Deidre Adams

Kitchen, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic & oil on canvas, ©2007 Deidre Adams

Last Friday was the first day of my last semester in the BFA program at Metro. I’m only taking one class:

ART 4701 – Snr Exp Studio: Portfolio Devl
This studio course requires the student to present finished work in a senior thesis show, produce a slide and/or CD portfolio, and write a concise statement about the intention, and methodology of producing the body of work. This effort will result in the production of a body of work as well as an introduction to the profession of the studio artist.

AKA “BFA Thesis & Portfolio,” this is the class where we wrap it all up, tying together everything we’ve learned, and get pushed out of the nest to sink or swim. (Sorry – couldn’t resist the mixed metaphor.) A major effort of the class involves figuring out what our art is about so that we can write our BFA thesis statements.

By now, it seems we are expected to have settled on a particular media and theme that we want to pursue to the exclusion of all others. This idea is reinforced by the art world in general and the gallery system in particular: once you become known for doing a particular thing, major changes to your style and methods are done at your own peril. Society likes to be able to neatly categorize things, and if you want to sell your work, you need to figure out which box you can be put into.

For me, this whole system is fraught with angst. I’m interested in a wide range of themes — place, time, language, politics, social issues, technology — and I love working with different media — textiles, painting, photography, printmaking, and collage. If I had to choose just one from each column and work only in that way for the rest of my life, it would seriously curtail my interest in making art.

A long time ago, during the course of earning my first degree, I remember learning about the concept of  “opportunity cost” — probably in Econ 101 or some other finance-oriented class. Opportunity cost is “The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action” (Investopedia). It applies to investing because by choosing to put your money into one stock, you have an associated opportunity cost, which is giving up the chance to make money by investing in something else. The idea really struck me, I suppose, because it occurs to me frequently when thinking about what kind of art I want to be making. For instance, if I choose to work on paintings on panels, the opportunity cost is the time I could have spent making textile work. (Or time I could have spent working on my web site or pursuing exhibition opportunities … but I guess I shouldn’t muddy the waters too much.) The opportunity cost of writing this blog post is the time I should be using to complete my assignment that’s due in class tomorrow.

Last night the idea hit me again vividly when I was making salads for dinner.

When I cut into this beautifully formed Roma tomato, I had a strong, visceral impulse: I wanted to immediately drop everything I was doing and start working on a series of huge, close-focus paintings of sliced vegetables. But my inner arbiter of common sense quickly intervened and reminded me that that would be utterly ridiculous. There would be a huge opportunity cost associated with that: I’d be giving up all the time I need to work on the things I’m currently doing.

That’s been one of the very enjoyable luxuries of school — freedom to experiment and try lots of different things without having to feel that I was giving up something. The painting at the top of this post is a good example. It was done in my Painting II class in 2007. I don’t remember exactly what the assignment was, but I know it had something to do with interiors and Cubism. I remember that I enjoyed making this painting immensely, and I would love to make several more in a series of them. But would it really make sense to do that when I also have a strong desire to make more textile work, and in fact have started on a new series in that medum? And when I am simultaneously thinking about my Resonant State series, which was to have been the work for my BFA thesis? (I say “was to have been” because now I’m wavering once again about whether I should really try to incorporate textile work into my thesis.)

Thank goodness we’re doing all this contemplation and introspection in class. I’m more confused than ever.

Suspension. 22 x 30 inches. Watercolor and acrylic on handmade paper.
©2009 Deidre Adams

Sometimes when visiting Mexico or Florida or southern California, the thought has crossed my mind that it would be so awesome to live in a place where you have lush foliage and bright colors surrounding you all the time. But when I get home to Colorado, I realize how much I love the rhythm of the change of seasons, and how each time of the year has its own appeal. I think winter may be the least appreciated of the seasons, but I love the quiet and the muted colors of this time of year. You may have to look a little harder, but the beauty is there in the landscape, just in a more subtle way. This painting is a celebration of winter hues.

(Suspension is available through Translations Gallery in Denver.)

Precognition. 22 x 30 inches. Watercolor, acrylic, and photo transfer on handmade paper.
©2009 Deidre Adams

Something I’ve wanted to do since starting this blog two years ago was get into the habit of posting on a regular basis. But I still have this idea that in order for a post to be worthwhile, I need to have some kind of meaningful content to impart, which often turns out to be self-defeating. Right now I just want to post some work that I did last year and never got around to showing. That was, after all, the main reason I wanted to blog: to have a way to quickly and easily get my work onto the web. So, no words of wisdom, no lengthy blather today. I’m sure that will come as a relief to many!

