Untitled work in progress, 40 x 30 inches, ©2010 Deidre Adams

Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, but after a summer spent mostly unfocused and adrift, I have returned to painting with a vengeance. Maybe it was the change of the seasons, maybe it was getting some lingering projects finished, maybe it was limiting my Facebook and web-surfing time. Or maybe it was going to Ohio — so much yummy urban enchantment & so many fantastic surfaces — plus a change of scenery always does me a world of good. Whatever it was, I now have no fewer than 15 paintings and 4 textile works in progress.

A large part of my creative funk probably had to do with finishing school. As much as I complained and whined about the forced manner of the assignments, of having to do things I didn’t really feel fit with my vision, the truth is that I loved having a place to go and a community to be a part of. Being completely on my own is a two-edged sword: I am for the most part an introvert and find it hard to work with lots of noise going on around me, but on the other hand, the company can get kind of boring when it’s just me.

And my other problem stemmed from the normal letdown after a show is over and all the work comes back and is sitting there in the living room waiting to be stored. The sustained push to create all the work for my thesis gave me an energy that’s hard to maintain when there isn’t the goal of a show looming. It was easy to make excuses — I can’t make panels by myself, I can’t be creative when xyz is going on, etc.

But a little over a week ago, I was rummaging around in my basement for something, and I came across some canvases I had purchased a while back to use in class assignments. Over the last couple of years, I had bought quite a few of these when I found sales. Then we learned how to make our own canvases and panels. By about the 3rd semester of painting class, you are shamed into forgoing the purchased canvases in favor of either making your own (a pain if you’re just not into the whole scary electric saw thing) or buying them custom-made (expensive, and difficult to find someone who can make them to your standards at a price you can afford to pay). In any case, I had a large assortment of purchased canvases on hand, and I thought, why not just get a couple out and throw some paint on them, can’t hurt, right? I had to trick myself into getting back to work. “Self,” I said, “Now, you’re not really doing ‘serious’ work here, you’re just playing around, and if you make something really crappy, no one need ever know. So it’s OK. Go ahead.”

Untitled work in progress, 12 x 12 inches, ©2010 Deidre Adams

And that was all there was to it. I’ve been completely in the groove, just painting away the hours, totally absorbed. It’s that best possible art-making state, when the works just flows; it’s like a meditation, relaxed and most pleasant, and the realization that it’s time to stop and eat or do something else or go to bed or whatever is just plain annoying. This is how it should be.

Untitled work in progress, 24 x 24 inches, ©2010 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

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

And this piece:

Horizon XI, 34 x 34 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Progress on the new version of Iterations is coming along nicely. Quilting and blocking the panels separately made things ridiculously fast. No endless scrunching and turning and readjusting. Then all I had to do was square up the adjoining edges and join them to one another.

To put the panels together, I just set them side by side and stitched them together with a closely spaced zigzag stitch. This required getting the trusty Bernina back out, since the Juki does not do anything but straight stitch. Note the use of the very sexy and high-tech masking tape for basting purposes.

After the panels were all attached, here’s what I ended up with:

At this point, I trim off the edges and put on the binding. This is a faced binding which I turn to the back so it doesn’t show. Now all that remains is to do the painting. After the first few layerings, here’s how it currently looks:

Several more layerings of color will be needed to achieve the final depth and richness I’m after. I should be finished by the end of this weekend if all goes according to plan. But other plans for this weekend include writing an 8-10 page paper for Art & Cultural Heritage class, finishing four 22×30 paintings for Watermedia II, doing client corrections on two freelance design projects, and celebrating Mother’s Day and my birthday, both tomorrow!

I’m certainly not trying to say I’m amazing — flat-out crazy for trying to do everything at once would be much closer to the mark. It is very hard to try to do so many things at once and do them all at your very best level of accomplishment. I’ve found myself having to compromise a lot this semester, which I really do hate. I’ve always been (OK, at least since graduating from high school) kind of a sociopath about wanting all As in school. But really, who cares? I’m not some young kid who’s going to be out looking for my first job and has nothing else but a grade-point average to prove my worth. Why can’t I just relax and not stress out about it?

Since I had three studio classes this semester, it really was too much and I just could not devote the amount of time to every assignment that I would have liked. I did make some work that I was pretty happy with, but I wonder how much better I could have done with more time and proper focus? Well, I’ll start posting some of it soon and you can tell me what you think.

I have finals next week, and then on Friday I’m leaving to drive to Ohio, where I will be attending the SAQA Art & Excellence Conference (held in conjunction with the Quilt National Dairy Barn exhibit). I’ll be teaching a 3-day preconference class called Photoshop for Artists. Then I’ll be heading to the Surface Design Association Conference, Off the Grid, in Kansas City. I’ve been wanting to go to the SDA conference for years, and this was the first time it seemed that everything was in place for me to do it. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in this textile-focused world for a few days. Should be a lot of fun!

