Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on creativity

Here's a link to one of the most amazing talks I've ever heard:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

Unlike many artists, I am amazingly bad at talking about The Creative Process. What is creativity? Where does it come from? "Where do you get your ideas?" - now there's a conversation-stopper, at least when it's addressed to me! Why do some people "have it" while others "aren't creative"? (heinously not so, in my understanding of the way things work, but a surprisingly ubiquitous view).

And why am I so mute when someone tries to engage me in conversation on the subject? ME! A normally bright, funny, opinionated, articulate person, and certainly not loathe to blather on about almost anything. Whether or not I know anything about the subject at hand! Yet when it comes to the topic of how/why I do what I now spend my days doing, about all I can manage is a self-disparaging "Oh, I just make stuff. Small art quilts. Surface design. You know, fabric..." Well, nobody's too sure what that means...must be code for "Beware - Flaky Artist on the scene; better get your crystals out and align your chakras!"

I could go all mystical: "I don't really know - things just happen. I just like to play." (Kinda true, but incomplete, inadequate, insufficient.) Or I could go cerebral, launch into long theories and "process" talk, most of which leads directly and in short order to the kind of pompous, self-congratulatory mental masturbation that drives me right straight crazy. Or there's always the time-honored Tortured Soul route - that's an archetype that our society has a definite place for. (And how come, by the way, we have no tradition of the Cheerful Artist? The Gleeful Soul, who creates for the sheer joy of being in the Universe?...Ooops, I see that leads right back to The Flake!)

Mystical Flake, Fatuous Narcissistic Ass, Tortured Artist: surely the creative life deserves more! Gilbert comes closer to expressing my own experience and understanding of creativity and the artist than any I've come across so far. I'm not going to recap what she says here; just, please, if you're interested in the subject at all, take the 19 minutes and watch this video!

And then let's talk!

Prayer Flags - from my daughter's wedding

When my daughter Liddy & her husband Chris got married in 2004, I and my mom & my other daughter Molly - Liddy's twin) made dozens of what I thought of as "prayer flags" - like the brightly-colored Tibetan Buddhist flags that carry prayers of thankfulness on the winds to the Buddha - to surround them with the love and blessings of all of us who love them so dearly as they walked into this next stage of their life.

The wedding was held outdoors, under the long covered pavilions of our local Farmers Market. No, silly, it was in the evening; all the local cabbages and brussel sprouts and apple vendors had gone home. It was magical - we transformed the space with hundreds of candles and Chinese lanterns and locally grown (from Market vendors) fall flowers, all in the marigold colors that they had chosen, and handmade tablecloths, and the whole scene just glowed with home-made love and celebration. Not to mention Hippie Chic! I strung dozens of these flags, all carrying messages of love and hope and blessing, some meaningful, some rich with quotations from the songs that surrounded Liddy as she grew up, some just plain goofy, all along the sides of the pavilion, with the intent of surrounding them with all the love that followed them in their journey.

So...it was all very beautiful and meaningful, but after the wedding most of the flags got packed away in my basement studio, and of course in all the excitement of the wedding I knew they hadn't really had much of a chance to take them all in. This past Christmas, I finally got around to doing something that had been on my mind all along: I joined 4 of them together, added just enough more embellishments to make it seem united, and added hand & machine quilting in a beautiful copper metallic thread (it doesn't show up that well in the pic, but ooo-la-la baby!), beading, and a few doodads here & there, and gave it to them to put up in their place in Philly. I hope that every time they see it, they will remember how much love they are cradled in - and also that some of the thoughts of love that are expressed in it will help to remind them where they started through those married-life days when the troubles sometimes make you wonder "what was I thinking?" You know what I'm talking about!

So that's what this funky thing is. The picture in the upper left corner is a little painting Chris made for Liddy on their first Valentine's Day together, and they used it as their wedding invitation. Doesn't that kinda melt your heart?

Little Art Quilt

Here's a little art quilt I made for my mother for Christmas this year - I'm quite infatuated with it, actually. The background fabric is my very-first-ever venture (well, my first intentional one, anyway, not counting various bleach spots on favorite jeans over the years!) into discharging; I think it was discharged using Palmolive dishwasher gel, painted along the fold lines of the fabric. Or maybe Soft-Scrub with bleach, or possibly a Clorox bleach pen - anyway, you get the idea - not anything too high-tech or artsy! The circles are Dupioni silk, fused to the cotton background. The little piles of squares & rectangles are watercolor paper, variously painted & stamped & ripened in the box where I throw all those things for future use; they have a beautiful metallic sheen, and are very lovely, if I do say so myself. They're secured to the background by some of my handmade paper beads, which are also very special. (Well, at least my mother and I think so...) Then came both machine & hand-quilting, done in gold Kreinik thread, and various random beadings.

Too bad I don't have something more profound to say about it. It just started out as a little sampler, to see how Thing This combined with Thing That. As it evolved, I kept thinking of how my mother is always telling me to "just hang it on the wall and call it art", so that's where it ended up!

