Painting and Drawing

Save Your Passion

There's Always a Reason

She Became Preoccupied

Light of the Moon

I've been adding layers of paint or pastel or cheesecloth or block print to these four works on canvas. I have no idea how or if they will turn out.

It's elating.

the dream house story

October 2, 1992 journal entry

I drove out to Debbie's with the proposal for 'artist in the school'. They were blowing up the road, digging at it with backhoes. There were hardly any flagmen – you were just supposed to go slowly. Debbie had my dream house, straight out of Harrowsmith, looking over a peaceful little lake just right for the kids to go boating on. There was a gazebo with a fireplace and wooden floors, beautiful table with chairs, big windows.

“I’m so glad to see this” I told her. “It makes me believe the world might be OK after all.” “Yes, I understand” she said. I turned away from her to look out the window. Why couldn’t we have done this? Built that house by the beaverpond in Thunder Bay? Why had we taken the step away – or around – and moved to Kenora instead?

She liked my writing. “You’re really good at being practical and clear, but there’s also so much heart” she said. She added a paragraph about the isolation of the area, and we clarified a bit about the folk shapes in two places. Other than that it was fine. We drank tonic water with ice and a slice of lime in the gazebo. The lake was shimmering in front of me.

At home, Ned got me to help him unlaoad a heavy iron stove that he'd bought on sale. He has plans. We have the supplies to build at least two dream houses.

Context or Aesthetic?

Fragile as a Leaf in Autumn 2003

How should I exhibit my quilts? Would I like the gallery to pay more attention to the work's context or to its aesthetic? If I choose context, would I have to face up to my biography? I am a mother who loves nature and worries about my family.

My quilts have longish titles. I use these instead of straight descriptions of the work or historic narratives of how it came to be created. The viewer already recognizes herself in the domesticity of these comfortable items. My titles are a way to reveal that inner mystery we also share.

What if I chose an aesthetic way to display them and they just had numbers? What if they were all called 'untitled'? It’s obvious that they are traditional women’s work about traditional women’s subjects but when these ‘domestic’ items are displayed in a white cube gallery setting, isn't that enough to elevate them into fine art? Won't people be affected by the lengthy time spent, recognize their own memories, come away transformed just by the work itself?

Nope.

remembering mother

backyard amazement, 1989

When I was little I designed pages and pages of paper doll outfits by laying my drawing paper over a separate drawing of a female figure, dressing her, then moving the paper and repeating with a different outfit.

My mom thought that I'd grow up to be a fashion designer.

When I was a young mom I painted my children doing their thing. Playing outside, finding bugs, diving backwards into sparkling water, wearing rubber boots.

My mom thought that I should be a children's book illustrator.


I miss you, mom.

Connecting

rejoined the SDA (Surface Design Association).
joined a-n.co (art network)
subscribed to Crafts (UK).

All online.

Longing

It can be argued that humanity’s horrific descent during World War II left modernist artists of the 50's little choice but to work abstractly in their search for something elevating and spiritual. They used the traditional art media; oil paint on canvas or bronze.
Maybe it's our troubled times, but I think we've returned to this longing. Many artists working today are attempting to lift their audience to some mysterious other place. The difference is that most of them work without any “art” media at all.

stem stitching

The fabric is three layers of linen the same height as me. The blue thread is linen floss. The white thread is lace making cotton size 60 cardonnet.


I've finally got my essay text edited to 3000 words.
Oona took some great photos of my busy hands doing something else. Click here to see.

Head Shot

I am posting the press release that went out today for the LaCloche art show coming up locally this summer. Jon Butler asked me for a 'head shot' and a bio last week. I have never been happy about putting photographs of myself in front of the world, preferring to hide behind my work and my children. However, we are who we are I guess.

Here is the text that goes with the press release, and the artwork.

Featured Artist

Our 2009 Distinguished Artist is Judy Martin.

Judy maintains a working studio in downtown Little Current that looks out on the North Channel and the historic swing bridge. Her wide range of art media includes drawings and paintings on paper and canvas, fabric and paper collage, experimental work with wax and hand stitched large wall quilts.

Judy grew up on a farm in the Fort Frances area of Northwestern Ontario and moved to Manitoulin Island in 1993. Although she already has a fine arts degree from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Judy embarked on a second one by distance from Middlesex University in the UK three years ago. Studying art at the university level informs her practice with art history and theory and gives her work a certain technical discipline.

Last summer the Gore Bay museum mounted ‘Red Thread’, Judy’s twenty-first solo exhibition. She has also participated in over sixty group exhibitions across Canada and the USA and her work is in several public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank.

Judy and her husband Ned live on Manitowaning Bay. Together they have raised four environmentally concerned young adults.

