Target is March 2020

Target Family in progress, by Gayle Pritchard

2020 is coming. This is exciting to me for a variety of reasons: a new presidential election, the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment (look it up, please, if you do not know what that is!), and a new exhibition scheduled for March 2020 with my art group: me (Gayle Pritchard), Gail Crum and Jill Milenski at the fabulous Beth K. Stocker Center Gallery.

My art group tries to meet once a week. We have been doing so for years now. We sip wine, catch up with each other, plan play-days and art-related outings, and, all the while, we work on whatever it is we are working on. When one of us is exhibiting in one of the many juried exhibitions around town, we all try to attend the opening. This type of support is so important, not only for the professional reasons you can imagine, but for the emotional support and the safe creative environment it provides.

A drawing play-day at Jill's

Meeting every week provides an incentive to keep working. While it is perfectly okay if you had a hectic week full of distractions or family obligations or illness and got nothing done, we all really want to have something to work on each week, or something to show that we have finished. It's absolutely exhilarating.

Jill and I, both writers as well as artists, recently took part in a one day writing workshop sponsored by our local library system, The 36th annual Western Reserve Writing Conference. Here we found yet another iteration of the creative community in our Northeast Ohio region. We spend the day with like-minded people seeking ways to improve our craft. I am so grateful to be surrounded by creativity virtually everywhere I go. Writing and talking about the writing process is just another way of expressing that fundamental need to express.

All of which now takes me back to my target: March 2020, the next exhibition, the next body of work, the next chance to interact with my audience, and another giant block of time to work on my art with focus.

Get Your Saw Out: A Framing Experiment, part 1

My  handy-dandy miter saw

It's been a busy few months, and now it's time to start preparing for my next three-woman exhibition, Conversations With Women, which will be in March 2020. More on that later, but...hurrah!

A few posts back, I was pulling out some unfinished work, and showed you my piece May Queen, in progress. I finished the collage, which I had created on a painted canvas, and now needed a way to frame it for a finished look. Because of the depth of the 3-D elements in the piece, it wasn't going to be popped into a regular frame, and I didn't want it inside a shadow box. So, off to Lowe's I went in search of wood suitable for my purposes.

My canvas was only 3/4" deep, and I was looking for something a little wider than that. I ended up with 1 1/2" maple, that would do the job, and bought enough of it to allow for the entire perimeter of the canvas, plus extra for mistakes. I bought two 5' lengths.

Mark the wood in pencil so you can see
where to cut.

I got my miter saw for my birthday one year, and it's perfect for these kind of projects. I use it a lot for my artwork. The saw sits in a groove, and the pegs are movable so you can lock them in place around the wood you are cutting. The blade is replaceable, too, if it gets dull. I have my saw, wood strip, my artwork and my pencil, and first off I'm going to mark the first cut. I line up the wood edge to edge with the canvas, and mark it. I started with the short sides, and made sure the mark worked on both ends. 

Make a hole with an awl, and push
the nail in before hammering.

Saw, saw, saw, and the wood is cut. I used a bit of fine-grained sandpaper to smooth the cut edges. I picked up some really small finishing nails at the hardware store. I used an awl to mark a hole to hold the nail while I hammer it in place.  

I attached both the top and bottom frame

pieces. Voila, I'm halfway home!

Measure and pre-mark all the nail hoes with an awl
before trying to hammer the finishing nails in place.
I ended up adding another nail in the center of each side,
since the canvas was not perfectly straight. The extra
nail eliminated tiny gaps.

May Queen by Gayle Pritchard, half way framed!

In the Details

My art group at the opening of In the Details, Jill Milenski,

Gail Crum and me standing in front of my installed work.

I was so excited last Friday night to attend the opening of In the Details, a fiber exhibition curated by Mary Urbas and held at the Artist Archives of the Western Reserve. The CAN journal, Cleveland's go-to magazine for the arts community, had a nice article preview about the show and the accompanying solo exhibition by the late Lillian Tyrell at the adjacent Sculpture Center, Disaster Blankets. New-to-me Canvas Magazine also had a nice review article by Michael C. Butz.

