not sure

(These leaves are called gunnera and I love them)

not so sure about my work
not sure if it is necessary

yes, it gives me reasons
to get up
to dream, but
it will not save the world

when I was a young mom
I took my first fine arts degrere from Lakehead University

I wrote an essay about Kathe Kollwitz
and Henri Matisse

( I thought it was a rhubarb plant when I planted it 25 years ago)


My thesis was that Kollwitz made her work
because she wanted to change the world somehow
She hoped to make a difference

She was against war
and her paintings and prints about human sorrow
about mothers mourning
and women raging
moved me

they moved me a lot

I was irritated at that time
when I was young
by Matisse
who went to the south of France
and said that he wanted to make
art that soothed people

he wanted his work to make them feel
as if they were sitting in an armchair
and could forget about the trouble out there in the world

(it's sometimes called Dinosaur food)


my teacher at the time criticized me
for these ideas
She was right
I based my argument on nothing
but gut reaction

I looked at Kollwitz's work and saw her clear message

I loved Matisse, but didn't know why
and his words
made me

not sure

now that I have matured as an artist
I understand Matisse

My own work
is about finding heart in the inner world
not the outer

but these days
Kollwitz comes to mind

and I'm not sure 

cross and plus

yellow-blue 9 patch 4 by Eleanor McCain  2003  52"x52"

A second post about the cross symbol.  Some prefer to call it the plus sign....that's kinda nice.

Eleanor McCain's work (above) with this shape is nearly iconic.  See more beautiful quilts using the cross on her website.

 A Galla Placidia by simon hantai oil and wax on linen  130" x 167" 1958-59

Simon Hantai (1933-2008) was given a retrospective in 2013 in the Centre Pompidou.  Renowned for folding the canvases before painting them, his shibori-like practice had stunning results.  If you have time, the video of the installation is worthwhile.  Here.

I saw these two paintings by Simon Hantai in 2009 when we were in Paris.  So moved, I wrote about both my journal, and as I look at them again now, I am still inspired.  He worked on the pink one in the mornings, and the darker one in the afternoons every day for one year.  (this detail found here)  

Ecriture Rose, coloured ink and gold leaf on linen, 130 x 167 inches by Simon Hantai 1958-59

Both were created early in his career (he was 35) and I like them because they are covered with small marks, revealed when one steps closer.  Another video that shows close ups of Ecriture Rose is here.

ecriture rose by simon hantai ink and gold leaf on linen 1958

Simon Hantai withdrew from the art world in 1983 at the age of 60 because he didn't like the market-driven aspect of it.  He continued to paint however - just didn't exhibit for 15 years.  This detail about his career is very moving for me and is written about in this hyperallergic article.

cross blanket by pia wallen 

Lastly for this post, Swedish designer Pia Wallen's blankets are currently inspiring (other) modern quilters too.  Example here.

Perception goes on all the time

 marble fragments from an imperial tomb, 13th-14th century, Istanbul

13th and 14th century marble fragments from Euphemia Martyrion, Istanbul

 a gravestone above, part of an arch below

Travelling is a rich experience.  I receive and respond to so much stimulation in a rush.
I perceive.
Agnes Martin says that perception is the primary experience and that we continue to do it, even when we are asleep.

I packed Agnes Martin's book of writings for this trip to Turkey.  3rd time reading it.

If you do what you want to do and what you can do

and if you can then recognize it

you will be contented.

You cannnot know what it will be 

but looking back you will not be surprised

at what you have done.   Agnes Martin

All images are from the Archeology Museum in Istanbul. 

Interview question

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed

World of Threads question: Are there any specific historic artists that have influenced your work? Please explain.

Judy Martin answer: I have been fascinated with art all my life and am humbled by my ongoing studies. I got my first fine art degree in the early 90's and was influenced at that time by the work of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro and by the ideas of Judy Chicago.

