Series: Gluing down paint the way my hero Beatriz Milhazes does it

Forgive me, friends, for friending Facebook and forgetting to blog.
Forgive me also for returning, in a faltering way.
You see, I am a child of traditional media, and I don't know where I belong.

I know there are many of us! Even children love the rough touch of paper and that inky smell.  Some of us remember being paid a living wage to write words on paper. Now we feel unloved. But I still want to do it: write on paper. So I've returned to an actual notebook for the pleasure it gives as it helps clarify my thoughts. I have begun writing notes and some of them will appear here. Don't worry -- I'll interpret that small writing!

Trying Beatriz Milhazes' technique: steps 1-6

With this experiment I am ending my series inspired by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes. I realize I love her colors most of all; they remind me of South Florida's brilliance.  I also love her layering of colors and designs, and her lack of focal point -- her pieces jump and dance, with no resting spot. But Friday I threw my final (16" x 20" Kona cotton on duck) experiment into the trash. I used her basic technique: cut shapes from plastic, paint that with acrylic, let it dry, then glue it down. At first I couldn't get the paint to stick to the surface, but I discovered a video that shows Milhazes actually holding the plastic. It looks like dropcloth, so I bought one at Home Depot. With the help of Elmer's Glue-All, it worked! (I can't show you; it's in the trash.) I hated the results! It looked like plastic tape, so shiny and fake! Milhazes doesn't like the mark of the brush or hand, but I do.

Thank you, Beatriz, for your guidance! I may return to our technique some day.
(I'll gladly go into more detail about the steps. Just ask me!)

I was working with these colors.

Series: Heroes, not judges

I can't be as good as my heroes: Picasso, Beatriz Milhazes, Thornton Dial, Matisse, Agnes Martin ... 

list of heroes on my bulletin board

On this subject, William Stafford (below) is speaking to me, and maybe you. Never mind that his art is writing. 

Stafford's inspiration, also on my bulletin board

So I'm going to make stuff, having fun.

It shouldn't hurt to have heroes! 

Series: I'm ready to have fun

Around here there are red dirt roads that wind into the countryside off the main highway. They seem lonely, but they lead somewhere. Maybe they are even more purposeful than the paved ways. I love them..

Lately I've been on a dusty, lonesome path of my own -- setting myself a clear goal, then following instead another way. I think I've arrived at my destination -- a series more compelling than the one I'd originally proposed. 

Surprise! I don't like to follow rules. If I have them, I tend to be slavish, which in art is self-defeating. Of necessity, a series imposes rules. That's why I've decided not to make a formal quilt series, even though several months back I convinced myself it would propel my artistic development. (You must have once promised yourself to do something "good" for you.) 

As you know, instead of quilting I've been painting in our shed

 and falling in love with Artists as I read their biographies: Agnes Martin, Picasso, Cy Twombly. They make me feel impossibly uncertain. You might call that an accidental series of flower paintings and another series of inspirational readings. But it's not what I intended. It's what I love. 

On the way to making a series of art quilts I've discovered I like to work intuitively. I want to make a mess.  I want layers, and I love moody. Words too.

So I'm promising to take myself lightly. To make drawings with thread and then paint them. To see where this goes.

Series: Looking for surprise

It's been a long time since I "started" a series of quilts. I had clear plans but got detoured by painting. I love it -- I've been painting every day but haven't made a quilt. Painting the way I do (the messy hands technique!) is forgiving, fun, and intuitive. If I don't like something, I can paint over it. This makes a rich, layered piece.  I can't plan how the end will look. This makes it surprising and fun. I don't expect all my paintings to satisfy me. Some are "mistakes" that lead to improvement.

Quilting, for me, is the opposite: You don't intuit, you measure and plan. You sure do hope the quilt turns out, because it takes so long to make it. It's satisfying, yes, but I've got to admit I like to paint better.

I want to make quilts, but I want them to surprise me. There are lots of "intuitive quilters" who lay down fabric as I do paint. This doesn't appeal to me. I must incorporate paint with my fabric.