Her work can be seen year round at the Art Gallery of Sudbury’s art rental space as well as seasonally at the Perivale Gallery on Manitoulin. As well, Judy keeps an online journal where she publishes a piece of her art and writes about being an artist regularly. A link to this blog is on her web site. www.judithmartin.info

On July 3 between 4 and 6 p.m. there will be a Distinguished Artist workshop with Judy Martin. This workshop is open to all artists who have entered the La Cloche Art Show.

Watch for more information on the 2009 workshop.

p.s. The LaCloche exhibit attracts a huge amount of entries in so-called fine art media such as paintings in all mediums, photography with very few mixed media pieces. It's rather daring of the exhibition committee to invite me to be the distingusihed artist because of my unconventional mix of techniques. I hope that the artists who enter this year feel invited to be experimental, take risks, have fun.

Judy Chicago

Three tickets arrived in the mail yesterday for the Judy Chicago event in Toronto on February 12 and I've made a date to attend with our two youngest daughters. I'm looking forward to a few days in the big city so that I can take in some art exhibits at the textile museum and the newly renovated art gallery of Ontario. Judy Chicago has made a real difference to art history and it should be really interesting to hear her speak with Maura Reilly and Jenni Sorkin.

From very early on (age 5 or 1o) I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history. I developed an “oppositional gaze”. I knew that I did not wish to become the object of the male gaze – I wanted to do the gazing and the painting. It is crucial to understand that one of the ways in which the importance of male experience is conveyed is through the art objects that are exhibited and preserved in our museums. Whereas men experience presence in our art institutions, women experience primarily absence, except in images that do not necessarily reflect women’s own sense of themselves.”

Therefore, since the early 70’s, I have been on a path whose goal has been to bring female experience into the very mainstream of art history – and not as an add on.
Judy Chicago

Yes We Can

YES
WE
CAN I'm so happy for the United States today.
Our dual-citizenship grandson.

art and life

I've added a second layer to this piece today.

Ned's home.

Fast Art

This month at the studio I began four new mixed media pieces. I did not spend a lot of time on them - about two or three days each. Layers of magazine images, art postcards and cloth on canvas were covered over with further layers of acrylic medium and pigments. Sometimes I drew (carved)a dot pattern into the result with a graphite pencil while the paint was still wet. I think I'll stop for a while and let myself absorb the imagery. I plan to add more layers and will most likely begin with some handstitch. The vertical arrangment of peach colour squares is a series of small paper and fabric collages on wool blanket. They also wait to be obsessively stitched into.








Frida Kahlo layered.

Slow Art

I have finally finished the hand quilting on this 75" square velvet and cotton quilt. It has been in the works since December 2002 (about six years). It has seen me through a lot of life; a birth, a marriage, three deaths, career changes, and my nest emptying. I have not worked on it every day, there have been months when it lay abandoned.

I go back and forth about this passion of mine. It's not art I think. It doesn't speak a modern language. Many art quilts our there resemble abstract paintings. They steer clear of traditional patterns. This piece is based on simple first shapes, squares, diamonds, crosses. It calls out to be touched. It wants to wrap you up and keep you safe.


I can't stop making these bed-sized wall pieces. I have decided to call this piece, Slow Art.

"For four decades craft artists were misguided in trying to make painting and sculpture often forgetting or disparging what was useful and valuable and distinctive about crafts. Some of the distinctive qualities of craft that Janet Koplos identifies are attention to surface and its subtleties, scale that is keyed to the human body, and tangibility. Koplos suggests that craft's best route to art is to capitalise on its strength, its own character, doing the things that other art mediums can't do." Ilze Aviks in reference to Janet Koplos' 1992 essay "In Considering Crafts Criticsm"

Challenging the norms

Robert Rauschenberg
1925 - 2008
age 40 in this photo

Louise Bourgeois
born 1911
age 64 in this photo






Ann Hamilton
born 1956
age 29 in this photo



These are the artists that I'm profiling in my essay. The essay question reads:

How have artists used techniques other than painting to challenge the norms established by modernism?

Well, I can't imagine Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko dressing up like this can you?

home alone

Sonnet XIV detail, 25th anniversary quilt 1998

Ned went to Toronto for a few days to take in the boat show. I stayed here to teach piano and write my essay and stay with the dog etc etc. I am happy to be home alone as I am able to devote time to my art stuff and not be distracted by so called normal activities.

It's really really cold here though. We heat our house with wood and I miss him already.

Local Colour

The group exhibition, Local Colour, opens this coming Saturday at the Art Gallery of Sudbury and I have no idea which of my pieces Krysta Telenko (the new curator) will include. It would be great is she shows my Emily Carr quilt and perhaps this watercolour.

For a list of Local Colour artists, click here.

