have you grown from doing that?

 I recently started piano lessons (well actually I'm a volunteer in a university project to see if learning piano will not only stave off brain rot but also improve one's cognitive powers!  (here's hoping)) and the first thing I realise is that you do a LOT of practice and very few Performances.  In quilt making, few people seem to want to practice.  You wouldn't believe the resistance I get when I suggest - " make a sample of each of the different ways you could do this"  or  "I think you should do several different value sketches before you begin - practice trying different value patterns".  And if I dare to suggest that one should NOT always be goal-oriented!! Well that's when I get the organizers taking me aside and whispering in my ear "get on with it! they want Something to Take Home"!!

Iona

I do it to myself too, of course.  If my actions in the studio are not directed towards a specific outcome I feel very guilty...but in this last year I've begun to relax and allow myself time to explore and experiment.  Let's see how many different color schemes I can put together - just for the fun of it!!  I wonder if I tried a small experiment with just using line to depict figures, how would that work?  Can I insert poetry into a piece, now what are the ways I could do that?  Let yourself ask yourself these kinds of questions and I think you'll move forward into richer waters and deeper pastures.  (Oh I love mixed metaphors, so much more engaging!).

I absolve you ahead of time for all those dinky little projects you won't do..while you're playing and experimenting.  Learning is about trying, not necessarily completing; learning is about the journey and not the destination.

so - if you have been, thanks for reading!!  And do write and tell us how you PLAY!!  Elizabeth