Also -- I've learned another thing: I want to make art that speaks of my life. Flowers are gorgeous, but I love best the flowers and butterflies I've made recently; I learned of a friend who was cutting herself and she wrote of The Butterfly Project, an incentive to cease the self-destruction. I want to let my passions touch my art.

Flower Series 6: Success??

Bright flowers
12" x 12"
acrylic

I planned a series of quilts inspired by flowers, mandalas and the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes. Months later I have a stack of acrylic paintings. One is a mandala, all have flowers, and  I see Milhazes in their layers and colors. My niece Gretchen got me started painting a pineapple for her. Since then I've painted on cotton, drew with stitch, and collaged with fabric and paint. But there is no series as planned.

Instead, I'm on a discovery trail and loving it. 

1. For inspiration, give me flowers -- they are more than mere petals and stems!
2. And give me paint to mess with. Yesterday I read about an artist who paints with his fingers, wearing plastic gloves. I'm more of a natural mess; I love my fingers all gooey with colors. (Paintbrushes also have a place. ) For me, precision is in the feel of the finished piece, not perfection according to plan. I must discover a way to make messy quilts, with undefined edges 
3. For now  I'll skip "meaningful" (or political) work. The world is such a tumble, but direct defiance is not my best response. (Embracing causes has not worked for me,  in either religion or journalism. Or art.)
4. I'm going to continue painting and sewing and looking and loving. Flowers and paint are not the end. They are leading me somewhere.

Flower series 5: Happy heart

Happy heart
32" x 36"
paint and stitch

I love Happy Heart!

Of course, there was a moment when I wanted to throw her away (her??) That happens.

I like how my original small flowered heart transforms dramatically when enlarged. I copied the original onto a transparency and enlarged it. using the overhead projector that Maureen so kindly insisted I keep. (Sure does come in handy, Maureen! Thank you!)

I drew the lines in pencil on white Kona cotton, lightly so the pencil wouldn't show on the finished piece.

Then I sewed over the lines with black thread, using free-motion stitching. It was miserable! Even if I blasted light on the piece, I could barely see the lines. Then I used Mark-B-Gone, with trepidation. It's as blue as this quilt! It's hard to believe the color will wash out with cold water. I tested it first. Still I worried my piece would be ruined by blue. Probably everyone who uses the stuff feels the same way at first.
Before quilt-drawing I layered the Kona with felt and white duck. (Yes, purists, I confess I used spray adhesive. I love it!) The thing is, that felt is wool. I love wool felt.

After  the design was all stitched in black -- my machine was like a drawing tool -- I held my breath and ran cold water over the piece. I held it over the bathtub, and in a flash the blue ran down the drain. I sighed big time! 

Alas, too soon! 

Did you know that wool felt shrinks in a second?? 

My quilt was all scrunched up. Lots of people do this on purpose, but I did it by accident. Suddenly my quilt was very QUILTY. The design was bumpy, thanks to shrinkage. I was sad. 

Then I was happy. I love it the texture!

After that, painting.

This, too, was a delight. I expected to be bored to death, coloring within the lines of my flowers. But it was peaceful and fun.

It helped that I had made a dozen preliminary drawings, mixing paint and then trying out this and that combination. 

It still needs at least stitching around the edges. Maybe a simple facing. 

But I have a happy heart.

** Series note: You are right, Ellen! veering from guidelines is the definition of art. My series is far from what I'd envisioned. It turns out I'm exploring paint-related quilting techniques, doing what's fun rather than following the rules I'd set for myself. It's still about flowers, quilting, and color, with Beatriz Milhazes as my distant teacher. A series, it turns out, can be exploration. Boundaries are for leaping.

detail
Happy Heart

Series 4: veering from plan

Seduced by paint,  I have detoured from my plan to make a series of quilts. A couple of months ago, dazzled by my own sense of organization, I outlined what I wanted to make (Yes, I did want to!), then created a few flower paintings to warm up for the floral quilts. And never quit. There's paint on my pants and on my hands, and dripped on the floor too.

I haven't abandoned flowers. I thought they'd get to be a bore, but instead found that forever isn't long enough to absorb floral color and variety and life.