Today I took the dust cover off of my beloved Juki DDL-8700-7 for the first time in months. I haven’t done any sewing since the beginning of the semester back in January. I’ve been very busy with my studio classes in printmaking, watermedia, and painting, as well as a class for my general studies science requirement called Ecology for Non-Majors and a multi-cultural requirement class called Art & Cultural Heritage. In addition to this, I have several freelance design projects going on, but I really find it boring when people go on ad nauseum about how busy they are, so enough said about that.

The studio work has good and bad points. While it does push me to think in new directions and takes me out of my established patterns, it also distracts me from pursuing my own body of work. My mind is full of lots of ideas and concepts for things I want to do, none of them having anything to do with fabric. I’ve been really enjoying the painting and mixed media work I’ve been doing this semester, both in watermedia on paper and acrylic on canvas. So much so that I’ve wondered if I even want to go back to doing my textile work in the near term.

Well, something did come up that kind of forced the issue. Thanks to the very hard work of Kate and Judy at Translations Gallery, I have a commission! That’s the good news. Bad news: it’s due May 18, just a few short weeks away. The client wants another version of a piece I’ve already done, sold to EnCana Corp. last year, but now with a slight variation of the color on the bottom strip.

Iterations #1: Aquamarine, 30 x 66 inches, © 2006 Deidre Adams

So last night I got started on the prep work of cutting and ironing the fabric and basting the pieces together with the batting. Then this morning, I got down to the serious business of the quilting. Well, just a few minutes into it and I quickly remembered why I love the textile medium. The magic is still there. This medium has a tactile hands-on aspect that simply is not available in the other media I’ve been working in. I love the feeling of the fabric in my hands, the meditative back-and-forth rhythm of the stitching process, and the zone I get into when I’m working this way. The finished product has a dimension and depth that a painting lacks.

When I made this piece the first time, I was working with my Bernina Artista 180. At that time, I thought it was a pretty good machine, and it is, but I was feeling dissatisfied with it because of the restrictions of the small area of the center open space (I’m too lazy to look up the technical term for this, so if anyone knows offhand, please chime in) and also because I felt like it was too slow — I pretty much had it floored all the time and it still felt like it took forever to quilt something. It has a lot of fancy stitches and an embroidery attachment, which I have used exactly once. While it is a very fancy machine and cost a lot of money, it just was not built to do what I need it to do, which is take a huge pounding putting a gazillion stitches into some rather large pieces.

My first try at remedying the situation was the Grand Quilter from Pfaff. The store I went to is used to selling this machine with a frame and setup stuff that basically turns it into a long-arm quilting machine. I didn’t want all that stuff, I only wanted the machine, so they really weren’t equipped to deal with my questions. I bought it anyway and took the thing home, but within 30 minutes of using it, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with it. It was very loud and clunky and I returned it the next day.

The next step was to go to industrial. In Denver, that means Ralph’s Industrial Sewing Machine Company. This was a whole new realm for me. Turns out there is an amazing variety of industrial machines out there, including machines built to quilt mattresses, so they also had a hard time understanding what I needed. We went through quilt a few different models, with me testing each one using a sample quilt I had brought with me. I finally settled on this Juki machine because it sews 5,500 stitches per minute, has a large opening and an automatic thread cutter, and it counts down how much thread is left on the bobbin. Cool! It’s heavy and solid and sits in its own table. It is also amazingly smooth and quiet, and it has its own oil pan so I don’t have to oil it. Yay! Another bonus: everything in the industrial machine world, like thread and needles, is SO much cheaper than in the commercial home sewing world.

It was a bit traumatic getting the machine to work in the beginning. Because it was designed for straight-stitch garment sewing and I was doing free-motion quilting, which means yanking the piece in all different directions, I had a lot of thread breakage issues at first. Luckily, the technicians at Ralph’s are very professional, and the guy who came out on three different occasions finally hit on the right combination of presser foot, throat plate, bobbin case, needle, and customized hook assembly so that now it’s smooth sailing, full steam ahead. I can even use rayon thread with very little problem.

I’ve decide that this time, I’m going to work this piece in three separate sections and put them together after the quilting process, because it’s very difficult to keep the lines between the sections straight when each has different amounts of quilting from the others. This time, I finished the quilting on the first section of the piece in just a couple of hours — a huge improvement on the last time.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been making sheets of paper from cotton and abaca fibers which were obtained as “half stuff” (which means the fibers have been partially processed and sold as compressed dried sheets that the artist then needs to process further into usable pulp), as well as raw plant materials and recycled papers.

Here’s a selection of sheet samples:

From left to right, these are abaca, recycled bond paper printed with black inkjet ink (which turned blue when soaked), cattail mixed with abaca, daylily with abaca, green iris with abaca, kozo with bits of recycled cardboard, dried iris, and kozo papers.

There are several ways to process fiber. The preferred method is to own your own Hollander beater, a specialized machine made just for this purpose. Failing that, an ordinary household blender could be used, which works especially well with recycled paper. Plant fibers must first be cooked, and can then be processed either in a Hollander or blender, or by hand beating with some kind of mallet or a baseball bat — marvelous for releasing tension and long-suppressed aggressions.

