Sometimes you just have to take a break from worry. And angst. And the sense that the world is degenerating into a chaotic mess. No amount of hopeful TED talks give solace.
This week I retreated into this make believe. Just some goofy guys. A nine patch of alternate realities.
Rock on.
The piece I was working on last week transformed before my eyes after several hours of experimental stitching. The cloth is an old circular tablecloth that I dyed with a spray bottle filled with watered down dye. It was going to be an underskirt for my nuclear testing piece that is languishing in the corner of the studio.
I pulled it out of the experiment pile last Friday and folded it in half, then cut it into two wedge pieces so that I could try some stitching ideas I had. The stitching exercise gave me some great textures. It started with random straight lines that went across the piece higgledy piggledy to anchor the cloth.
Then at each new bobbin I changed the color of the thread to add more interest. Eventually a wonky grid emerged. As the grid grew I noticed that at the junctions of the navy blue lines there was a sense of dominance. So I decided to reinforce that by starting a new line of thread (in black) that started at the juncture and traveled on in a wavy line across the piece. Letting the thread ends hang.
As the thread ends started to accumulate I had to figure out how to handle them. Bury them? let them hang? cut them off? Tie them together? I loved the extra texture the thread was giving me but the thread ends were obscuring the texture below so I decided to nail them down with a spiral of stitches and trim them off. It was then that I realized I had created a terrain of sorts with little focus points that could represent targets.
Laying the stitched cloth over the remaining wedge of fabric made me stop in my tracks. Suddenly it all made sense. This piece is about a land ravaged, surrendering to chaos and on the edge. The stitched piece created a shoreline over the second wedge.
The edges are raw. The threads are chaotic.
And now I am hand stitching trails, individuals and groups across the void. Moving them toward the calm and away from the chaos.
The winter sun always casts awesome light. After several days of rain the sunlight adds a little extra joy to the day.
Who can resist the glow of gingko, the spark of maple and the dusky undertones in sycamore leaves?
My focus is omnivorous and indiscriminate today. Light, shadow, line, shapes they are all teasing me into running down alleys with cloth and stitch. Practice. Experimentation. Practice. There are a lot of what-ifs? What if I striate the cloth with lines and add new layers of texture with every thread color change? What happens if I add curves to line when I change colors? What if at each intersection I add a dollop of a thread knot? What if I let the threads just hang there. . .does it add meaning? The trick is to slow down enough to see. Slow down enough to let things happen. Slow down enough to make art without meaning.
It's the sphinx like shadow there on the lower right corner that made me move on with this practice cloth. What is he looking at?
Our new shower curtain, courtesy of the folks at Cafe Press and my sketchbook.
So I'm working along, happily creating ART (that's the one with the capital A) and my mind starts wandering. What if I made a set of pillows using this design? Could I create a product line? Would it translate to a fabric pattern? What about copyrighting the idea? Should I open a shop on my website? Does my creative vision extend to others who would be willing to pay for these products if I did? And...the big one...what to do about marketing? Oh, yeah, that's why I don't finish the thoughts.
It's the design mind butting up against reality.
The multi-layered opportunities for creators in this have-it-in-an-instant-my-way society are confusing enough to make me wonder where I put my brain cells. I can enlarge my drawings to the size of king size sheets. I can wear my images on my feet, in my backpack, on the face of my watch if I took a hankering for it. Soon the print on demand services will be selling homes with preprinted and customized wallpaper. Self marketing through Etsy, Spoonflower, Society6, CafePress, etc. (ad nauseum), creates instant links to the products and service industries (for a cut of my action). Should I stay or should I go?
I think I'll go back to ART. It's sleeting outside and the phone is quiet.
Sightlines, Paula Kovarik, 2015
I was talking to a good friend this weekend about the fact that I can't seem to finish things. I am full of ideas and come into the studio each day with a new direction I want to pursue. Exploration, imitation and experimentation all teach me what to do next time -- perhaps with a clearer eye to finality. But often that next time doesn't arrive because I'm onto a different idea. A perfect example is this tangent lines piece. It started as an extemporaneous exploration of color piecing.
I decided to use saturated colors that interact with each other and shatter across a black and white surface. I used the willy-nilly approach of joining the color pieces from a scrap box instead of pre-planning and cutting to fit.
The composition came together with a strong horizon line and some interaction between the shapes. I thought it was a good start and that I could play with line to exaggerate a wacky perspective. Since the two colorful figures seemed to be communicating I wanted to explore how my line work might emphasize that. I used an acetate overlay and experimented with line patterns. I drew plumes of lines coming from the tips of the forms, antennae, perspective lines and heart beat lines but wasn't happy with any of them.
The piece lingered on the design wall for over a month. Then one day I came up with the idea of adding a line at each seam just to see what would happen -- an experiment in geometry. Would the composition come together or fall apart? Would the lines impede the message? What message?
Sightlines, Paula Kovarik
There were a whole lot of lines to add. Over 275 if I counted right. The texture of the piece changed drastically. The experiment taught me:
vacant doodle
So ... with nothing to lose I went for more experimentation.
Remember those drawings you did on the back of your math homework or your English class spiral notebook where you scribbled a line and then colored the shapes that were formed? Well, maybe you don't. But I sure do. I still do that in a vacant sort of doodling mood. It occurred to me maybe these lines and forms had even greater secrets to reveal. You know....like a fourth dimension. Perhaps if I colored in areas where the lines formed triangles it would reveal a pattern that connects. Little did I realize that there are over 200 triangles formed by these lines and some of them take a huge hunk of thread to fill in. Tedious. I'm still finding triangles to fill, still seeing triangles in my dreams. Still.
And, from what I can tell. There is no pattern that connects. Just a whole lot of lines and triangles.
I think I'll crop it, block it, and wait for the next inspiration. For now I know it is unfinished, next to three other unfinished pieces on the boards. And that might be a good thing because I learned from it. Or a bad thing because it's still a mystery and I might have to add more. It does give me more ideas to pursue. How do forms inform line work? Where do lines intersect to add more meaning? Why triangles?
Not sure.
Sightlines, triangles, Paula Kovarik
