Nature Inspired Art – Page 16

Bid on Me!

I belong to SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates). This organization has provided me with a lot of information and encouragement over the past several years. For the support they give me, I like to give back to them. This year, I am again participating in SAQA’s annual benefit auction.

Earlier this year, I made a 12″ x 12″ quilt that is similar to my quilt “Silenced” (pictured on my home page). Both of these quilts feature my rendition of the now extinct Carolina Parakeet. These birds were the only indigenous parrot of North America. They once flourished in the old growth forests along rivers and in swamps. They could be found from Southern New York all the way to eastern Colorado.

Whenever I talk to people about the Carolina Parakeet, they question me by saying they’ve seen parakeets living in their yards. How could that be? The parrots they’re actually referring to are called monk or Quacker parakeets which are considered a feral species. Feral species, including “feral” cats or dogs, were once house pets that escaped that now live and breed in the wild.

With these quilts, I hope to educate people. Maybe by seeing my quilt with cloth parakeets, I can start a virtual discussion with the viewer. Maybe we can find a way to stop further losses. At the minimum, I hope the viewer finds a visual place to pause and imagine what life use to be. I hope whoever sees this finds peace.

You can own this quilt
“Carolina Parakeets”
by bidding on it during the

SAQA Benefit Auction

Bids on this quilt will be open Sept 15- 24
For more details visit www.SAQA.com

Keep looking forward

Doors have been opening for me lately. I think that’s definitely a circumstance of me knocking on them and putting myself out there. I also think it’s because I’ve started putting my aspirations first. For the past year, I’ve been focusing on self-development. I’ve pondered my dreams and wondered how to get them to come true.

For over 10 years, I’ve had a bucket list dream that always seemed to fall just a little short of reality. Although I did try, I really don’t know why I didn’t try harder. I suspect it was the perfectionist that lives in my head. She likes to tell me that things need to be a certain way before I can put it out there. I call myself a “recovering perfectionist,” but that doesn’t mean I’m recovered.

I’m not too concerned that sometimes my alter-ego drives my thinking. Right now that pesky little voice has put me somewhere that I’m pretty confident about. I’m ready for this and its all because she used to tell me “not yet.” Maybe that’s the key to our dreams, maybe we need to be ready for the next step. It doesn’t mean give up. It does means continue learning and developing yourself, because with knowledge comes confidence. If life doesn’t seem to give you want you dream, keep trying, keep looking forward.

Make sense of the world

What were you doing on Monday, August 21, 2017? Did you get to see the eclipse?

I felt lucky to live 3 hours from Columbia, SC. This was a site of totality where the moon would cover the sun 100% for several minutes. It didn’t work out for me to be in this path, but I did get to see it as it crossed my neighborhood at about 96%.

Talking with people who witnessed it, some felt that it didn’t live up to the hype. I’m one of those who felt otherwise. I sensed something more in the air Monday afternoon. I cannot describe the vibes I was feeling. I was aware that during the apex the cicada’s became very loud and seemed in synch with their melody. I was, unfortunately, in a place where young children were playing and their sounds drowned out other details I might have detected. It didn’t get too dark here, but everything had this strange color. It seemed like I was wearing cheap brown sunglasses (cue: ZZtop).

Things seemed eerily surreal to me. Having experienced this, I can understand how ancient civilizations could have been confused and even scared. Before scientific study of the planets, we couldn’t predict anything to this level of accuracy. I might never have known the exact time of day I needed to be peering at the sky. This is why I love science and use it for creating my art. It helps me make sense of the world.

Continue to experiment

As promised, here is the peacock feather I was working on in my last post. During the process of rendering my design into fabric, I found that my stabilizer didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

What’s interesting is that there are so many variations to creating thread sketched pieces. I have options to finding something that works better. I don’t usually put backing fabrics on my pieces when I thread-sketch/paint. Sometimes the backside of my art quilts look messy, so adding the backing after the fact hides some of the ugly. I do use some sort of stabilizer which helps keep the fabric from shrinking up too much when you add the layers of stitches.

On this particular piece I used fusible fleece batting as the stabilizer. I don’t think I ever tried using fusible fleece before. What I realized is that this brand of fusible fleece is acrylic and the more I stitched the more grip (resistance) it created on the sewing machine bed. It was almost like the acrylic fibers were melting a bit from the friction. When you free-motion stitch, your fabrics need to move smoothly under the needle. If they don’t, you’re stitch lines won’t look as fluid. I’m happy with the final piece and I’m ready to ship it off to its new owner. This is, however, a reminder that there’s always lessons to learn and I should continue to experiment.