(Precognition is available through Translations Gallery in Denver.)

Resonant State No. 5, 36 x 36 inches, ©Deidre Adams

New Year’s Day is one of my favorite days of the year. All of the hoopla and frenzied compulsive consumption associated with the holiday season is now officially over. Nothing left now but a bright new start, a clean slate full of hope and quiet promise.

I find myself reflecting on how fortunate I’ve been, not just this past year but for a long time, for family and friends and health and art. I don’t make resolutions, and I don’t make laundry lists of achievements and failures. I just want to be and to do. It could be a great day to go and clean up the studio, preparing myself for all the great art I’m going to make in the coming weeks (she said only somewhat self-mockingly). I could go out and do some photography, or I could go shopping. Did you know that “Is Costco open on New Year’s Day” was the 7th most popular Google search when I happened to try it this morning? Well, thankfully the answer is no, so there goes that idea. Still, the day is open to infinite possibility.

Whether you prefer to spend the day taking stock of where you are and where you want to be, or if like me, you just want to enjoy each moment as it comes, I wish you a very happy new year, with much joy and success, and the ability to recognize them in their many forms.

Resonant State No. 1, 24 x 24 inches, ©Deidre Adams

Do you ever get the feeling that life isn’t always as random as we might think? I had yet another experience today that goes into the category of amazing coincidence.

Last week, I wrote about my Entangled Series, the first group of pieces that I did for my Painting V class. Making these pieces was a cathartic experience for me, but they were also extremely time-consuming. While it was OK that I had to spend pretty much every minute of my time not taken up with other obligations working on them, I knew that work in my other classes was going to start demanding way more time and attention, and I needed to find a way to do the work faster. So I decided to go back to painting.

By now I think I’ve worked something out of my system, so even though I started out this second series still thinking about entanglement, the work evolved into something different as I progressed. I’m still thinking about the processes of the brain, but now it’s more general. I’ve been doing a lot of research on neuroscience, at least insofar as I can understand it because it can very quickly become “science-y” beyond the point that I’m willing to pursue it. I have a basic understanding of neurons, synapses, axons, and dendrites, but what I find immensely fascinating is that science still doesn’t have a clear understanding of how all these physical structures lead to the phenomena of language and memory, perceptions and emotions, consciousness and dreams, and ultimately becomes an awareness of self. This is what I’m trying to explore in these paintings.

I’m still working with texture, because after so many years of working with textiles, I’ve developed an inseparable connection with the tactile nature of materials. Besides the visual texture imparted by the lines, shapes, colors and markings in this work, I’m also using thread, string, fragments of handmade paper, and other embedded objects to impart elements of physical texture to the surface. I’m still very interested in creating a sense of depth and layering here, in an attempt to create an illusion that you are moving into the piece.

Resonant State No. 1, detail, ©Deidre Adams

Today, I was in the process of writing this blog entry on the next group of pieces, when something arrived in the mail which helped to solidify my ideas about what I’m trying to say with these pieces: the December ‘09 issue of Discover Magazine. Now as far as I know, we do not have a subscription to this magazine (although it could very well turn out that a family member is giving us a gift subscription for Christmas), and I’ve never read it before in my life. But it looked interesting, so I thumbed through it, and right there on page 61 is a fantastic article about Henry Markram and the Blue Brain project. The project is an attempt to simulate a human brain with computers, reverse engineering what we know and “building tools to synthesize those data into biological phenomena.” In its current state, the project is running on the IBM Blue Gene®/P, a supercomputer consisting of “16,000 processors squeezed into a space the size of four refrigerators.”

The article is fascinating and I highly recommend it. I won’t go into it in too much depth, except for the part that really sparked my recognition of how this applies to my work. In answer to a question about what they’ve learned so far with the project, Markham talks about the phenomenon of “gamma oscillations,” a rhythm of electrical activity that appeared spontaneously in the circuit. He explains further:

Gamma oscillations are the basis for consciousness, according to a theory. The theory holds that when the brain goes into high-frequency oscillations, those oscillations do perceptual binding, which is the foundation of consciousness. … It’s significant that we didn’t specifically try to model the phenomenon in the brain. All we have to do is pay attention to the fact that we are building it correctly, and these phenomena emerge. The whole circuit goes into this resonant state, which is an amazing state. Now we can dissect the circuit and find out exactly which neurons were crucial, which pathways, which receptors, and so forth.