Mary Urbas, center, talks about In the Details, as the artists in attendance
listen in. Left to right: Jennifer, Deborah, Juli, Mary, AAWR director Mindy
Tousely, Gayle Pritchard, Libby Chaney

The gallery is a small space, but it's perfect for showcasing a themed exhibit, as this one is. A broad range of fiber art is on display, and includes two of the Archived artist, Lillian Tyrell and Evelyn Svec Ward. I was happy to be included for exhibition with amazing artists such as Susan Shie, Libby Chaney, Juli Edberg, Sandy Miller, Jessica Pinsky, Jennifer Whitten and Deborah Silver, all of whose work I have admired over the years. The show will be up through November 4.

Part of the crowd reading Susan Shie's amazing work.

Sunprinting, Chapter 2

On the left, two sunprinted fabrics; on the right, the same
image on paper.

If you read my last post, you'll see how I used the sun to print the images of my grandmother you see here. Since you can only really see the quality of the printed image after it has completely dried, I waited. It's winter, and my drying rack is next to my furnace, so I didn't have to wait very long! I ironed the fabric and had a look.

The same image printed twice. On the left, no clamped glass was used.

As you can see in the picture, above, I ended up making two prints on fabric. Why? Because I forgot a crucial step in obtaining a crisp print, especially when using transparencies, and especially in the winter: I forgot to cover my fabric with a piece of clear glass clamped in place. The resulting blurry print on the left is blurry, in part, because I failed to clamp the glass on top, making a secure contact print. (It's also blurry because I did not iron the fabric flat enough before printing it.) After it dried, I realized my omission, and immediately reprinted the image, as you see on the right. The result? Even though my fabric is old, when printed correctly, it still gave me a decent print. That has been my experience over the 25 years I have used this process, and is also why I never hesitate to buy yardage when purchasing pre-treated fabrics.

The same image on treated paper.

While I was at it, I grabbed an old but unopened package of treated sunprinting paper I picked up at a recent library sale. These are the Super Sunprint Kits often found in museum stores. I clamped the glass on top of the paper as described in my last post, opened my sliding back door, and let it sit on the threshold dangling over the snow to catch the sun. It was later in the day, and it was dangling, so you can see that there was still some blurring that occurred as a result of the position of the sun and the minor movement of the substrate the paper was clamped onto. I got one very clear print on paper, and the two blurry ones are interesting, and will still be used. You may notice that the print on this text-weight paper is not as dark as on fabric.

The print on the left is on fabric. On the right, is a print
on high quality watercolor paper.

Each surface gives a slightly different effect. Notice how the contrast is increased on the watercolor paper print here. When rinsed, the background reverts to white, and since the image I used had a lot of negative space, it produced a crisp print.

Mother Shrine uses a sunprint.

In Mother Shrine, the cyanotype print on fabric of my mother is also in high contrast. The difference between this one and the watercolor paper print is that the image of my mother is printed on fuschia fabric instead of white or aqua, therefore the contrast is lessened, though the image is still clear.

You may be wondering where the variety of pre-treated fabrics and paper come from. Although you can purchase cyan printing chemicals and treat your papers and fabrics yourself, I have always ordered mine from Blueprint Printables. They have been around longer than anyone else, have consistently high quality products, and great customer service. You can even send them yardage of your own fabrics to treat. Tune in next time to see some examples of that, and about how to turn a cyan print to sepia.

Cyan print on the left; on the right, a cyan print on watercolor
paper turned sepia. It's really easy!

Wearables for Spring

 I finished this jacket recently for a client, so thought I would show it to you. It is custom made completely: she picked the design, shape, sleeve length, and the colors she wanted from a selection of fabrics. I did the rest, and it came out beautifully.

The jacket is assembled in my personal collage style. I create my art quilts, Magic Baby clothing and wearables for adults in the same way: put bits and pieces of this and that together to create a quirky, fun and beautiful finished design. Hope you like it!


Detail of closures, jacket front



Jacket back in beautiful batik

Next up: a busy week ahead. I am giving a lecture and book signing for my book Thursday evening at the Medina Public Library. On Friday, I need to pick up my work from the exhibition Piecing it All Together: The Art of Collage. That means also either rehanging it or preparing it for storage once I get it home. I really need to schedule an appointment for professional photography of the pieces I finished for the show at the last minute, too!