Fabric and thread

This week, I’m working on a process to demonstrate thread sketching. Thread sketching is just like making a sketch with pencil and paper. Sketches are pretty quick and often made of simple lines. Instead of paper and pencil, I’m using a sewing machine and thread to sketch.

I want my example to be reproducible, so I need to start with an image. For this example, I decided to use a peacock feather as inspiration. I initially drew the design on paper (right) and I probably could have just made copies, but it looks a little sloppy from all my erasing and redrawing. To clean things up, I scanned the drawing into my computer and re-drew it using Adobe Illustrator (left). The line drawings I can make in Illustrator are known as vector graphics. I like working with vector graphics because they can easily be re-sized and changed without effecting the quality of the image itself. If I tried to enlarge the scan, the image would get more blurry the larger I made it. With vector graphics, I can enlarge or shrink the image as much as I want and have the same quality for all projects. I can also tweak the image to change how it looks. It definitely is a bit time consuming, but since I plan to reuse the image for several projects, I feel it’s worth my time in the long run.

Stay tuned, because next time you see this it will be rendered in fabric and thread.

Have the opportunity again

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to travel to Herdon, Virginia to be part of the Sacred Threads Artist Weekend. Sacred Threads is an art quilt exhibit held every other year which focuses on the spiritual side of making quilts. For this juried exhibit, artists were asked to submit quilts with statements that explain their story.

This was my first time entering this exhibit. To my great honor, my quilt “Soar” was accepted.

It’s always a treat to visit the exhibits where my quilts hang, but this time things were different. The emotional energy that’s in the building can’t be explained. Most quilt exhibits, you look at a quilt and move on, but in this exhibit you’re compelled to read the stories. More than once I was moved to tears reading the artist’s intent. Lisa Ellis and her team of volunteers also produce an audio tour of stories told by the artists and there’s the book, a big book, of all the quilts and artist statements. I didn’t have time to read all the statements while I was there, but I did buy the book and plan to read every one. I had the most fun, stalking fellow artists and asking them to autograph my book. It gave me a reason to have dialog with these talented people and personally learn about their artistic motivation.

During the weekend event, there was a special gallery viewing in which the artists stood by their quilts and talked about their art. Due to the traffic flow of show, I found my best observation point to be across from my quilt. I enjoyed the opportunity to observe people’s reaction to my piece. I had a great vantage point to see people’s reaction without them knowing I was there. I found that a lot of men were attracted to “Soar’s” large osprey wing. That intrigued me. Was it the size? Visual impact? Or that it didn’t look like a traditional quilt? I didn’t ask, but its an interesting tidbit for me. If you have the time to visit this week, I encourage you to go. If not, it will be 2 years before we have the opportunity again.

SEE MY QUILT “Soar” at the
Sacred Threads Exhibition
July 7, 2017 – July 23, 2017
Floris United Methodist Church, Herndon, VA
www.sacredthreadsquilts.org

Call this a win

Today is one of those rare June days that I can have the windows open. I love hearing the birds sing and call outside. There’s a red-headed woodpecker visiting our bird feeder. I can hear its distinct chatter. Somewhat migratory in it’s nature, the red-head seems to only visit us in the breeding season. I always look forward to seeing them. They are definitely hard to miss with their bright red head and black and white tuxedo-like body.

We have several varieties of woodpeckers who visit our yard. Another impressive species is the pileated woodpecker. Pileateds are large birds and amazing to watch. Last week we saw one feeding its young with suet from our feeder. It is so special when they play in our backyard.

Both of these birds are common in the longleaf pine forests in which I live. Like many habitats its being lost to encroachment of people. The pinecones of the longleaf are massive. I’ve been working on a concept using the longleaf pinecone as inspiration. This week I sketched out a digital drawing based on a photo I took a couple years ago. Now that I have the line drawing in Adobe Illustrator, I can easily resize the image to fit any project requirements.

I tried to send the line drawing to my Cameo Silhouette plotter. The Silhouette has a blade attachment which will follow the lines of a drawing and cut out pieces of fabric. (Here’s a link to a post where I describe how it works.) I’m not sure I’m sold on using the Silhouette. I can see it’s potential, but I also need a lot of practice trying to get the techniques down. The image in this post shows my results after I fused all the tiny bits together. I still need to fuse it to a background fabric, then add some depth and detail using thread and pencil. For the most part I’ve accomplished what I tried to do, so we can call this a win.