It's hard for me to say if one or two specific artists influenced my work. I have been inspired by so many artists and types of artwork. I like very early Greek statues, I also like Giotto's simple figures from pre renaissance Italy. I like the humanness of Velasquez's faces and the passion of Goya's narratives. I like Picasso, the flaunting of his masculinity and the immensity of his vision, I like Matisse, such simplicity in his lines and shapes, I like Van Gogh, the energy and inner passion in his wonderful brush strokes. I like how DuChamp made us notice the mysterious in the every-day and how David Hockney realized time passing with photography. Whoops, those were all men I just mentioned. But that was the art history I studied. Joyce Wieland, Reason over Passion

My work is influenced by Joyce Wieland's use of feminine imagery and domestic technique, Louise Bourgeois's grand idea that art is therapy, Emily Carr's connection with the spirit of nature and Mary Pratt and Mary Cassatt, who painted women, children and the domestic.


I also love Mark Rothko and Paul Klee, those guys who painted empty contemplative space and who attempted to make visible the invisible.


Agnes Martin's committment to solitude and work and Frida Kahlo's confrontational look at her own life story through painting. Those ideas inform my work.

Recent Australian acrylic painting is very inspirational right now. The empty spaces, the human gesture of line and shape. Wow.


Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison
Indian embroidered tunic

I am in awe of those anonymous early quilt makers who were able to really see their surroundings and create beautiful and meaningful repeated patterns. I have respect and admiration for early Amish quilt makers, as their placement of colour is fantastic. For a long time I have admired the earthy minimalism in Dorothy Caldwell's resist dyed work. She remains a huge inspiration as does the passion of quilt artist Nancy Crow.

World textiles knock me over. African, Indian, Japanese cloth. Embroidery, dye methods, meaning.

Creative Painting

Marc Chagall

Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine" 1917, oil on canvas. The artist was 30 years old when he painted this. His paintings are usually dream scapes or childhood narratives, every day worlds full of the wonderful and miraculous. Chagall is famous for his use of colour and his central theme of LOVE.


Naata Nungurrayi

Untitled 2002, acrylic on canvas. The artist was 70 years old when she painted this. Born 1932, she has led a traditional nomadic bush life and now paints instinctively, using line, colour, and form in an immediate and breath taking way.

I'm prepping to teach painting tomorrow and am trying not to fall back on my own familiar ways. It's so difficult to push myself over into the unknown.

Two Grande Canadian Dames

Reason Over Passion 1968
quilted cloth assemblage
collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
by Joyce Wieland (1931 - 1998)

Two Vests 1972
Pressed and printed with ink onto paper
by Betty Goodwin (1923 - 2008)
These two artists will forever be an inspiration for Canadian (textile) artists.

Notes re: Judy Chicago

I bought little notebooks for each of us at the nearest Shopper's Drug Mart before the lecture last Thursday. I like to scratch a few words to help me remember. Allyson Mitchell, the very intelligent, ambitious (and young) curator of "When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago and Stitch" and its companion show "She will always be younger than us" moderated the panel. Allyson said: "Feminism is always as young as its youngest enthusiasts".

Jenni Sorkin spoke next and reminded us that Judy Chicago had worked in opposition to the current feminist themes of her time like performance and video, choosing instead monumental projects like 'the dinner party' and 'the birth project'. As well, Jenni raised the question of the marginalization of fibre art. With slides she showed that at the same time as the break through feminist collaboration 'Woman House' there was an exhibit of vibrant fibre art taking place nearly next door that has not been remembered in art history, not even feminist art history. Why?

Maura Reilly, respected New York curator and writer about women's art said that she was 'tear-jerked' when she saw the stitched pieces in the two exhibits at the textile museum. She said that she had never seen them together like this before and that the sheer amount of work as well as it's haptic quality affected her greatly.
(Maura Reilly is responsible for finally getting The Dinner Party a permanent home in the Brooklyn Museum in New york and is thus very familiar with Judy Chicago's work.)

When Judy Chicago finally rose to speak she answered Allyson's comment about the monumentality of her work by saying that she opposes ephemeral art by women because it just continues the process of erasure of women artists. Even worse, the women do it to themselves. She had found out that art institutions didn't want to exhibit women's work when she had so much trouble exhibiting 'the dinner party' and 'the birth project'.

Robert Rauschenberg

Blue Urchin (Hoarfrost) - Robert Rauschenberg

Textile artists continue to be inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s radical use of cloth. The Hoarfrost series that he made in 1974 was very well received by the critics of the time. In them he used a variety of transparent, translucent and opaque fabrics ranging from humble cotton cheesecloth to exotic satin and silk on which he printed text and images from newspapers and magazines.

