Opus Update

Since 2006, I've been studying for an honours fine art degree specializing in embroidery and mixed media textiles. The degree is validated by Middlesex University in London England and has been delivered to students in the UK and around the world by the Opus School of Textile Arts.

In February, Opus closed its doors. A new school started up and most of the teachers agreed to continue as if nothing had changed. This in itself is a vote of confidence for the new associate school. It's obvious to me that the main reason that Opus ran out of steam was because of the lengthy illness and subsequent death last November of its founder, Julia Caprara. In honour of that most inspiring artist, the new school is called The Julia Caprara School of Textile Art.

Why not?

I've been able to stitch into this linen piece in the evenings.

People ask me why am I taking this second fine arts degree? It takes so much of my time, shouldn't I stop procrastinating and get on with my own work? I'm studying 20th and 21st century visual art this winter and have not been able to do much of anything else art-wise, especially this last month.



Why am I doing this?
Well, Why not?

Louise Bourgeois

Femmes Maison - Louise Bourgois

At the age of 40, Louise Bourgeois, a wife and mother of three young boys, exhibited a group of painted abstract wooden figures in a gallery in New York. One of them, ‘Sleeping Figure’, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
She was part of that post war generation of women written about by the early feminists Simone de Bouvoir and Betty Friedan. One of those women who, because of the current ideals of post war America, probably experienced some of “the yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. …afraid to ask even of herself, the silent question, ‘is this all?’

Don't Abandon Me - Louise Bourgois

Because of her challenge to the status quo of society in general in the late 40’s and 50’s and to the masculine ethos of modernism, Louise Bourgeois’ work was looked at with renewed interest by the feminist movement in the early 1970’s and
1980’s. Lucy Lippard, the renowned feminist art critic wrote about her “Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker’s psyche. It can’t be categorised. Can’t be art historicised”.

Over her 70 year career she has not had a signature material, but has experimented with a wide variety and managed to remain ‘contemporary’ for three separate generations. She turns 98 this year and although she is an undeniable influence on younger women artists she remains famously neurotic.

“Art is the guarantee of sanity” is her mantra.

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?

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.

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.

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!

BOO! and one advantage of an empty nest

Last night as I got into my car in Little Current I noticed a crowd of teens, one with a kitten hat on, another with blackened eyes. I knew what they were doing - waiting for the bus that would take them over to the highschool Hallowe'en dance.
I said to myself - thank goodness, I don't have to worry about any of THAT anymore.

It's rare when I put up artwork by anyone else but today's image is a piece by Freddie Robbins, a knitter from the UK that I was introduced to today by my Opus tutor, Davida MacDonald. Davida also suggested that I look at hyperbolic crochet, the exhibition that started in Australia and is touring the world. I like that this co-operative exhibition is concerned as much with ecology as it is with women's traditional textile work being taken seriously in the fine art world.

Waiting for a photo from Oona of her Halloween costume project for the two and a half year old sweetie.

Julia Caprara

The textile world mourns Julia Caprara , director and principal of Opus School of Textile Arts who passed away Friday morning. When I was considering the degree program at Opus, Julia was the one who answered my questions on the phone and encouraged my enrollment. She was always professional, generous and kind and I regret that I did not get to meet her in person. Many Canadian textile artists have been inspired by her as she and her husband Alex have visited this country several times. Truly exceptional, she will be missed by so many of her students from around the world.

My friend and fellow Opus student Joanne Young informed me of this sad news by email early today and I've not been able to think of much else. Joanne also told me that Julia was able to put together a new book about embroidery and that it is excellent.

My heartfelt condolences to her family.

wool

Currently inspired by all things wool, I've started to stitch into a gold (on one side, peach on the other side)wool blanket. This artwork gives me a break from reading Clement Greenberg's famous essay . I'm trying to follow my intuition and not think so much.

drawing and painting the figure

Denying the idea that women could create children but not art I found that motherhood increased my creativity. Not only did I make every single stitch that my first baby daughter wore – knitted, crocheted, sewn - but I began to draw and paint her wonderful innocent beauty. By the time my son was born two years later (1980) I began to exhibit paintings of babies and young children and continued to do so for the next ten years (and two more babies). I became better and better at creating a narrative between children and natural light. Almost all the paintings I made during that period sold but I've saved a few so that each child can have a keepsake. I began to make quilts instead. Quilts satisfied me because they were huge multi layered projects that took a long time to make and yet survived constant interuption. (I was a busy mom) Quilts could also tell layers of deep psychological stories to those who understood the woman's code of traditional pattern and colour.

