and ends tomorrow!  So move quickly if you’d like to participate!

Four Ways to Win with Foto/Fiber 2012

A quick reminder that Foto/Fiber 2012, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, TODAY, February 15, at 10 a.m. Central.  I am honored to be part of this event and hope you will support our efforts.  Prizes are donated by many artists and will be sent directly when someone makes a set donation to the ACS.

There are 4 ways to win with this fundraiser – one of which is that 100% of the funds are donated directly to the American Cancer Society through
Fiberart For A Cause. The other three are detailed here today.

For full information go to Virginia Spiegel’s website page dedicated to this fundraiser here.  Over the past few years, Virginia’s efforts to raise cancer research funds have surpassed US $215,000….that’s all because of one woman helped by a whole lot of women and men.  She called it FFAC:  FiberArt For A Cause.  I know that every one of us has been touched by cancer in some way, and I’m proud to help.  Here’s to Daddy, Charlie, Linda W. and to my many friends who have had cancer of some sort and survived.  Even hubby Paul had a skin cancer on his face… Daddy had lots of them, they are fairly benign most of the time, but that’s what too much sun on too pale skin does…. even if you can’t afford to participate in the event by donating today, DO go take a look and pass the word to your friends! Thanks, Sarah

Another subject that is dear to my heart is storytelling, both in words/literature and in pictures/art.  Hockney touches on this in True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, p. 47 (also from Cameraworks chapter, 1983).

“recently I’ve been trying to figure out ways of telling stories in which the viewer can set his own pace, moving forward and back, in and out, at his own discretion.”

Later, on p. 50, Hockney continues:

“I mean, the urge to depict and the longing to see depictions is very strong and very deep within us.  It’s a five-thousand-year-old longing —- you see it all the way back to the cave paintings, this need to render the real world.  We don’t create the world.  It’s God’s world, he made it.  We depict it, we try to understand it.  And a longing like that doesn’t just disappear in one generation. Art is about correspondences—-making connections with the world and to each other.  It’s about love in that sense–that is the origin of the erotic quality of art.  We love to study images of the world, and especially images of people, our fellow creatures.  And the problem with abstraction, finally, is that it goes too far inwards and the links become tenuous, or dissolve, and it becomes too hard to make those connections.  You end up getting these claims by some of the formalist critics that art just isn’t for everybody—-but that’s ridiculous.

  “The revival of the figure with many of the young painters today testifies to the enduring longing for depiction, although the crude character of much of this s o-called neo-expressionist drawing testifies to the deterioration in basic  training which we’ve seen during the last couple generations.  I mean, training people to draw is basically training them to look.”

WOOOO HOOOOO HOOOO!   YES!  we can all be trained to LOOK by training ourselves to draw! I’ve been saying that for some years now–so nice to see it confirmed by someone like Hockney!  Folks in the 19th century, before the advent of the camera and/or before photography became widespread, could draw passably.  No, not everyone was brilliant, but this is a skill that CAN be learned!  (and a plug for a great book…The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards... I’ve done that through self study and hopefully will get back to going through it for a second time…yes, you can even teach yourself!)

And I love how Hockney doesn’t pussyfoot around—I too just don’t get the appeal of non-representational  art.  It just leaves me wondering “OK, what’s next?”  I know some folks love it, are inspired and create that way.  But I just don’t get it.  I like the story, the connection to someone.  Think about it…what would National Geographic be like without the photos?

True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler.

Here’s a quote of something David Hockney said  from True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, that will resonate for quilters (p. 30):

“But these early collages were really more like studies:  you did them, just as you do a drawing sometimes, to teach yourself something:  it doesn’t matter what they look like when you’re finished, that’s not why they were made.  In this case, in retrospect, I realize I was training my visual memory, and this took a lot of time.”

YES yes YES! Those class projects are just that…learning experiences.  You learn the technique, then go home, practice and make it your own. And it also shows that even someone like Hockney, an acknowledged master, took the time to learn and develop his skills and “eye.”

And another tidbit… I’ve never really much cared for Cubism, that angular way of painting developed in the early 20th century by Picasso and some of his contemporaries.  But this quote made me  understand how those painters were exploring a new way of seeing (p. 33):

“Cubism, I realized during those few days,”  Hockney continued, “is about our own bodily presence in the world.  It’s about the world, yes, but ultimately about where we are in it, how we are in it.” [emphasis in book]

So how we do apply that to representational art quilts.  One thought that immediately occurs to me is that sometimes when I see art quilts of kids in fields and whatever, the thing that grates for me is that while the child may be well rendered–well done enough that if you saw that child come trotting down the hall, you’d recognize them as the child in the quilt–somehow the not-as-well-done of this sort of quilt will have a scene and a child, but not a child IN the scene… The most successful of these textile artworks convey the essence of the child being fully present in the place and time depicted.

And now we’ll return, for a time, to regularly scheduled blogging!