Displayed by pinning the fabrics directly to the wall at their top corners, the stress lines of the hanging soft material become part of the composition.

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.

The ROCI project

what am I waiting for? 2005

On December 14, 1984 Robert Rauschenberg initiated his ROCI project (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange)by inviting representatives of the art world to the United Nations in New York. His U.N. presentation stated that one-to-one contact through art was a non-elitist way to share exotic and common information. He had given up on the politicians.

"It's now up to the artists to wage peace" he said, and travelled from nation to nation, creating art about what he experienced and exhibiting it. He visited places like Tibet, China, Japan, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, and Moscow over a period of twelve years. Record - breaking crowds attended the exhibitions. He acted on his long-held belief that "the artist must be engaged in determining the fate of the earth, that the artist cannot stand aloof as an observer."

He did the ROCI project when he was in his 60's. "I decided that instead of having a mid-life crisis I'd do something about the world crisis."

Hang on

I think that it’s really difficult to get the system of galleries, curators, critics, and all the rest to look seriously at artwork that is made with roots in the craft or folk tradition.

Two things have to happen. The first one is that the artists working with ‘low’ materials like fabric and stitch have to raise their own bar and make really challenging fine art. The other thing is that curators are going to have to be more open-minded.

Yes, the boundaries are changing and more fine art is being made using metaphorically rich domestic techniques than before but when we consider the huge numbers of hard working women artists who are still being left out of art history, well it’s just not fair.

Squarely in the Centre Of Visual Culture: American Pieced Quilts of the 19th Century

Pieced quilts made in America during the last half of the 19th century exhibit an unusually distilled and bold sense of graphic design. The women who made those powerful quilts lived during a time of social upheaval. They were repressed by Victorian ideals, widowed by the civil war, startled by Darwin’s discoveries, inspired by transcendentalist thinking, and bombarded with a mixed bag of criticism and encouragement from women activists. They also had access to a wide variety of domestically produced cloth and many opportunities to publicly exhibit their art form in well-attended fairs. Here were artists who used the quilt medium to express personal creativity and spiritual ideas to make quilts so powerful, beautiful and strong that they stand as icons of inspiration for quilt artists and painters to this day. Log Cabin, Barn Raising, Wool, velvet pressed. Pennsylvania Mennonite 82" x 83" 1880 - 1890

Log Cabin, Something More Magical Than It ever Was, recycled family clothing and silk, photos and paintings transferred to cloth, 90" x 90", made by moi in 1991.

Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I’s court was so fine that in 1595 a German visitor remarked that “at no other court have I ever seen so much splendour and such fine clothes.” Velvet, furs, jewels of all sorts, gold braid, silk fabric, and fine linen under clothing were used for both men and women's elaborately constructed garments.

Materials used for this collage: Vogue April 2007 magazine pages

New Art History

Values such as 'making-do' and 'necessity' have been projected onto 19th century quiltmakers, but this demeaning idea has got to be re-evaluated. Nineteenth century women had access to a wide array of inexpensive materials as well as exhibition space in the form of huge well-attended fairs for their quilt art. It is my thesis that 19th century quiltmakers were artists and knew themselves to be. It's true that formal art education was not easily available to all women but I would suggest that it's also true that many of those women preferred (as I do) to work with cloth and thread.

"If trends in visual and cultural studies and the so-called 'new art history' truly aim to revolutionize an understanding of the past, the aspirations and cultural productions of those women who worked in media heretofore outside the purview of mainstream art history - cloth and thread - must be taken into account." Janet Catherine Berlo

Mid 19th Century North American time line

Early feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton criticizes sewing: "As a paid occupation it is unhealthy, as an amusement it is contemptible"

"Roughing it in the Bush" by Susanna Moodie is published.

The American Civil war creates many widows.

A cult of "true womanhood" pervades.

Godey's Lady's Book provides monthly advice and patterns to women.

Piet Mondrian is born. His theory: "The appearance of natural form changes, but reality remains constant" is important in the development of modern American art.

Amish women are seen at a railway station and their colour saturated woolen clothing is described by Phoebe Gibbon in her journal.

William Morris' Aesthetics Movement arrives from England.