Speaking of exhibitions, my friend Terry Jarrard Dimond is participating in an art quilt exhibition at BookSmart Studios. I received her invitation this week. I also received the Call to Entry information for The Artist as Quiltmaker XV from the new curator, Ruta Marino. The entry deadline has been pushed back from September to January 23, 2012, so get busy with your entries now.

Itching for Hand Stitching

I have a spring jacket that I hardly ever wear. I bought it when I went to visit my daughter in Galway several springs ago back, knowing how misty-moisty damp the weather in Ireland can be. After stubbornly putting away my winter jacket while hoping spring would actually arrive here on the North Coast, I had to pull it out today to keep the still chilly weather at bay.

When the silhouettes of the trees on the horizon begin turning that beautiful shade of lime green, I know spring here is around the corner, and my mind automatically starts making lists of things to do: rake the leaves away from the emerging spring bulbs, gather up dead tree branches, wash the kitchen floor.

Gayle's stitched collage, Changes
In my Magic Baby work studio, I am slowly sewing up the piles of designs I tend to cut out at night while watching the news or a movie with my husband. Once I have finished a design idea and my prototype, I sit and cut and cut and cut at night, and end up with large piles of sewing to await me each morning when I start to work.


Detail, Changes by Gayle Pritchard
I have decided to stop cutting out new garments to sew until I get my piles of unsewn ones under control. I get stir crazy, though, if I don't have something creative to do while I am sitting. Spring's imminent arrival has made me itchy to have some handwork to do.

At I seminar on creativity and work productivity, I made a note of the speaker's comment, paraphrased here. She said, when you want to begin new work, and have nothing in particular in mind, go look at your body of work and be inspired by that. I have always remembered that. I am rarely short on ideas, but frankly, at the end of a long work day in my self-created sweat shop, I am tired. I still want something creative to do with my hands, but I also want to relax. Handwork, for me, has always fulfilled that desire. With a composition already created and put together during my peak thinking hours, at night, I can just sit and stitch. Rhythm, pull the thread, put in the needle, repeat. It's wonderful.

The framed collage here hangs in my living room. I have always loved it, refreshed by its quiet colors and serene symmetry. I love the raw edges of the antique linen and other fabrics used for the collage, and I love the stitching marks that lead my eye around the piece, and back to the slightly obscured drawing I transferred as the focal point. This will be my inspiration for some light night stitching.

Happy spring, Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it, and may peace find you in the wee hours of the night.

The months seem to be flying by already this year. The calendar says it's late April already, and yet, as I look outside today, the trees on the horizon have not yet achieved their lime green spring glow. The weather is cold and rainy. Only the daffodils know it is spring.

Detail of I Hear Voices In My Head by Gayle Pritchard

I have been accomplishing a lot in the studio as of late, and at least spring activity, bringing me out and about, is heating up.
I had a great time when I made my presentation to the East Cuyahoga Genealogical Society last month. Tomorrow night, I will be presenting a lecture and book signing for the Willoughby Hills Quilt Guild. On May 19th, I will be in Medina for a lecture at the public library, and June 23 at the Akron Art Museum. I am so pleased that interest in my book continues, and love having the opportunity to speak with large groups about the amazing treasure trove of fiber art that exists in Ohio.

The struggle of balancing paper work and household responsibilities with studio time continues. Luckily, I still have the energy to work 14 hour days! Have a great week, and hope to see some of you at my upcoming lectures.

The Art of Collage Opening

Piecing it All Together: The Art of Collage opens Friday night, April 1 at the Valley Art Center in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. I will have seven artworks on exhibition. This is a curated, invitational exhibition with several wonderful artists included: Clare Murray Adams, Linda and Opie O'Brien, Jeff Kallet, Gretchen Bierbaum and Gail Crum, among others. Hope you can make it! For those of you long-distance exhibition gawkers, I will post pictures after the opening. I can't wait!