This set of quotes from True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, is also from the Cameraworks chapter (1983).  These relate to LOOKING–or as I would put it, SEEING what is really there.  After taking a number of quilting classes, when I started quilting in earnest, I realized that what I needed was not more quilting classes.  I needed to learn to SEE.  Not merely looking at something and moving along, but really SEEING what is there, how the lines relate and form shapes, create form and substance. On p. 14, Weschler quoted Hockney:

“The camera is a medium is what I suddenly realized,” Hockney explained.  “It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby—-it’s a tool.  It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. …  these collages are principally about line.  An internal sleeve crease, for example, aligns in the next frame with the outer sleeve contour, and contours generall jag from one frame to the next, a series of locally abrupt disjunctions merging into a wider coherence.” [emphasis in book]

Way cool…. it’s that thing about how we see that I quoted in the first of these posts—how we see things as a series of snapshots that then merge to create a whole.  This continues on p. 1:

“Yes,” he [Hockney] said, “I think some of the most effective collages in both the Polaroids and my more recent series involve the theme of looking—-of looking at people looking.”

and on p. 21:

Looking, for Hockney, is interest-ing:  it is the continual projection of interest.  “These collages only work,” Hockney explains, “bcause there is something interesting in every single square, something to catch your eye.  Helmut Newton, the photograher, was by here the other day, and I said, ‘Everywhere I look is interesting.” ‘Not me,’ he replied, ‘I bore easily.’  Imagine! I’ve always loved that phrase of [18-19th c. English painter] Constable’s where he says, ‘I never saw and ugly thing,’ and doing these collages I think I’ve come to better understand what he means:  It’s the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.”

I don’t suppose he was talking about our pug, <grin>, but there is truth there…the more you really look at something, the more interesting it becomes.  I’ll be back anon with more from this wonderful book.

Books like this make me happy, they excite me, make we want to dash out and learn more more more and create… I told my friends that if I hadn’t already bought them presents for Christmas, I would have bought each of them a copy of this book.  Kate looked at my copy, and promptly took all the info to order it for her town Library (her town is SO lucky to have her as their Librarian, but I digress…)…   What book?  Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed Media Mapmaking by Jill K. Berry.

Personal Geographies by Jill K. Berry.

Order from her here or Amazon.com here.

Ya know how a comment from an internet friend, especially one in a small group where you get to really know each other and know a suggestion is worth checking out, will set you off to check out a link for a tutorial, which will lead you a person’s blog, then their website, and on and on?  And then you find out she has just published a book…on a subject you adore?  In this case, it was this tutorial on geo-papers and Jill Berry’s blog and book about maps…all SORTS of maps!

True confessions:  I will admit to being totally, utterly biased.  I LOVE maps and I LOVE color and I really enjoy a bit of whimsy. But let’s start at the beginning:

Table of Contents

As you can see from the map on the right page, it’s not all about continents and streets and the bird’s eye view from the height of an orbiting satellite… that map is about the Right Place at the Right Time…oooh what a cool concept to turn into a map!   You know straight off you’re not in for some dry tome on elevations and political boundaries, at least in the usual map-sense.  This book begins with some basics:

• What is a Map
• Questions for the Cosmic Cartographer
• Things to Map

"What is a Map" from Personal Geographies; as you can see, I was so excited reading it and full of ideas I had to write them down in aqua ink right there on the page--any book that does that to me is a GOOD BOOK in my world!

• Nontraditional and Quirky Maps
• Parts of a Map
• Designing a Compass Rose

Parts of a Map---pages like this make me want to learn more, see more old maps....

• Designing a Cartouche
• Supplies for the Journey

Now…I am a book fiend AND I love to delve MORE into the information… I was thrilled that in the back is a Resource section that coers not only where to get STUFF, but where to get more information…like research sites and good books for learning more.  Guess where I’m going …the internet and inter-library loan!!! and I may be adding a couple of new reference books to my groaning book shelves! I mean…how tempting is it to know there is a site where you can learn the history of sea monsters?!!!! OK… I’m really not gonna go surf now…really…..

Then there are the three major sections of the book:

• Mapping the Self
• Mapping Your Experience
• Plans, Projections and Possibilities

Oh me Oh MY…..just re-reading this makes me want to stop writing and go PLAY and DO! But I will restrain myself just a bit… just for you dear readers!

One of the first maps is this one which, when you read the words closely on the top layer (“My Idea of My Neighbors’ Day not mine”)  and suss out the words on the underneath layer  (Jill’s life) are just hilarious…makes me wish Jill were my neighbor–this is someone with whom you can have fun!  I’ll just have to do that via her book.

Jill K. Berry's"Head Map"--please remember all these pages and artwork are Jill's and respect her copyright!

Just one example…on the nape of the neck it reads on the top layer:  The way to sculptured shoulders perfect in halter tops.  On the underneath layers:  several blog shapes with the notation:  spit-up land.  What a hoot… anyone who has been a mom or babysat remembers having shoulders like that!

Another cool thing Jill did is to ask a dozen mixed media art buddies (including Jane LaFazio, whose classes I’ve taken online….) to try making a map–something they had never done before.  She sent them the projects in this book, and they each tried… and wow what they did… it is so much FUN!

As usual for me, I wish there were more more more of the information up front, and not quite so many projects, but that is just me.  The set up of the book is pretty standard for what you see in the quilty world, too:  information up front, projects in back, a smattering of art from other artists to illustrate the author’s writing, and resources, index, biographies of contributors, etc. in the back.  That’s just a quibble…I’m greedy:  I WANT MORE!   So thanks to this book, I’ll set off on my own map journey, which will include going to that sea monster site.  Now!   And oh yeah, in case you hadn’t figured it out, I can highly recommend this book, especially if you like maps, or if you just want a lark into a mixed media thingy that might just open whole new ideas for you!