Stay there or get out

I’ve been trying to develop a rhythm. The summer is in front of me and I hope to have a lot accomplished before it ends. I think we are all guilty of falling into the treadmill trap. Think about it. When you’re walking on a treadmill, you’re physically moving but the scenery doesn’t change. Its almost like you’re not moving at all…except when you stop and realize that you’ve used up a lot of time and may even feel exhausted.

I think life can be like walking on a treadmill. You get pulled into the day-to-day activities, time is moving, but you’re personal goals aren’t being met. Its easy to postpone things when daily activities stand in your way; dinner should to be made, bills have to get paid, laundry is piling up, and the dog begs to be walked. These are the treadmill duties…they keep you moving through life, but they don’t take you anywhere. As soon as you get them done, there’s more waiting for you.

Long ago, I’ve realized if I want to see change, I have to shake things up. I have to fight against the current rhythm and and create a new one ~ one that includes fulfilling my personal goals. Let me tell you, it ain’t easy. If you want it bad enough, you have to put your mind into gear and find a way to do it.

For me, I’ve been purging and rearranging my studio space to give me more comfort and efficiency when I work. I’ve also been working on my health (actually spending a lot of time on a real treadmill ~ so explains my metaphor). Both changes have given me strength to keep moving forward. I see progress. Its not easy pushing yourself out of a rut, but if things aren’t working there are only 2 options: suck it up and stay there or get out.

It affects all of us

The past 6 months has given me tremendous food for thought. I have pondered the direction of my art, my life and focus. On this blog, I guess I’ve always pondered those things. Yet, something is different now.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had deep interests in nature and art. I was a big-city kid who loved hugging trees, picking dandelion bouquets and playing with earthworms. I also loved learning new crafting skills at school or with my mom. I majored in art in high school and earned college and graduate degrees in environmental and wildlife biology.

When I shared my artwork in the Paper*Canvas*Cloth exhibit at the the local Arts Council galleries this past November, I realized that my art reflected my education. I knew I had found my voice. Many of my pieces silently speak of lost natural habitats.

In February, I happened to be at the right place, at the right time, and was granted the gift to take a short walk through Muir Woods in Northern California. The giant and ancient sequoias seemed to speak to me. I felt I was in a magical place.

Then this past week, I took a once-in-a-life-time anniversary trip with my husband. We planned a visit to Las Vegas to see family. The majority of the trip was intentionally designed to explore the local desert landscapes (not the casinos). The last time I took a trip similar to this was in my youth with my family. To say that I was overwhelmed by the beauty of last week’s journey is underselling the emotional impact it had on me.

Simultaneously to these events, I was also observing other things that impacted me, my art and my focus. It also happened in November; the election. As with any new presidency, there is curiosity about the what will happen with a change in administration. The past few months, I’ve been watching as new history unfolds and have become concerned with the actions that effect my core beliefs. I’m seeing an assault on scientific fact and aggressive actions that would impact the natural landscapes of this great country (and possibly the world).

I grew up in a big city, I know what that’s like. But, I also grew up with a strong love and appreciation of nature. Before the election, my artwork was already giving account to the lost and endangered habitats. My mission hasn’t changed. What has changed is the level of caution I’m choosing to embrace in speaking out about it. I’ve decided that, from this point forward, my blog will not only serve as a forum for my journey with art, but also address my concerns about habitat destruction and preservation. I can’t stand quietly anymore, its too important. I hope you stay with me, because it affects all of us.

Fine-tuning

The past few weeks, I’ve been trying to fine-tune some techniques I’m using. Right now, I’m revisiting the Carolina Parakeets.

The attached photo shows the same quilt at different stages of the process. (If you click on the image you’ll get an enlarged view to see the details.)

With the image on the left, you see the fused fabric pieces and a little bit of coloring on the head/beak of the parakeet.

The bird on the right bird is completely colorized and has a sealer on it to keep it from smudging when handled.

When comparing the 2 images, look closely at the wing, tail feathers, and feet. The image on the right has more shading and definition. It doesn’t look so 2-dimensional. This is what I’ve been playing with.

I’m trying to make 2-dimensional applique look more like a painting. There are many different things I can use to accomplish this. Right now, my weapon of choice is colored pencils. There are limitations to using pencils on fabric, but there are also limitations to using pencils on paper. I’ll be experimenting with this process over the summer. I like where its going, so stay tuned, it still needs some fine-tuning.