Prepared fibers are then suspended in a vat of water, where they can then be made into paper with the use of a mold and deckle — two same-sized frames, one with a screen, which are dipped into the pulp to form the sheet.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve made two sizes of my own mold and deckle sets, plus acquired most of what I need for my own papermaking studio, which currently consists of outside on my deck. I don’t know how much paper work I’ll continue to do, but I do have some ideas about combining paper and textile processes for something new in the future.

I’ve been trying to develop ideas for my final project in the class. I want to use recycled paper, because the idea of making something out of another used-up thing has a huge appeal for me. I took a bunch of old unsuccessful watercolor paintings and turned these into a pulp by soaking several hours and then processing with the blender. Here’s a sheet made from this:

The chunky look of it is due to the fact that the original paper consisted of different compositions, including some good 100% cotton and some crappy student-grade stuff. The cotton breaks down better than cheap stuff, which stays chunky. The blue comes from the old placemat I pressed the wet sheet with. This is also how I got the ribbed texture.

I also have a huge stack of old maps which were rescued from a recycle bin where my husband works, and I would love to use these somehow. I need to think up some kind of a concept for them which makes sense as a finished piece, though, and that’s the stumbling block. Better get going on some brainstorming in the sketchbook.

Untitled, ©2008 Deidre Adams

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m so happy to finally get some time to go back into the studio, as of yesterday. This is a shot of a piece I started a long time ago but haven’t had time to work on. Yesterday I finally sat down and finished the quilting, about a full 8 hours’ worth or more. I don’t do the entire 8 hours in one sitting; that would be a bit excessive. The time is broken up by meals, trips downstairs to do laundry or let the can in/out, and once, to see the latest present she brought us (more about that later).

This is how a piece looks after quilting but before blocking, full of lumps and bumps and wonderful (at least to me) texture. The next step is to throw it in the washer to equalize the stitching, then I’ll pin it up to the design wall to dry and thus flatten it out. I almost wish I could leave it bumpy, but I haven’t become that independent in my art making just yet. I still worry too much about what others think.

I know I’m not the only artist who is conflicted by the dilemma of how best to balance the drive to make art and the drive to avoid being broke. This is partly why I haven’t written a post in a while. I’ve been in a sort of paralyzed, deer-in-the-headlights state trying to figure out what I should do with my life. This is how the inner conversation goes:

Self 1: “You’re an artist. What are you doing wasting time at this job doing stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with who you are in life when you could be in the studio developing your work? Who knows how many good years you’ve got left?”

Self 2: “That’s just crazy talk. How can you even think of quitting when the future is so uncertain? The economy is tanking — what if you end up homeless? Even in the best of circumstances, you’ll have no money to travel or do anything fun. Besides, it’s really a fantastic job — the people are great to work with, the pay is good, and you have security.”

Self 1: “Well ya know, you’re not getting any younger. If you don’t do something soon, before you know it, you’ll just end up being a tired old lady sitting in a cube, staring at a computer screen, wondering where your life went.”

Self 2: “But we have a 15-year-old who’s going to college in 2 years. It’s become glaringly apparent that he’s not likely to be getting a full-ride scholarship anywhere, so how will we pay for that if you’re unemployed?”

And so on and so forth, round and round. But this past week, Self 1 finally won out. I finally got the courage to tell my supervisor I’m leaving. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. Besides giving up a great job, my supervisor is one of my best friends, and I’ll miss talking with her on an almost-daily basis. But the future is wide open now, so it’s sink or swim!

Façade IV: Chrome Oxide
39 x 60 inches

Here is the finished version of the piece I wrote about on Jan. 3. This series is inspired by walls of old buildings which have been painted over numerous times, with the top layers wearing away to reveal what lies beneath; sometimes there’s also graffiti, and all of it blends together to form a rich visual texture. My process in painting these is somewhat analogous to what these walls undergo. I add various elements, then subtract parts of them by adding more layers, while the layers of paint are affected by the physical texture of the underlying support — in my case, it’s fabric and stitching.

This leads into what’s been an ongoing dilemma for me: how to categorize this work. I’ve been calling them “mixed media textiles” because I don’t want to use the dreaded “q” word, and they’re more than paintings. “Quilts” suffer a bad rap in the art world; no matter how serious the artist nor how important the work, the medium is considered a “craft” and is therefore inferior to painting. Thanks to the efforts of many artists in the field and organizations such as SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc.), some progress has been made toward overcoming this image, but the battle isn’t won yet.

Façade IV: Chrome Oxide (detail)

So to that end, here’s some art-related content. I’m working on two pieces now that aren’t coming together easily. Sometimes this happens, either because my original vision wasn’t very clear, or because it turned out to be hard to articulate. Let’s just take one of them to discuss for now.

I started the painting on this one a few weeks ago. I had a very clear idea of the colors I wanted to use and how I wanted to divide up the composition, but it just isn’t working at this point. It feels like 3 separate panels, and they aren’t integrated. I like each separate section, but they just don’t make sense together.

To attempt to solve this, I changed the color for the middle section. It became very flat at that point, so I used some dark values to bring out the shapes from the original piecing and make it more dimensional, and I changed some of the values in the vertical sections. It’s still not where I want it to end up, but it’s getting there.

I’ll keep working it at it.