I love the idea of the “resonant state,” as I think this has multiple meanings applicable to thoughts, memory and the making of art in and of itself. Here are the other paintings in the series:

Resonant State No. 2, 24 x 24 inches, ©Deidre Adams

Resonant State No. 3, 24 x 24 inches, ©Deidre Adams

Resonant State No. 4, 24 x 24 inches, ©Deidre Adams

Entangled II, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

Now that school is just about over, I thought I would start posting some of the work that I’ve been doing this semester. Besides the Art Theory & Criticism class, I had two studio classes, Painting V and Printmaking II: Lithography. I’ll start with Painting.

Painting V is the last level of painting that Metro offers, and it is the time when students are expected to be hard at work developing their body of work for the all-important thesis/portfolio show. At this time, we’re expected to be pretty much self-driven, choosing what we want to work on, developing our own proposals, and being given little direction other than feedback on the proposal and the work itself, both in progress and finished. It was a stacked class, meaning that the instructor had another class to deal with simultaneously and so was stretched pretty thin trying to get around to everybody. (Not surprising with budget cuts across the board, but who knows how much worse it will get before it gets better!)

As usual, I struggled to figure out what I wanted to go with for my concept. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas, it’s just the opposite. I have too many, and I feel such affection for each of them, it’s hard to settle on a single one. I went through a couple of false starts before I finally settled on this one idea. It’s something that’s been rolling around in my mind for a long time, but I never could figure out exactly what I wanted to do with it. Part of the problem is that as a highly introverted individual, I’ve always shied away from making work that is too personal, choosing for the most part to concentrate on formal elements and/or safe choices that won’t reveal too much of myself to the world. When my mother died four years ago, someone close to me suggested to me that I should do a piece about it, to allow me to work out my feelings. No, I said, I could never do that. I wasn’t even fully capable of confronting those feelings directly; it was better to keep it all at a safe distance.

Without saying a whole lot more about it, the important thing to convey is that about 4-5 years before she died, my mother began to exhibit signs that something wasn’t quite right in her mind. She was forgetting things, losing things, saying things that made no sense, sometimes displaying irrational fears about things that no one else could see. By the time she died, she didn’t know who I was any longer, but I think from some of the things she said, she might have been confusing me with her older sister.

While I was thinking over ideas for my concept, mulling thoughts about patterns and textures in nature and science, my dad had an accident and went into the hospital. I went down to Albuquerque to see him and deal with anything that needed my assistance. While there, I stayed in my parent’s house, which always makes me think a lot about my mother. I also think about how the things I experienced growing up might have looked from her perspective, how differently those same incidents and conversations would have appeared through her eyes. I think about what she might have been like as a child and a young woman, what kind of hopes and dreams she may have had that never materialized as she continued down the path she ended up choosing.

When I got back home, something I saw, I don’t even know what now, sparked the idea of trying to tie together her experiences with the physical changes that occur in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease. I did a lot of research so I could understand the science of it. Neurons, the nerve cells which transmit brain activity, die when the proteins which are normally broken down and eliminated by the body instead become reformed into hard, insoluble plaques. Microtubules, the brain’s cellular transport system, break down abnormally and the proteins released reform into insoluble twisted fibers called tangles. As these cells die, the brain shrinks. Ventricles, the chambers containing cerebrospinal fluid, become enlarged.

Having seen the outward manifestations of these changes, I visualize the thoughts inside the person’s head becoming trapped: twisted, tangled, and cut off from their normal pathways by these cells and obstructing formations. An idea tries to make its way to a familiar connecting point, but it’s either stopped completely or diverted to a place it’s not supposed to go.

I wanted to use fibers and thread to express my concept, both because I love using them and because these materials seemed like a natural fit to express the concept of entanglement. As more and more thread is added, the surface becomes at once more complex and more unified. The idea is not a literal representation of brain cells, but rather a depiction of how the strangulation of the sending and receiving cells means they can no longer function as they should.

Entangled I, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

These originally started out as strictly fiber works, but the shapes were very wonky and I couldn’t figure out how I would hang them. I also knew I would need several more pieces in the series, especially since these two were so different. I would need to make more pieces with bridging elements to make everything work together as a single exhibit. So I came up with the idea of making a grid of 24-inch squares, and to that end I ended up stitching these pieces to stretched canvas.