Women save their treasured silk party and wedding dresses in order to sew the fabrics into quilts.

Cezanne exhibits in Paris. His belief that all nature can be reduced to a cylinder, sphere or cone is influential.

Young women

make
12 quilt tops during their adolescence. These are quilted during neighbourhood parties called quilting bees.


A 13th quilt is made when she becomes engaged and is quilted carefully by herself and her mother.

Fragile as a Leaf in Autumn

The feminist movement was important in the development of the art quilt.

"This movement, which formed with the diverse goals of securing equal political and economic rights for women, also fostered a deep abiding interest in traditional female craft." Penny McMorris

Women artists have increased in stature since the 70's and there are more of us. Many women artists have discovered quilt making. It is not surprising that a group of serious quilt artists has emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century. However, quilts are still not accepted as fine art in the male dominated art world.

Katharine and Dore

While researching my essay I was pleased to learn that women were important in the art scene in New York during the 50's and 60's. So much has been written about those 'genius' male artists that it is easy to overlook the women who were involved. I researched Katharine Kuh because she was the person that Mark Rothko called first when he decided to withdraw his paintings from the Seagram building. Kuh had curated Rothko's first solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956 and remained friends with the artist for the rest of his life. Another close friend of Rothko was Dore Ashton, also an art critic. When Dore visited Rothko in his studio and they were surrounded by the dark red and purple Seagram Murals he told her "I have created a place". Dore Ashton's book About Rothko (1973) remains in print to this day. (Because I have not read it I won't give an opinion on its merit but I will say that I am reading James B Breslin's biography of Mark Rothko and would give it four stars.)

My (family) connection to Mark Rothko

Here is the story of how I am connected through my family to Mark Rothko and the Seagram Murals. Samual Bronfman (a Canadian) had purchased the Seagram beverage company in 1928. By that time he was well on his way to having made $800 million between 1919 and 1934 bootlegging to the U.S. during prohibition. In 1957 The Seagram company would be soon be 100 years old and Mr. Bronfman chose to celebrate by building a skyscraper in the "international style" in down town New York.

He commissioned a design and sent the drawings to his more knowledgable daughter (Phyllis Bronfman Lambert) who was studying art in Paris at the time. She made 16 or so suggestions, and so he asked her to take on the project. Phyllis accepted proposals from five architects, (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gropius, I.M. Pei and Mies Van der Rohe. Mies won the competition. The building would be 39 stories tall, sheathed in bronze and tinted glass.

There was to be a Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor and Philip Johnson was recruited by Phylis Lambert to design that. Philip and Phylis commissioned Mark Rothko to provide 500 to 600 square feet of oil paint on canvas for $35,000. He would be given $7000 up front, and the remainder would be divided over the next four years.
OK, here is how my family is (sorta kinda) connected to the project (and hence to Rothko):

Phyllis Lambert founded the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. Last summer my son (Jay) EJ Martin was one of three graduate students who won a research grant from the CCA. Jay actually participated in a luncheon meeting with the regal Phyllis. His photographic research from that summer can be viewed here.
By the way, Rothko changed his mind about hanging his paintings in a restaurant and withdrew from the project. The paintings that he created for the Four Seasons instead now hang in three major art galleries around the world: the Tate Modern in London England, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, USA and the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art in Japan.

ABstract EXpressionism and HIghway 17

The nineteen hour round trip drive between Kingston and Manitoulin goes so much more quickly with an audio book. This time I listened to Seek My Face by John Updike. This novel refers to the 50's and 60's art scene in the USA and is quite well done. The author used the art and life stories of such art giants as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Lee Krasner and Robert Rauschenberg among others to create his fiction and gives an interesting perspective of that period in art history.

Why am I interested in Mark Rothko?

1. Why is his work said to be spiritual?

2. He repeats the same subject over and over and over. Is he fooling us or is he searching for truth?

3. What was his personal life like? Was he happily married? Did he have kids? He commmitted suicide – was he mentally ill his whole life or just severely depressed at the end of it? In order to be a great artist is it necessary to be a little crazy?

4. Why are the Seagram murals  considered to be key works in 20th century art history? Does it have more to do with the controversy surrounding their acquisition than the paintings themselves?

5. Is it even possible to find the “spiritual” in art?