Getting ready for the exhibition, as mentioned in previous posts, inspired me to finish some new work. On the day I delivered my artwork, as I was gathering up and packaging my work, I spied an unfinished work I had begun a few months ago.

My piece on the postcard here, I Hear Voices, was made about my husband, and was inspired by one of his songs. The piece utilizes the song lyrics, and imagery from his childhood. The unfinished work I pulled out last week, and shown below, was a small collage I made after I Hear Voices. It is also about my husband, and uses the song lyric Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Now I just need to complete the assemblage. Here it is still in progress.

This is just a quick snapshot (and not a very good one!), taken to capture my instantaneous idea as I pulled the rest of my art together to deliver to the show. I'm excited to finish it. Step one, always my way of beginning, is to write the story on the background. I will do that while adding paint and drawings, then begin the assembly process. More to come!

Getting My Head Around it



Detail of Gayle's collage, Sacred, in progress

 Something is going on. The ground is shifting. I see it on the faces of the people on the news stories about the Middle East; I see it in my friends faces; I see it in my face when I look in the mirror. For awhile, I just couldn't get my head around it.

As an artist, I have trained myself for decades to try to stay in the moment and to respond to what is in front of me without knowing where the resolution lies. It is part of trusting the process, a deeply personal way of trusting oneself. The way I tap into that part of myself is to just keep working, because much of the creative process involves problem solving, asking the "what if" question, remaining open to the answer. When I am fortunate enough to be fully engrossed in this process, I continue to work on the problem at hand even when I am sleeping. My journal is full of dreamed notations waiting for action.

This is where I find myself right now: working, thinking, dreaming, working. This process has never failed me, and serves as an anchor for me when the ground beneath my feet is shifting.


Detail of Gayle's collage, Lady Blue

 

Detail of Gayle's collage, Blue Landscape

I have spent months feeling blue, discombobulated. Fortunately, my trusty journals remind me that this is also a cyclical part of my process. It doesn't keep me from working, usually, and this is fortunate as well. I am designing like crazy, as I focus with renewed energy on my line of Magic Baby designs.  I hope to start a separate website and blog for that work as soon as I have some time to sit at the computer all day.

I am also itchy to do free painting, so hope to get to that soon. In the meantime, I am finishing up the three collages shown here. I will be offering all of them for sale in my etsy shop as soon as I finish stitching and mounting them. Stitching away by hand, which is what I do most nights, is my preferred form of meditation. My thoughts are freed up while I work to think and dream, to get my head around it.

Recycled Love

 

A page from For Sadie Jane by Gayle Pritchard featuring a
Womankind badge and a heart created from recycled kimono silk.


According to wikipedia, St. Valentine was executed on February 14, ca. the year 270. It would appear this event was an auspicious beginning for celebrations of love, and quite far removed from the pagan holiday we are familiar with today.

In my life, love is a core value, and something we try hard to express and honor. It is an intangible to be experienced, absorbed, shared and recycled.



Two page spread from For Sadie Jane by Gayle Pritchard

I suspect that love, or rather the ability to experience love, and the creative process are deeply entwined. A person who is able to love deeply is a person who is open to staying connected to their inner spark and creativity. If you happen to be one of these people, I encourage you to dig deeply, locate your source and spread it all around you. Maybe tomorrow will be a day when we get to feel the recycled love in the air.

Family Connections

T. Vickery's Boots and Shoes! I loved this ad the minute I saw it recently. Vickery, you see, is a family name, though I can't think of any T. Vickery's in the group.

You may think it strange for an artist to also be passionate about family history, but for me there is a direct connection. You see, my art is very personal, and is often about my family, my history, or some combination of the two. My piece The Day Momma Died uses physical objects that belonged to my mother to create an artwork, and to commemorate the experience of the day she died at 62.
Prayers for the Dead commemorates three family deaths which took place shortly after my mother's death.
My Joie de Vivre series is a group of three abstracted self portraits that chronicle, for me, a crucial developmental phase in my artwork. A few years ago, I made a piece about my husband using the lyrics of one of his songs.


Gayle with her piece inspired by her husband's song lyrics: I Hear Voices in my Head

Whether I am working on works for the wall or creating mixed media assemblages, my work tends to be autobiographical. It is the way I process my internal thoughts. It is what comes out when I go to that space deep inside where my inspiration lives. What inspires you?