Flowers are in. Color is in. I've stuck to that much of my series plan. Stripes and mandalas are on hold. I'm spending lots of time painting (The colors, when I mix them, turn into other colors!) I'm making a glorious mess.

Thanks to Google and a visit last month to the Quilt National exhibit in Athens, Ohio, I have been able to observe how others combine paint with quilting. I'm now "drawing" on fabric using black thread and free-motion quilting, then painting inside the designs: flowers, for now.

This may be a series of sorts, based on the gorgeousness of flowers and fabric. And paint.

Flower series 3: Artists who mix paint and stitch

Talk about inspiration!  Paint and stitch go together many ways.

Artists who mix paint and stitch:

Maya Schonenberger

Sati Zech

Shelley Brenner Baird

Betty Busby

Cas Holmes

Barbara Takenaga

Katie Pasquini Masopust

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.

Series: focusing the heart

I'm close to starting a series. It took ages to settle on a theme and a few characteristics to unite all the pieces. Thanks to Elizabeth Barton's Visual Guide to Working in a Series, the preliminary thinking has been fun -- it's learning to choose what I love.  I recommend this to you if you want to get deeper into whatever you are making -- it could be cantatas (Bach did it!) or ice cream (Jeni in Columbus, Ohio, is a master).

Series will feature Florida nature
Palm tree, Melbourne, FL (photo)

Here's my art series plan:

I'm going make mandala-inspired pieces -- 

all square 

several small ones and at least one large -- size to be decided soon. Maybe ( 20" x 20" or 25" x 25")  and then 36" x 36" or bigger.  

Pairs may have similar design but different value structure. (Not sure if I'm up to this one -- I may try this after making several simpler pieces.) 

I will look to Beatriz Milhazes for inspiration. I love her layering and her concentrated palette and spirit and the way she conveys it through flowers, geometry and abstraction. My palette will be different, and I'm trying to grasp the spirit of Florida. 

 sketchbook
Beatriz Milhazes
preparing a series

They will have flowers -- one big one each? 

wild red flower by our mailbox

Also:  poinciana blossoms and that pink flower from Coconut Grove -- flowers I love already.  Possibly stripes. Black and white, for starters:

Orchid in sketchbook (acrylic)

What I like so far about this plan:

Lets me work with intuition (choices of shape and color)

Flowers

Curves and swirls

Layering

May include quilting, embroidery, words, paint, print

May include nature-inspired imagery -- butterflies, swirls, leaves, dragonflies, circles, and maybe hearts, if that's not too sappy. Pointy grasses and palm trees

and cypress roots. Birds. Fish. 

Although I'm referencing mandala, the quilts don't have to be circular or symmetrical. And  -- maybe because mandalas are spirit-based -- they may free me, and also those who see them. 

Art Series

I'm no baseball fan, but I want to make a series. Of art quilts, that is.You could too -- come along!

I've been making one quilt at a time -- inspired by this, learning that technique, entering a competition ... I am going in a zillion directions at once!

Time to settle into a series.
My organized hero, Elizabeth Barton, in her book Elizabeth Barton's Visual Guide to Working in a Series, advises writing the answer and then pinning it up where you won't forget. Here it is -- I pinned it to my design wall:

You can see my idea is kind of lightweight. And that's perfect for me.
Then Barton says analyze the work of other artists. See what all the pieces of their series have in common, and how each differs. This goes deeper than analysis I recorded in the May 7 blog entry. (You still with me??) Think of some artists. Find series they have created. Analyze.

I love this art-thinking.

1. First Beatriz Milhazes, a world-famous Brazilian artist: Her Gold Rose series (2009) is seven silkscreen print designs -- all in boldly graphic, referencing nature through geometric shapes and bright colors. Milhazes often overlaps shapes. In this series, each piece is 31 1/2" long, but the width varies. Two of the pieces stand alone, while the others make up a diptych and a triptych.

