Get Well Soon

I hope that your cold gets better soon, dad.

women I admire

Magdalena Abakanowicz born 1930. Conte pencil drawing from a photograph taken by Artur Starewicz when she was 52. Here's a sample of her work.

Louise Bourgeois born 1911. Conte pencil drawing from a photograph taken by Peter Bellamy when she was 85. Here's a sample of her work.

Both are from a generation (or two) before me and they continue to make profound artwork after long and succssful careers. They are strong role models for women artists and I admire them.

art is

Art is the guarantee of sanity. Louise Bourgeois

Currently on pause in my creative output

self at age one and a half from a photo 2008

I explain to myself and others why I'm not participating in so many shows, why I'm not teaching art this year, why I'm not even making new art. I've 'gone back to school'. In 2006 I enrolled in the Opus textile school of art based in the UK and am pursuing a second fine arts degree, this time in mixed media textiles. I am really enjoying the workload (which is rigorous) and am being transformed from the inside out. However, I am just not able to create new work of my own, and instead have to have faith in myself that what I eventually make will be better.
Right now I'm in a reading course and have been reading about other women artists. Some of the new ones I've discovered and am inspired by are:
Susan Hiller and her amazing piece "From the Freud museum"
Christine and Irene Hohenbuchler and their work blurring the boundaries of female craft and art that gives voice to those in institutions
Marlene Dumas and
Ida Applebroog who paint
And many others.

Do you use your body as subject matter for your art?

The Mother/The Child 1988

I have made many self portraits over the years, but when I think about them I realise that they are not about my body so much as they are about my concerns.

What is my main concern? What do I love? What do I fear?

Northern Ontario life

I've spent most of the last three days in the car. At least when Ned does the driving I am able to stitch.

I am a middle child

photos by Paul and Pauline Johnson

women's art

"Women's art from the past has been excluded from the main stream - why? The culture of women will remain unrecognized until women themselves regard their own past with fresh insight. The answer does not lie in the mainstream at all, but in sharing women's information with women."
Miriam Schapiro 1978


Coddling a cold, I was able to do a lot of internet research for my university course today. It was rewarding to come across these intelligent art blogs.
daily serving: contemporary art
modern and contemporary art
view on Canadian art
art intelligence

Visual language

None of us were able to truly communicate. We were not able to say how we felt.
It's easier to show it.

peace

in Kingston

High speed internet has aided my awareness of the grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramovic. I am impressed with her work. In the afternoon, my father and I walked over to the river to visit the beech tree planted in memory of my mother.

visiting my father

My father and brother have set up a computer for me to use while in Kingston. This image of our kids and the Lake of the Woods is in it.

personal mature body of work

It has been amazingly gratifying to have received my Opus assessment today for last summer's work with the figure. I realise that my life's work is such a small speck in the large world of women artists. Who do I think I am? Living on this peaceful island in the middle of Canada with my gentle husband, moving my needle in and out of cloth and thinking that I might make a difference? My work has not been published. Other than through this blog and my website, it's hardly even been seen outside of Ontario.

Although the main reason I study with Opus is to help me lift my practice, a secondary one was to have peers that I respect really look at my work and give me feedback about it.

In the assessment, the word 'stunning' was used!

Pay attention

Quilt making helps me explain my situation. I'm a mother. I'm an artist. I spend a lot of intimate quiet time with each quilt wrapped in thought.

Anyone contemplating quilts and quilt making must enter this idea of being wrapped. Quilts help us to remember to find time to be silent. To be thoughtful. To pay attention.

absence, memory

Poco a poco little by little

Remembrance

I think about their mothers.
Only twenty one, twenty one, and twenty two years old, they died September 3, 2008 in Afghanistan.

ink, watercolour, cloth, metal, stitch

I'm preparing a CD of digital images to send to Dylon Whyte, my web site man who updates my web site for me. This mixed media piece will be going into the NEW WORK gallery sometime over the next few weeks.

Pattern language

I find that my work is making a shift in the repeated marks I like to use. The dot and the cross are appearing more now and I think that they are replacing the heart and the spiral, at least for a while.

The heart and the spiral are very curvy feminine shapes. Maybe this shift to more neutral shapes is an attempt to make my work more universal. However, I still want to use 'feminine' content and media. (domesticity, family, beauty, emotions, stitch)

realization

While cleaning my studio, I found several old self portraits. This one was done when I was thirty years old. The mirror says not anymore.

Reasons to live

I finally finished reading the Collected Stories of Amy Hempel . I kept reading because the author makes me reconsider relationships and loss.



"You think you're safe, the father thought, but it's thinking you're invisible because you closed your eyes."


Amy Hempel

Looking

I have so many old projects and have been spending some studio time just pinning them up on the wall and regarding them. Are they worth finishing? These photographs of my view of the Wikwemikong Penninsula were stitched together about two years after we moved to Manitoulin. A series of mixed media watercolours and some machine stitched paper pieces were inspired by them at that time.

Now I'm look at them with fresh eyes. I look and think. I still like them.

The Sound and The Fury

I finished listening to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (audio book) at the studio yesterday. This book is written in stream of consciousness style and it's been a while since I've read such challenging literature. I loved being lifted into a completely other place by the intelligent writing. I wish that I could create visual art as transformative.

What he wore last night

Trick or Treat!



He loves trucks and cars and wheels and all working man type things. (like his dad).