This is an actual advertisement from Derby, England in 1816. The Mr. Pritchard mentioned is my husband's ancestor.

Cleaning Out Our Attics

These are fish napkin holders. They arrived in Saturday's mail, carefully wrapped and shipped USPS Priority Mail. Inside the box was a note from a dear college friend I had seen earlier in the week. She was in town from Paris visiting her elderly parents, and they had been cleaning out the attic of their family home. The never-used fish napkin holders, gifted to her parents long ago, had sat boxed up in the attic for years, waiting to be re-gifted to someone who still uses cloth napkins. That someone would be me, the recipient of a sweet and thoughtful gesture from a friend and her elderly parents, all of whom I adore.

This entire episode reminded me that we, 'we' meaning my husband and I, my siblings, my colleagues and all my friends in their fifties, we are all in a "cleaning out the attic" stage of our lives. The attic-clearing can be literal: passing long things we've held onto over the years, but no longer need or want, to someone else.

When my children left home, out of my house went extra furniture, dishes and pots and pans. Now that they both own homes, I have a list in my mind of special family heirlooms or otherwise valuable items in my attic and closets that I have now decided they are "old enough" to value and take care of. By becoming homeowners and parents, they have attained a certain level of stability in their lives at the same time that I am in the mood to clear "things" out of my own.

My 'baby' sister and I this summer, during her visit from Italy

My entire summer has been a more metaphorical cleaning of the attic. I have been acquiring new roles, such as "grandmother of three," "college buddy now in her fifties." I have also had the pleasure of not only forging fresh relationships with new grandbabies and old college friends, but of reconnecting with high school friends on Facebook and my own siblings, all wrapped in a parentheses of the music being created within my own family unit.

At this age, relationships become even more important, as they are my fuel for being an artist. Over the past decade, I have carefully swept my attic clean of unhealthy, one-sided relationships. I find I no longer have a tolerance for being with people who have nothing to give back in return. Instead, I have focused on my family, and building new and stronger relationships with our artist friends and musicians, all of whom provide deep love and support, shared experiences, and new ideas that find their expression in a cleaned out attic, where there is room to grow.

In July my tArty friends, a local artist group, met at my house to share their new work. It ran the gamut from exciting commissions, new, mind-blowing sketchbooks, and ideas developed into artwork.
Christy's commission sketches

Jill's sketchbook drawings

Christine with work inspired by her sketchbooks

In my own work, I have spent the summer working on designs for my new line of Magic Baby clothes. They have been selling as fast as I can get them finished and photographed. Now I am gearing up for Fall and Winter, with new editions being created in soft flannel, knitted fabric and baby cord. I am also trying to work out some baby boy designs. I need to come up with something very cute and very unique, but not "girly." My 'clean attic' and supportive relationships give me the support and space to let my mind have room to think.

Please don't get the idea that my house or my work space is literally clean. Quite the opposite. In my writing studio, every shelf is covered with research materials, my manuscript pages and files, and accented with piles of finished artwork, TagTalk cards and the like decorating the floor.

In my art studio, a too-small bedroom filled with a Pier 1 dining room table converted to a work table, fabric and works in progress are everywhere. It looks like a mess, but this is how I work. I have my fabrics organized in ways that I can find just what I am searching for. My trims and notions are organized in containers and boxes that fill the space under my work table. The lighting is terrible, but this is the space I have to work in, and this is where I work. Every day.

My point in showing this to you is that the "cleaning the attic" analogy has nothing to do with literal cleaning. It has everything to do with clearing out our lives so that we can focus on our passions. For those of you who haven't found your passion yet, I suggest the technique of attic-clearing to help you make room for finding it.



Another artist group I am participating in, Compositional Conversations, was formed online by my colleague Terry Jarrard Dimond. You can check the links in my sidebar to some of the artists who are also participating and writing about the project. Terry, an amazing artist, invited 16 artists to participate in a conversation, both in writing online and responding, but also by agreeing to be recipients of an art piece begun by her with a single piece of fabric which is sent to each artist respectively to be added to, considered, and conversed with. It's an intriguing exercise for the artists, and a chance to respond to the choices other artists have made. My turn to receive the artwork-in-progress is fast approaching. Each week, as I see the pictures posted from the other participants, my heart starts to race in nervous anticipation. Clearing out my metaphorical attic has made room for these new experiences and artistic conversations.