I also started a third piece, but since these are extremely time-consuming, I didn’t get this one to a satisfactory state before the due date. I’m not even sure if I want to keep going with it. For now, it’s a UFO (unfinished object).

Entangled III, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

Completion through removal. Abstractions of surfaces. Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking and entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse.
— Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks researching the work of Gordon Matta-Clark for a paper for my Art Theory & Criticism class this semester. The assignment was to choose an artist and/or specific work to tie in with some of the theories we had been discussing in our readings. Deconstruction theory* is very interesting to me, so I started with a Google search on that term and came up with Gordon Matta-Clark. As soon as I saw the images that came up, I remembered having seen a slide of his work in an earlier art history class. The slide we saw was from his work Bingo, in which he cut out sections from the side of an old condemned house. Some of these sections were saved, and this slide shows them placed in a pristine museum setting — a striking contrast of particular interest for me because I find abandoned structures so compelling.

Gordon Matta-Clark was quite an interesting guy. He was the son of two artists — Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta and American artist Anne Clark. Marcel Duchamp was his godfather. He was active during the early 70s and died an untimely death from cancer when he was only 35. His work is somewhat difficult to categorize, consisting of elements of sculpture, drawing, film, performance, social activism, and “semantic deconstruction,” a label applied to his fondness for word play in his documentation.

His most well-known works are probably those often referred to as the “building cuts.” The earliest works involving cutting of buildings were “urban guerilla acts” in which he illegally entered abandoned apartment buildings and cut out parts of what would have been a floor on one level and a ceiling for the level below. These cut-out fragments were displayed in a gallery setting as Bronx Floors.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floors, 1972-73

As he gained notoriety, Matta-Clark was able to gain legal access to various condemned structures in order to perform his interventions. Splitting (top) is probably his most iconic work, consisting of a house which he cut completely in half. He and his collaborators were able to remove part of the foundation on one side so that the affected half tilted back and transformed the opening into a dramatic wedge, widening from bottom to top.

Matta-Clark was interested in the social aspects of how abandonment and urban renewal would affect and displace communities. His ideas about consumerism and capitalism seemed to be taken almost directly from the Situationists: the concepts of psychogeography, dérive, and détournement. In explaining his “dualistic habit of centering and removal,” he said,

Here I am directing my attention to the central void, to the gap which, among other things, could be between the self and the American Capitalist system. What I am talking about is a very real, carefully sustained mass schizophrenia in which our individual perceptions are constantly being subverted by industrially controlled media, markets, and corporate interests. … This conspiracy goes on every day, everywhere, while the citizen commutes to and from his shoe-box home with its air of peace and calm, while he is being precisely maintained in a state of mass insanity.[i]

Matta-Clark was trained as an architect, having received a B.A. in architecture from Cornell University in 1968. But he spent a lot of time in the company of artists while in college, and he expressed some disaffection with the field of architecture, and especially with the type of modernist ideas he encountered there. After leaving Cornell, Matta-Clark moved to New York City, to an area now known as SoHo but which was then called the South Houston Industrial area. At that time, the area was in a state of decline, a prime example of urban decay, with numerous abandoned buildings and streets lacking lighting and maintenance. Since the 1950s, artists had been attracted to the area for the cheap rents, living illegally in buildings zoned for commercial, not residential use. In the late 1960s, the city’s urban planners and wealthy landowners wanted to transform the area into a modern corporate and financial center, an idea which was met with no small resistance by the inhabitants.

At this time, much of Matta-Clark’s work involved a spirit of community, calling attention to the plight of the poor and homeless and involving neighbors and other artists in the work’s creation. He had several ideas for making building materials from discarded bottles and other trash, with thoughts of developing some of these ideas into places for the homeless to live.[ii] He explained his motivation:

As a native New Yorker my sense of the city as home runs deep … [and] my attitudes are still keener as regards an awareness of prevailing conditions and their need for improvement. Among the conditions my training and personal inclination have taught me to deal with is neglect and abandonment. There are words which when applied to children or human beings of any age evoke a profound call for alarm and rectification, yet when existing in massive proportions throughout our urban environment evokes only bureaucratic or juridic ambivalence and in-action.[iii]

Matta-Clark’s ideas about the social content of his work grew clearer to him as he progressed in his career. In a 1976 interview with Donald Wall, after he had done several building-cut projects, he reiterated his commitment to fighting against what he saw as a flawed system:

By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer—a virtually captive audience.[iv]

In 1975, Matta-Clark began work on Conical Intersect, one of his more complex building interventions. In Paris at this time, the old section of the city known as Les Halles was being demolished to make way for modernization, including the building of the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou. Matta-Clark obtained permission to work on two 17th-century houses that were the last to be demolished to make way for the modernization project.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975

Having been to the Pompidou myself last summer, I found this especially interesting. The pictures are fascinating, but how amazingly cool it would have been to be able to experience this first-hand. These works could only exist, and for only a short time, because they would subsequently be destroyed. All that remains are photographs and film of the process.

