Life of Poet James Merrill

James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like it, but no.
I wanted to like him, but no to that too. Not Merrill's fault, but his biographer's.
This is a recitation of faces (family, lovers, students)  and places (the mansions of childhood, followed by Amherst College, Athens, Stonington, Madison, WI, California ...) and all the while a growing body of poems. Sterile, bloodless. Not Merrill, and maybe not all his poems, either. Just this book. It's a record, no doubt helpful but I like some life when reading a life.


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Flower series 2: Painting orchids

Wild Orchids
16" x 12"
Paint on cotton, quilted

Detail, Wild Orchids

How I made it:

1. Sketchbook drawing. Inspired by orchid in my window. I drew the flowers and leaves onto white Kona cotton then painted them, thought it too boring, so painted black lines and shapes freehand. (11' x 14")
2. Drew it onto white Kona cotton. Black fabric marker. (11" x 16")
3. Painted with fabric paints. They seeped through. Wondered if Gesso would make fabric less absorbent.
4. Painted over white and green areas with acrylic paints. 
5. Layered over thin white felt.
6. Free-motion quilted along drawing lines. Black thread. You can't really see the quilting, but it adds depth. Decided not to use rayon thread. Too shiny.  
7. Tried adding machine quilting detail to an orchid. Didn't like it -- not subtle. ed Ripped it out.
8. Sew a couple of rows of stitching around edges, using straight stitch. Black thread.
9. Attached to Timtex painted black around the edges.  Timex is about 1" bigger than orchids. Mystifuse
10. Add a piece of muslin over the back. Before attaching, put Fray-check on the edges of the muslin and attach a rod pocket and a label.  Mistyfuse adhesive.

Flower series 1: Paint, print, stitch -- stop!

I am not ready.

Not ready to make the series of quilts that I planned a month or so ago: square, precise, Milhazes-inspired mandala-like flowers and stripes in vibrant colors. (Sounds pretty, doesn't it?)

After many false starts, a few paintings, and 2 quilt-ish pieces, I have learned:

• I can't do precise. I like messy, or shall we say irregular?
• I seem to prefer square-ish to square.
• I don't like to do intensive thread painting. For example, below, I copied my painting Roses onto cotton and then adhered it to stable cotton duck. Ideally, I would cover the surface with stitch to mimic the paint colors. But no! I just don't enjoy it.

... and on the positive side, I learned:

• I lean toward an intuitive, even spiritual,  method, not necessarily the mandala style I'd planned.
• I love working on a single subject, in this case flowers. My pop-around brain benefits from focus. There is no end to what flowers can teach me of color, line, shape, mood, etc., etc.
• I love layering.
• I love colors. 
• I love stripes, even precise ones. (One of my hero-artists is stripe master Bridget Riley.)
• Most fun for me has been painting. I thought I was painting to become a better quilter, but I love painting for itself.

My style emerges.

For my next "series" I'm going to paint flowers freely, and experiment with painting on cotton, linen, and silk and combine that with stitch.

In addition to recording progress online, I'm taking notes the crazy way I did in graduate school: big and messy, sometimes upside down --  sitting on the floor and writing/drawing with colored markers on a newsprint pad. One page or more per project, no other rules.

It works for me!

Notes so far

Walking backward to a series

I have taken many steps in my series project -- most of them backward.
First, I pinned my plan to the design wall. The plan taunts me. It seems I've picked exactly what I cannot bring myself to do: inspired by Beatriz Milhazes, I have set out to make precise, geometry-inspired designs in square format, with palette and imagery based on Florida nature.

For my first piece, I picked a drawing in my (rectangular, 11" x 14") sketchbook. It is a watercolor, based on a sketch of flowers against the window blinds in my studio.

The blinds would work as stripes, which Milhazes uses so effectively.

 I traced the image, rearranging the blossoms just a bit. I went to Staples and enlarged and also minimized the flowers. I made tracings of these, then played with them on my design wall, where I had pinned a striped 19" x 19" square for my base. I rearranged them over and over, many times, many days, including just  before I went to bed and as soon as I got up. I added a vase, put stars on the stamens, and took a few photos when something seemed close to good. What I'm looking at now is what a bird would see if he approached the flower upside down. A hummingbird, maybe. No, no! don't let me add a hummingbird!

Milhazes color copies on right, my tracings on left, and trash can handy for many rejects

I also played with the colors of blinds and grass and sky.

What I have been able to do is stick to flowers. A series is supposed to concentrate your thoughts, so give me one point. All this time, I've been drawing and painting flowers, real and make-believe, exact and abstract.

It's not that I adore flowers (I like chocolate and butterflies and bridges better.), but flowers are teaching me so much about everything else: color and line and shadow and impact. I'm afraid I'm also learning I love messy edges and incomplete thoughts. Precision, as in Milhazes' art, drives me wild. Not when I look at it, but when I make it.

But it's true I learned how to cook intuitively by first following many recipes; and I trust my series project will give me the same kind of good grounding. I have the feeling that once I start cutting fabric, the series might practically make itself. I can hope.