Linda Finn is also having an opening on the same day (January 17) and will speak about her work at 1 p.m. I hope that I will be able to attend. Linda is from Eliot Lake and besides being a good friend of mine, her work is really very good.

art theories

There are many different art theories.
Ritual theory
Formalist theory
Imitation theory
Expression theory
Cognitive theory
Post-modern theory
Feminist theory

A theory is more than a definition. A theory is a framework. A theory helps things to make sense. Many modern artworks challenge us to figure out why, on any theory, they would count as art. Theories guide us in what we value, guide us in what we dislike. They inform our comprehension and introduce new generations to our culture.

Cynthia Freeland

My research portfolio

Rain Cape watercolour with tissue paper and coloured pencil - 1983?

This entire weekend is being devoted to organizing my research portfolio for the online university course I'm taking on 20th and 21st century art and design. I'm completely bogged down with notes I've made on the required reading done over the last three months. The topics? Modernism, the gaze, the body, women and art, post modernism, the avant garde, the 'other'. Doing a reading course has allowed me some time in my studio to do my own work, but getting it ready to ship off to the UK has caught up with me now.

The pictured image was scanned from a slide. I don't know where the original is or even if it still exists.

New art histories

Finally getting the tree undressed, ten ornaments at a time.
Finally getting my art history work organized.

Traditional art history states that art is about universal human experience but Marxist art history says that this is just not true. Art is a weapon employed by the middle class in an ideological struggle for cultural dominance. The kind of education that art historians require is limited to members of a leisured and wealthy social class.

Other new ways of looking at art history are from a feminist viewpoint or from a non-western viewpoint. Art History is being re-written and it's very different from what it was thirty years ago.

African Threads

Valerie Hearder has started a new blog, African Threads, about the African embroideries she brings to North America. She speaks eloquently about the Stephen Lewis Grandmother to Grandmother foundation which she supports with a donation of 15% of her profits. Several new embroideries came in to Val's etsy store just before Christmas.

I attached this one to a cloth bag for Connie and pieced some velvet around another to make a pillow for Nancy.

Me and Louise

self portrait - age 40

You worry about everything that you do.
You look away from the things that are hard to do.
You are always making excuses for yourself.
You think you are always right.
You lack faith in yourself.
You cannot see the other person's point of view.
You avoid people, live too much within yourself.
You have no aim in life.
You lack outside interest.
You have fits of temper.
You go around with a chip on your shoulder.
You neglect physical health, appearance.
You are not tolerant and have no control of your emotions.
You cannot form friendships.
You are unable to laugh at a situation or at yourself.

From Louise Bourgeois' diary, May 6 and 7 1950

The light of the moon

I love the philosophy of connecting real life to art and have been practicing it for thirty years. It's difficult to actually do it however. How? Why? When? Where? does a 'normal' woman fit the creation of heart stopping art into her life?

How do you push art out from yourself when the rewarding job, the strong marriage, the amazing children, the challenging essay-writing, the new diet, regular sleep and exercise, and the nightly news all compete for time and emotional energy?
How? By reminding myself that I'm lucky.
Why? Because I have to.
When? In the middle of the night.
Where? Everywhere. All the time.

Delivered

protection tunic 2006 Delivered this.
protection dress 2006 Picked this one up.

We made another road trip to Sudbury today to exchange my work for the Local Colour portfolio. Living in the North increases the time that the business side of my so-called career takes. I'm starting to question myself again. It's nice that Ned supports me by doing the driving. I can stitch.

Gifted

from april

from grace


from oona

These are some of the hand made gifts that talented local elves created. Thank you girls. Alas, there were many other gifts exchanged here over Christmas that I did not manage to photograph before they were packed into suitcases.

road trip to Owen Sound

more vulnerable 2008

Ned and I drove this piece to Owen Sound today for the Convergence exhibit. A seven hour drive (one way) it would have been cheaper to ship it. We enjoyed the beautiful day however - took the dog, listened to an audio book, ate in restaurants.

Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg

It has been quite liberating to use my collection of images from magazines in combination with paint. Here is Joni Mitchell with text from an old journal.

By his constant experimentation with materials, Rauschenberg tampered with the definition of 'what is a painting'. from Rauschenberg Life and Art by Mary Lynn Kotz

You never know. There might be a reason for it.

New

red thread, 2008

I spent the afternoon in my studio today and began a new series of work. Although the idea had been growing for quite some time I didn't feel ready to go ahead with it until today. As soon as I woke up this morning I wrote a five page plan into my journal. All the steps. How I'd work back and forth between arbitrary rules and intuitive play. How I'd use up some of my stalled ideas in this new series. How I'd purge old thoughts and re-create them new. I THINK the first piece went well, but it was too dark to photograph by the time I was done. Maybe I'll show it in tomorrow's post.

While at the studio I removed some work from the small gallery space because it's necessary to update my art rental portfolio for the Art Gallery of Sudbury. Click here to see the Local Colour portfolio as it is currently.