never giving up on the art

september 28  hand quilting on something started earlier this year

 

september 29  hot wax, black cloth, a beautiful day

september 30  town studio

october 1 a new beginning

october 2  hot wax encaustic in Barb's studio

  october 3  visited the Cambridge art galleries with Barb
 Justin Ming Yong's two-sided piece, Sun In Eyes in foreground

october 5 recovered my studio bag with pieces of cloth that came to hand 

october 7 adding quilting stitches to the sleeve for Far Away Stars

october 8  packing up Far Away Stars / Cloudy Day to ship to Quilts=Art=Quilts

october 9 town studio

Blog update:  

For the next couple of months, I need to concentrate more on the neglected website. judithemartin.com  

My Process and Judy's Updates will continue as they are because they are both super easy to write, but the main blog, Judy’s Journal will morph to a photo journal (like today's post) for the next little while. 

Although I will continue the monthly emails until at least the end of the year, I may switch over to substack for updates.  We'll see.   

Thank you friends, for your continued support.   Never give up on your own creative practice.  

The Mother The Child and Joyce Wieland

In 1988 I was part of a group exhibition in Thunder Bay Ontario at the Definitely Superior Gallery that was entitled See Jane Sew Strontium.  The gallery had invited Joyce Wieland to attend the opening and give an artist talk and also a workshop the following day.  

I lived in Kenora at the time (6 hours by winter highway from Thunder Bay) and after a lot of deliberation, decided that I couldn't justify leaving my young family to attend the events.  I can't remember the exact reason, it may have been weather.

My friend Barbara Sprague was also included in this exhibition, and she was making the trip from Kenora to Thunder Bay and I asked her to deliver a letter to Joyce Wieland for me.   The other day, I came across the draft of my letter in a 1988 journal and that prompted me to find the artwork from that exhibition and re-photograph it for this blog post. The title of the piece is The Mother The Child.  

Dear Ms Wieland

First of all, let me say that I feel very connected to you through your work.  I saw your quilt, Reason Over Passion, at the National Gallery and it made such an impression.  I remember standing in front of it in awe.  Your femaleness comes through and it is such a rich, womanly, femaleness.  There is so much about being a woman that I can feel in your work, be it quilt or painting.  And you have a wonderful wit.

Anyway, I'm very sorry that I cannot attend the workshop and meet you.  I had planned ot attending until last week.  There are a lot of reasons I guess, but the main ones are distance, winter, and the fact that I have four children, two of whom are under three years.  I know I'm not the only woman who has very little actual control of how her life is spent.   I would like to have seen the exhibition.  I've only seen Barbara's quilt.  I'd really like to know your reaction to my piece.  Please, if you do have any time that you could spare, I would very much appreciate a written note.

I've used some photos that my father took and developed.  They are of my brother, my sister and me.  There are several of me at age 15.  There are also photos of the farm where I grew up in Northwestern Ontario.  I feel that our childhood and childhood landscape are remain within us always.  I think that these things are our inner core, the 'batting' layer inside us.  The painted tree symbolizes both growth and woman's connection to nature while the self-portrait is the 'outer self''  that I present to the world today, that of the good mother.  The baby is looking outward, the mother in this drawing is hiding behind her child.  

Anyway, with this letter I feel that I've made some sort of contact with you.  I'm just sorry it's not in person.  I'll see you next time.  Sincerely, Judy Martin

Joyce Wieland answered me and I've saved the letter....but I can't remember where.  I think I should find it and frame it.  Joyce Wieland  1930 - 1998

The House With the Golden Windows

It has been a long time since I have written about this piece.

When I made it, we were living in Kenora, a middle sized town in North Western Ontario, two hours drive from Winnipeg, six hours from Thunder Bay. 

I was 40 years old and had four children ages 4 – 13 years.  My husband had just left Kenora for a new job on Manitoulin Island, and the children and I would soon follow him there.  It was the final year of my fine art degree from Lakehead University and I made this piece for my degree exhibition.  One of my advisors was Mark Nisenholt, who I will always remember as the one who loaned me his copy of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  I have my own copy of that book now, and re-read it regularly. 

Sewing and quilting were not looked on with favour by the university, but for some reason, that did not deter me.  Rather, I was stubborn about it and built this house with thread.  I poured attention and time into it.  Ned was gone and I needed to finish the drywall and painting that had been left undone in our home so that we could sell it.  I sewed the magazine papers to the canvas in the middle of the night while the children slept. 

That was the year that I shared a studio with Barbara Sprague, an artist who was in the same stage of her fine art degree with Lakehead.  The studio was important to me.  I needed to pin the papers up on a wall and step back from them to look, I needed to be able to leave them in piles, untouched.  I left home for the studio as soon as my four year old stepped on the bus for junior kindergarten in the mornings, and was home again before she was dropped off around 11:30 am. 

 (This isn’t really an artist statement; it’s more of a memoir.  )

The way that windows are able to look like gold at a certain slant of light was the impetus for this installation.  When I was a child, we lived in the country, and I remember being in the back seat of the car driving home and my mother telling me to look at the golden windows of the houses that we passed.  And I did.  I looked at them.  They had a magical quality.

So magical, that when I was a mother of four and had a house of my own I remembered that idea of looking at domesticity from the outside.  Of imagining what it might be like.  What it could be like.  That is what the outside walls of this piece are about; the dreams and hopes a young woman has for her home and family.  So many of those dreams are fed to us by our society’s consumerism and by the fairy tales we are brought up with, but some of them come true. 

It’s very complex.  I built the walls of my house from small squares of paper carefully cut from glossy magazines that promise a beautiful life.

Barbara Sprague

I visited my friend Barbara over the weekend. She is preparing an exhibit of her drawings that will open this fall at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.

Barb and I were close friends when we both lived in Kenora in North Western Ontario. We shared a studio together and traveled back and forth from Kenora to Thunder Bay in order to complete our BFA degrees from Lakehead University. Now Barbara and her husband live in Southampton which is just a ferry trip and a bit away. It was wonderful to see them again.

The exhibit she is preparing is entitled The Dress, and the drawings explore the importance of the matriarchal line personally and within western society. The artist has included portraits of herself, her mother, her grandmother, and also of her daughters and her grand daughters linked to a female skeleton within the format of pattern pieces of her own wedding dress. Inside these dense and well crafted drawings there are many dualities. Strength and fragility, fantasy and reality, dream and determination.

These are details from the last two large drawings. (40" high) I asked Barb if I could show them here and she gave me permission. We checked the Thunder Bay Art Gallery's web site and there is nothing up yet about this exhibit, but the dates are September 14 till October 28. Another friend, Rosemary Sloot, will be showing The Immigrant exhibition at the TBAG during the same time period.

the high way

Highway 17 across the top of Lake Superior is a magnificent statement about the largeness of Northern Ontario.It took us four days - two to get from Manitoulin to Thunder Bay, and two more to get home again. We didn't drive after dark because of all the hype about moose danger, although we did not see a single animal. Not very many people either.
I drove and Barb entertained. She either had to turn the pages of Art Forum magazine which stimulated our art conversation, or take photos through the windshield, or check the map to see where we were.(We were in God's country.)(all photos by Barbara Sprague)