Interior view of Conical Intersect

I can’t help feeling nostalgic when older buildings are demolished to make way for the new. I know that’s a kind of sentimental attitude, and we must have progress and all that, but I just like the character of old buildings better than new ones. If I never saw what was there before, of course I couldn’t give that too much thought, but Gordon Matta-Clark did want people to think about that, and that’s why I love his work so much.

_______________

*Deconstruction is a literary theory credited to Jacques Derrida, who is maddeningly difficult to read. I found a very understandable explanation of deconstruction in Literary Theory for the Perplexed by Mary Klages. (Wow – Amazon seriously wants $132 for this book? Good thing we have libraries!)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[i]Gordon Matta-Clark, Interview by Donald Wall, 1976, in “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006), 58.

[ii]Christian, Scheidemann, “Material and Process: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Object Legacy, in Gordon Matta Clark: You are the Measure. Exhibition catalog published by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 119.

[iii]Gordon Matta-Clark, notes from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, quoted in Judith Russi-Kirchner, “The Idea of Community in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003), 148.

[iv]Matta-Clark, Wall interview, 57.

Several weeks ago, I posted Part I of an assignment for my Painting V class, a written response to a particular book, in my case Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland. The book is divided into two sections, which was convenient for the 2-part assignment.

Response paper – Art & Fear, Part II

By the time you get to part II of the book, you’ve become familiar with the book’s rhythm of bad news, good news. It’s a comforting seesaw going back and forth, first saying here’s a problem, but then don’t despair, here’s how you can deal with it.

Chapter VI, “A View Into the Outside World,” begins with all of the other things one must worry about in addition to the relatively simple matter of just making the art. One of the biggest is the way the work will be received by the outside world. People in general are fearful of anything that goes against the status quo, and stories of moral outrage or other negative feedback often result in artists’ self-censoring out of survival instinct. Along with this, there’s the problem of getting others to be interested in and to accept your work. The so-called “art world” has its predefined standards, and gaining acceptance in this world can be tricky. Without some level of ability to play the game, an artist has little hope of success in this world.

This chapter also raises the sticky subject of competition. Human nature being what it is, artists are also instinctively inclined toward competing with other artists. This inclination, if not kept in check, can get out of control. Competition can have positive consequences; for instance, if it drives an artist  to create work at a very high level, to make one’s best work at all times. But the downfall here lies in determining what one’s best work is. We may rely on the outside world to tell us. The danger here is that you might just make work that you know will gain easy acceptance and thus avoid challenging yourself. In my own experience, I often find that the work I think is my strongest is greeted with a big yawn by others, while some that I think is less than stellar gets very positive responses. It’s a battle to keep myself true to my own vision and resist using certain combinations of colors or visual devices just because I know people have reacted positively to these things in my past work.

“Navigating the System” deals with the subject of commissions and the necessity of making art that can produce monetary returns. If you’re not fortunate enough to be completely independent of the need to make money from your art, then you probably have to make some concessions to complete freedom of self-expression. You have to figure out how to strike a balance between making work for others and making work for yourself, and which is more important to your survival. For me, making commissions has been a good and bad proposition. When I’ve been constrained to colors I’m not used to working with, it feels unfamiliar and forced. And even when there’s complete creative freedom, there’s also the anxiety of wondering whether the end product will be accepted by the client. The rewards, both financial as well as in the form of exposure, have so far been worth it. I won’t seek a commission, but if requested, I’ll give it a try if I feel I can work within the parameters given and also if I feel a good rapport with the client.

Chapter VII, “The Academic World,” discusses issues related to learning about art in school, from the viewpoint of both student and teacher. The discussion of the problems faced by an artist who decides to teach sound so formidable, I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to do it. But following the bad news–good news cycle, there’s the reminder that in spite of the soul-killing administrative requirements and lack of time artist-educators have to create their own art, there is the very fulfilling prospect of nurturing and learning from new artists and their fresh perspectives on life. For me, this has been one of the most rewarding aspects of being a student as well: mingling with other creative people and being inspired by their ingenuity and generosity.