All eight pieces in Milhazes's Summer time series have a carnival spirit, with vibrant color and -- again -- overlapping shapes. Five pieces are acrylic paintings and three are collages. Size varies; the paintings are larger than the collages -- each painting is about 100 inches in at least one dimension, while the paintings are about 50" in one dimension.

2. Many of Peter Doig's large oil paintings feature a canoe. All convey a creepy-gorgeous mood, and each one seems to tell a story that the viewer cannot comprehend. The colors are different, with one having a pink sky and blue sea,

 another a dark blue sky with a lighter blue sea.

One has a pink canoe with a persimmon sky,

and in another a white boat floats in purple, with orange beyond.

 Doig's  horizon lines differ too, and the number of figures in the boat varies. Sometimes there is a solitary figure, and in others the canoe may be empty or hold a whole group of passengers.

3. Now my favorite artist, Agnes Martin: In some ways all her paintings look alike: grid-based, pale blue, gray, and white; squiggly pencil lines, the addition of a little color here and there. Oh, and big. 6' x 6' often. I still remember the first time I saw her work in person, when the art teacher took us all to the Miami Art Museum. Those lines looked like Martin was writing from the inside out.

"I've been working on the same theme for 10 years," Martin said in the documentary of her life With My Back to the World. Also, "Beauty is the mystery of life. Beauty illustrates happiness.

Martin's Innocent Love series

is eight pieces (six shown above) very much like what I described above. They are in a chapel-like installation at the Harwood Museum in Taos, NM. When we drive out West I'm going to stop and pray there! Then I'll find out how each piece in the series differs, but it's hard to tell from the  faint lines on white of the online images.

Oh, and she diluted her paint. And she says she's not a minimalist but an expressionist painter. OK.

4. You know I also love the work of Faith Evans-Sills -- her abstraction and references to nature. I can't tell if she ever made a series, but all her online work shares a watery feel (watered down like Martin?), pale colors (especially rose and blue), with lots of white and some black too. Printing, stencils, triangles, drips, and butterflies, trees, organic shapes, flowers, birds, branches and trees are commonalities.

5. In order to understand color more fully, still life painter Sydney Licht limited herself to the same three colors of paint (plus black and white) for five years. That's not a series, but it is a challenge.
When she does work a series, she calls it a project. In an early one, Licht used her limited palette and posed herself a question: Can I turn an organic abstraction into a still life? In another series she painted a visual diary of her three-week stay at Yaddo. Each day she painted her lunch. In the morning she made a watercolor warm-up, and in the afternoon she work in oils.

For each series she sets herself a problem (Can I turn an organic abstraction into a still life? Can a limited palette help me understand color more fully?) then sets out to solve it. Although Licht's austere paintings don't grab me, her method does. I'm going to see how it transfers to my work. She starts with a sketchbook piece, and then fills her palette with paint. She approaches the canvas with a palette knife, putting down splotches of color, and concentrating on the negative spaces. Unlike me, Licht does not do background first. She just makes it part of the whole. I'm going to try this, using pieces of fabric and maybe some paint. With the composition thus based, she refines it with layers of paint, working until it all is "right." I can't wait to try this intuitive + figurative process!


1. Beatriz Milhazes
Series: Gold Rose
common to all: seven silkscreen print designs -- all in boldly graphic, referencing nature through geometric shapes and bright colors.  All 31 1/2"  long
variations in each: two stand alone, a diptych and a triptych; width varies;

Series: Summer Time
common to all: carnival spirit, vibrant color
variations in each: five paintings, three collages; size -- paintings are bigger than collages

2. Peter Doig
Series: Canoe
common to all: creepy-gorgeous mood
variations in each: color, horizon line, number of people in canoe

3. Agnes Martin

Series: Innocent Love
common to all: eight pieces, Same size (6' x 6'?), grid-based, pale colors
variations in each: different colors and lines

4. Faith Evans-Sills -
Series:
common to all: abstraction and references to nature, similar palette
variations in each: different nature references and geometric shapes

5. Sydney Licht

Series: Lunch
common to all: Same palette. In the morning she made a watercolor warm-up, and in the afternoon she work in oils.
variations in each: Content and composition