If you regularly follow my blog, you may have noticed that I have been absent for awhile. I have been really, really busy working, and have needed to focus on that. Somehow, though, the fish napkin holders arriving in the mail following six weeks of reconnecting with old friends and loved ones got me to thinking about the past, about attics, about relationships, and about making room for what is important. I hope, perhaps, my thoughts will jog your own in the same way. Time to clean your attic.

The Artist Grandmother

Now that I'm a grandmother, I have been making baby clothes again. When my own kids were babies and my husband was still in college, I had to make do with what we had. I recycled sweaters, coats and usable cottons to make all of their clothes. I started making quilts in earnest about the same time. The first Christmas we were married, I got my first sewing machine, a $99 Singer. I still have it. It's the machine I use to stitch paper.

When I was still living at home, I sewed on my grandmother's converted treadle machine. Having come very close to getting kicked out of Home Ec. in Junior High for making a bikini instead of an apron, it should have already been clear to anyone who knew me that I was going to follow my own path.

When my first granddaughter was born last December, I was thrilled. Although I have sewn several things for my grandson, I admit that making fancy baby dresses for little girls is a lot more fun than a Thomas the Train pillowcase. I made her this dotted dress outfit for her first Valentine's Day. I now own more baby patterns than I ever had when my own children were small. Of course, I never follow the pattern instructions. I prefer to use them as a suggestion, and proceed as I do when making my artwork: do something, respond, do something else; collage and layers upon layers.

Unfortunately, there is only so much time in any given week. Because I work at home, it seems I am always at work. Right now, at this particular moment in time, I am finishing a manuscript, updating my website, trying to get my etsy store up and running, watching my grandson two days a week, and trying to get artwork done in my studio. Add in the everyday duties like grocery shopping, paying bills, cleaning, laundry, and, well, my head is already spinning. I find it difficult to juggle it all sometimes.

I have two studios in the house, both upstairs. One is a writing room, with all of my research materials, files, reference books, and two desks next to the windows. The walls are painted my favorite blue, and the futon gives me a great place to sit and read. My friend Susanne loaned me an awesome square and very tall bookshelf. It is a life-saver; it holds a ton in a few square feet.

My art studio across the hall is another thing. It's too small and too crowded. With all the projects I have in progress, I have simply run out of space to store it all, let alone find anything.

My grandmother was very artistic. Even though I was still little when she died, I remember how she always encouraged my artistic efforts. And when she was able to finally have the time, she started making art and craft pieces for the sheer enjoyment of it. She was the only grandparent I knew, and I absolutely adored her, even though I only saw her a few times a year.

As a grandmother of two, with a new baby girl due in the world this summer, I cherish taking some time away from work to make special things for my grandchildren. With the new line of baby clothes I am in the process of designing, the hardest part is not making everything for them. I have told their mothers that the baby girls will be the recipients of my learning curve process; the prototypes go to them, or, as in the case of Baby E's Valentine dress, are designed for them. Some patterns are just too intricate and detailed to try to make and sell.

I finished this dress this week. Well, it still needs buttons and a label, so it's mostly finished. Look for it soon in my etsy shop. To avoid internal conflict, I purposely made it in a size that will not fit my granddaughter. Alright, yes: I have enough scraps to make another dress for Baby E.

My latest attempt to solve my space dilemma involved cleaning the garage, and setting up a workspace there. My husband's band-mate, David, loaned me a spare tabletop from his stash, and voilà, a work table.

I added another of my glass-topped desks, which will be a good place for a second cutting mat. I spent the day moving my paints and collage papers, tools and non-fabric work in progress there today. I hated to take the time to move it all, but it really was time well spent.

Now that spring has arrived, I have several warm months ahead. I will soon be good to go for cyanotype and seta prints, hammering, and messy atomizer painting. Can't wait!