It's been a joy for me to return to drawing and painting the figure over the last few months in my Opus studies.

Opus update

pencil drawing

A new module begins this week for the Opus degree and I've just ordered a pile of books online. The titles are so enticing and I look forward to getting my isolated brain stretched. New for me will be Imaging Women - Cultural Representations and Gender by Bonner
Cubism: Movements of Modern Art by Cottington
Views of Difference: Different views of art by King
Feminism and Art History by Broude
The Body Imaged by Adler
I've been working very hard to complete the last module (figure drawing)but am not ready to post it yet.

Risk monkey

Pastel on 50" x 38" paper.
One thing that all of my Opus tutors have been telling me is that I need to take more risks.
"Screw your head off and put it under your arm" says Dorothy Tucker
"Work from your belly" says Mary Cozens Walker
"You're not alone. Every good artist faces this battle head on. Otherwise your work stays perfectly fine - but it's not enough. Enjoy the journey because you never get THERE." says Kate Green

"The Monkey parable: A monkey sees a nut in a hole and reaches in to grab it. Once he's closed his fist around it, he can't get his hand back out of the narrow opening. He can't free himself unless he lets go of the nut, but because he's afraid to lose it, he won't let go."

I'm like this monkey. I can draw and I can make good quilts. I'm afraid to let go of these things in order to free myself. It sounds silly, but it's really hard. To start making art directly from my imagination without knowing what I'll let come out. Terrifying.

We have our youngest daughter here this week and it's just so nice.

Back in my studio

Conte crayon on 50" x 38" paper.
We've been so busy with hosting family and friends at Ned's family cottage that we've hardly been on Manitoulin this summer. It seems like I only come back to do laundry. Actually working in the studio has been a rare event, and so it has been a treat to spend four hours there today.

Day Dreaming

Imagination is what augments those images we all carry with us of our house. The house is our corner of the world, it was our first universe. Our imagination continually seeks a house - it builds walls of shadows and finds an illusion of protection everywhere. Houses are where we day dream, where we access memory and imagination. We are always near poets. Houses shelter daydreams - they protect the dreamer and allows us to dream in peace. Day dreaming is pleasure.
Some ideas about the imagination paraphrased from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space

figures

Here are some of the fellow artists or volunteers who allowed me to draw them during the four and friends 3 day event. It was a satisfying weekend because of the interesting and kind people that I spent time with.

The Roof Project

stainless steel screening, polyester sheer, metallic thread
I've spent the last couple of months considering the shiny metal oblong of a barn roof. What does a barn roof do? It shelters animals from wet, cold, wind and keeps hay and seeds safe and dry. Like everyone else, I am concerned about the way that humans have changed the earth’s environment for the worse. I am a mother of four grown children who have been recently launched into this precarious world. If I could make an invisible roof to cover and protect my children wherever they may fly, I would. Wouldn’t any mother? But they must take their own risks, and for the good of us all, they must decide on their own future. plastic slide sleeves, maple keys, lupine pods and seeds, pussy willows, variety of threads
I began to make roof samples and found that one would lead to the next. I found the process of working through ideas and handling a wide variety of materials opened me up. It was difficult to stop thinking of new projects. Wool felt, copper and aluminium metal, white shiny cloth like satin and taffeta, blue sky, bird imagery, safety pins, vertical oblongs, cross-stitch, stainless steel screen, seeds, quilts, rolls of hay, on and on. These are some of the materials and imagery that have fed the roof project.

portfolio of samples

Candle wicking and metal on wool. Pins and linen on wool. Sheet aluminum and copper machine stitched to linen Eyelet stitch and hand quilting on hand dyed rayon.

another deadline

Overseas Opus students have an extra month to get their act together and that's such a relief for a busy gal like moi. I'm following through on a single idea to the nth degree - and coming up with a zillion samples and also a proposal. I've choosen an extended metal barn roof as my inspiration because it's so beautiful and nurturing.