Time to Decompress

Golden Mean Series: #4, Line

Today I will have my final phone call in the Working in a Series Workshop with Lisa Call.  It's been a wild ride for me.  I was ready to completely immerse myself in producing the best five works of art I could in eight weeks, while at the same time learning as much as I could absorb about the assignment topics, from her lectures, and from the weekly e-mails.  It sort of felt like being surrounded in a swirling whirlwind of art.  She provides all sorts of backup material to read and think about when you're not in the studio trying to finish your assignment.  I felt as if I was deeply immersed in a graduate level art course.

Eight weeks is a long time to stay shifted into overdrive, and she warned about mid-session burnout, but I powered right past that, and into week seven, where I promptly crashed.  All the pressures of work and family that I'd shoved to the side just couldn't wait one more week, and assignment #4 didn't get finished on time.  I did finish it yesterday, six days late.  Last night I promptly started on #5, which was due - last night.  I don't think I'll have much to show Lisa on it before our mid-afternoon call.  Oh well.

Prior to the call I have a date with my color/painting teacher Caryn Friedlander, to see her studio and her work.  I'm excited, and pleased that she invited me.  But scared to death of the reciprocal invitation.  My "studio" is nothing but a messy basement full of fabric.  Her class runs through the end of the quarter, early December I guess.  I'm hoping now that I'm done with the series workshop I will be able to devote more time to it.

So blog posts have taken a distant back seat to all this.  I will try to catch up and share more of the results of the workshop, and possibly post some of my workshop posts to share and record the thought process at the time.

Kandinsky Again

For our next assignment in Color class, a calendar of Kandinsky's works was cut up into pieces, each student got a piece.  Our  mission is to duplicate the colors as precisely as we can.  My piece was the lower left quarter of this work, Landscape 1913.

Quilts and Color

Michael James' "Lush Life."

This week's assignment for color class was to go to the museum and look at the quilt exhibit.  There is no way I can call that "work!"  We were asked to pick one piece and write about it in relation to the color combinations used.  I felt a little bad for not picking the Nancy Crow piece, but it was "March Study," from the 1970's, and the use of color in it didn't really excite me.  Since James uses strip piecing I thought it would be more relevant for me.    Here's my essay.

 I chose Michael James' "Lush Life,"  which was created in 1992.  The piece is constructed using strip piecing, a method I am exploring in my current series, so I thought it would be interesting to look closer at a master's work.  

Very generally, strip piecing involves cutting long thin strips of fabric, then sewing them back together into new "made fabrics."  The "made fabric" is then usually cut up and reassembled in various ways.  This is where any similarity between Michael James and I ends.  Obviously there are an infinite number of ways to slice up and reassemble fabric.
Unlike some of his other works, such as Rhythm/Color: Morris Men,(See below) in "Lush Life" the  the strips are arranged in a very simple allover 45-degree diagonal pattern.  Although each made fabric is made up of various colors and patterns of fabric, the simple overall piecing design allows sections of dissimilar value to read as solids when placed adjacent to each other. 
Looking at the piece from a distance, or on a small screen,  what you see first is the stencil-like cut-out shapes that appear overlaid on a contrasting background.  Low value figures on a high value background.  Or is it the other way around?  James is able to achieve subtle gradations of value and hue by carefully selecting the alternating color strips.

 In places the light fabric gradually transitions into dark rather than being sharply contrasted with it.  Where does one figure end and the other begin?  This draws you in closer, to the point where you realize it is all one very, very, carefully constructed symphony of strips.  Or stripes.  The lightest areas use pale gray and  pastel tints, so that there is little contrast between them.  The fabric reads overall as light.  In the mid-range values there is more contrast, so that the patterning is more evident.  In the darkest sections contrast is reduced again, and the overall image is "dark." 

I think that blue is the dominant color, but that is by no means certain.  There is also a lot of yellow and pink.  The blues tend toward blue-green and range from palest tint to darkest shade.

To me, this piece is so complex I can look at it, and try to understand it, for hours.  There are so many levels of color, shape and design that it's hard to know how to take it apart.  Here is the Nancy Crow piece that was featured in the show:

Nancy Crow, "March Study"

And here is Michael James' other work mentioned,  Rhythm/Color: Morris Men.

Rhythm/Color:
Morris Men

The Art of Color Class

I've been so busy actually doing art that I have not had much time to blog about it.   No complaints, that's the way it should be.  I waste way too much time staring at a screen and not creating.  But I like to keep the blog up, if for no other reason, to have an ongoing record of what I was doing and thinking at various times.  And it's stored in a place where I can't lose it, unlike paper or even digital files on my computer.  

So today I am sharing last night’s projects in my Color in Art class.  I didn't know we would be using oil paints or I would probably have been too intimidated to take the class.  Not sure why painting and even drawing scare me off, but they do.  It's like this little hidden secret, I'm afraid someone will find out that I really can't draw to save my life.  I know I could learn, and I think I eventually must go there.  The whole idea of learning how to use oils seemed intimidating and I feared failure.   But the experience so far has been the total reverse of that!  Being told exactly what to buy and how to use it solved much.   Last night when I started seeing all the amazing colors that would emerge out of mixing the six simple primaries (two of each) I never wanted to quit.  Merging two things that I was sure would produce a brown muddy mess instead created a mind bogglingly beautiful teal blue.  Wow. I'm hooked.  So - yesterday:

The first project was to try out all the combinations of our primary paints to see which ones produced what sort of secondary colors.  I knew nothing about oil painting, so it was fascinating to me to mix the colors and see what came out.  We did this in the classroom, but mine was a smeared up mess so I redid it.  Sorry the photo is crappy.

The second assignment was to create some sort of grid on a piece of paper 6″ x 9″ and then make an exact copy of it. One version was supposed to illustrate “color harmony,” and the other “color dis-harmony.”    No explanation or definition was given of those two terms.   In class each person put up one of their pieces on the wall and others had to guess which one was which.  Not as simple as it seems!  Very fun, though.  Everyone had quite different interpretations.

The other thing that is fun is that our teacher is very into Nancy Crow and quilts in general, and unlike most people already recognizes that there is such a thing as an art quilt, so it's nice not to fight that battle.  In fact, our assignment this week is to go to the local museum exhibit, American Quilts, the Democratic Art, and write an analysis of the color use in one of the quilts.   Fun! And an excuse to go back and soak in the exhibit one more time before it closes next week. 

WIS Assignment #3 - Shape and Texture