Next, the authors discuss how books fit into the artist’s life. Besides technique and history, one of the most valuable aspects of reading about other artists is gaining “courage-by-association” (90). The more experience I have under my own belt, the more I enjoy reading about other artists and their processes, their fears and triumphs, and just simply their approaches to observation and life in general. Wisdom, insight, passion, logic, and introspection: all great things to be gained from reading the words of other artists. “Every artist could write such a book. You could write such a book” (92). Maybe I will!

Chapter VIII, “Conceptual Worlds,” is the seminal chapter of the book. Everything else rides on these three questions to be asked when viewing the work of any artist, as first proposed by Henry James: “What was the artist trying to achieve?”  “Did he/she succeed?” And “Was it worth it?” (93). These words really resonated with me.  I hadn’t thought to ask anything like this about my own work, but if I were to go back and do this with certain pieces now, I can see that these questions hold the key to understanding why I’m just not that excited about some of them. “Art that falls short often does so not because the artist failed to meet the challenge, but because there was never a challenge there in the first place.” Using the analogy of an Olympic dive, the authors stress that you get more points for degree of difficulty than for perfection. Technical perfection, while commendable and valuable, can also become a trap. Yes, you can keep doing the easy thing, that thing which resonated at the time, and seemed so fulfilling. But if you don’t challenge yourself to go beyond that, you don’t grow as an artist.

This chapter also contains the best explanation I’ve ever seen on the difference between art and craft, a question of vital interest to me. Using the Mona Lisa as an example, the authors ask: “Is this art?”  Probably supposing that no one would deny it, they next ask, “What about an undetectably perfect copy of the Mona Lisa?” (97). The point is that art vs. craft is a question that must be considered not in isolation for an individual piece, but in the context of multiple works by one person. The art aspect is achieved when there is a conceptual leap from one piece to the next. “There’s a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next” (98). To me, this means that even though the techniques might be the same, someone is making craft if the end products are the same or very similar, and it’s art if each piece is unique in a substantial way. The artist must be vigilant to keep pushing this difference as his or her career matures, to be sure the work “continually generates new and unresolved issues.”  The key difference between art and craft is not the tools but the ideas. “For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision” (98).

The book concludes with the assertion that in art (as in most of life), there are no reassuringly concrete answers to tell us how to get along on the journey. But you can find your way by asking the right questions. Each artist finds his or her own way through observation, working, and associations with other artists and activities, but in the end the thing that matters is making the work. If the artist doesn’t find a way to proceed, then that’s the end of his or her art-making. There is no single set of instructions that works for everyone. “The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone — it’s non-transferable and of little use to others” (117). If I choose to continue to make art, I face a lot of uncertainties, but as the authors conclude, “Curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice” (118).

Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine includes a regular feature called “Art Studio.” I’m the featured artist for the November 2009 issue. I enjoyed writing the copy for it, since the subject is one with which I’m intimately familiar — and I can always use the practice talking about my work. The magazine did a fantastic job with the layout, as you can see. This is a beautiful publication, with articles of interest to both traditional and art quilters. Single copies and subscriptions are available at their web site, http://www.mqumag.com/home/.

I’m woefully behind in posting this news, but better late than never, right? This wonderful new book by Spike Gillespie profiles 20 art quilters, detailing their stories and working methods, with beautiful photography and layout. I’m honored to have been chosen to be a part of it. It was also really cool to find out that 2 of my pieces were featured on the cover, along with work by Lisa Call and Margot Lovinger.

Spike traveled around the country to meet the artists in person, and she came to Denver, along with photographer Ori Sofer, to interview me and Lisa for our respective articles. They were lots of fun, with interesting personal stories of their own. Ori took a lot of great pictures of me and my studio, and generously gave me copies of them. The photo I’m using on my About page and for my Facebook profile is one that he took. I like it because it pretty much looks like me but still looks decent, if you know what I mean!

The best part of this book is that it’s not just pages of the artists’ work, but also includes photos from their studios and little blurbs of advice from each one. I had to squirm a little when I saw mine in print, because Spike didn’t clean up my somewhat uncivilized language, but quoted me verbatim. Ahem!

But I couldn’t be more thrilled about being in this book. Here are a couple of spreads from my section:

Quilting Art is available through Amazon or directly through the publisher, Voyageur Press.