Too much Pain

I haven't spoken much here about my fibromyalgia and the pain that goes with it - not where/how I want to spend my time & energy. But a constant Fact Of Life nonetheless, and I do belong to a Yahoo group for fiber artists with fibro, called, logically enough, Fibro Fiberartists. Here's the link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fibro_fiberartists/.

I was thinking about what I wanted from this group today, and here's what I posted to the forum:

"As others have said, while I really appreciate a community of
fellow "fibro-fiber artists", I personally don't really want to focus
so much on the pain & disability here either...There are other forums for that, and I have chosen to stay away from them most of the time, because too many people there seem only focused on their pain & disabilities. I refuse to define myself by my pain!

I do believe that in order to move ahead it is necessary to acknowledge the pain, the anger, & all that "stuff" that goes along with having fibro, and to mourn what we have lost, and I think that this is a legitimate place to share whatever comes out in our art
from that process, if that is of value to you. It isn't gonna all be pretty, that's for sure!

If there's anybody here who's familiar with
the SoulCollage process (http://www.soulcollage.com/), I made this card for Pain.

One of the gifts fibro has given me, in a roundabout sort of way, is the gift of time. Because it forced me to just plain STOP everything else for a while. Because it has taken me right off the formerly all- consuming treadmill of working-doing-going-being-it-all and plopped me right smack into my SELF. Because the pain and stress has led me into techniques of healing breathing, meditation, ways to calm myself inside so I can see what's really there. Because it has changed so many of the things about me that used to be so central in my life, so that what is truly the ME inside me can actually shine more clearly for me.

So those are some of the things I like to focus on, and my creative work seems to be all coming from that place of illumination. I might not have found or really appreciated some of these inner places if it hadn't been for this fibro."

So I'll ask anybody who is interested: what are some
of the better things that have come to you as a result of having
fibro? Be honest and tell the truth!

Now Here's a Funky Old Thing...

In 1969, back in the Glory Days of all things hippie, I first decided to try my hand at batik-making. I was swept off my feet by the beauty and diversity of the "new" (well, maybe to this 16-yr. old American girl!) fabrics I was seeing - the Indonesian batiks, the tie-dyes, the exotic block prints and embroideries and sheisha mirrors, even the dreaded macrame. Of course I had to try them all! I'll spare you the results of my first adventures in tie-dye; suffice it to say that there was a lot of excited activity involving Rit dye, rubber bands, and white cotton Carters' Spanky Pants around the ol' kitchen stove...

Not too thrilled with the washed-out colors of those experiments, I moved on to trying my hand at batik - and this was my first attempt. As an impulsive and impatient young girl, I lacked most of the requisite supplies for making true batik - no beeswax, no tjantjing or tjap, and above all no patience for the complicated process of layers and resists and repeated ironing-out of wax from fabric. What I did have was good old Crayola crayons, paraffin, an electric skillet, Schaeffers Permanent Black ink, and one of my father's white cotton handkerchiefs, snitched from the laundry basket. Voila -"batik", American-teenaged girl style, 1969!

The piece lingered on my dorm-room walls for awhile, and then sank from view, as such things do, until the inevitable churning of household detritus tossed it up unexpectedly when we moved to our new house last year. Who knew the silly thing was still around? It's not like it was ever, even when it was first created, anything important; it was just my early doodlings with wax, color, and crackle, a Sunday afternoon experiment the summer before I started college. But still (or again), when it came to light again after nearly 40 years, it struck me as playful and spirited and worthy of a space on the wall, and I just stuck it right up there, in a public part of the house, for all to see.

Sophisticated art? Hardly! "Art" at all? Who cares? But there is something in it of spirit and fun, and of a part of myself that I am happy to be reminded of every time I see it. So maybe now I know how to batik and dye and block print and embroider and quilt the "right" way - but I still remember how utterly thrilling it was to lay down these colors of melted crayons on my Dad's stolen handkerchief: the suspense of waiting for the wax to chill in the freezer so I could crackle it up & give it its final wash of black ink, the pure burst of surprise in my heart when I saw how those black lines just made the colors pop right out - that joy was as honest & real as any I've gotten from any more mature, sophisticated, technically-correct creations since then.

And I don't want to forget it!

Ace of Clubs - or is it?

Ace of Clubs
Originally uploaded by cathyb53

And another non-quilt item, just for fun. Last Christmas I made a set of playing cards, using a blank deck of cards & painting, stamping, transfer printing, & other fun techniques. To see the complete deck, you can look down my list of links on the right side of the screen, to:

My handmade playing cards-12/06, for Matthew

Maybe I'm the Ace of Clubs, releasing my 3 now-grown children into the world? But wait, it's a well-known fact that I'm the Queen of Hearts...except in this deck, I seem to show up as the Queen of Clubs, if you believe the images on the cards...Or maybe a person shouldn't delve too deeply into interpreting what comes off of one's work table at any given time!

In the Land of the Lotus Eaters

In the Land of the Lotus Eaters
Originally uploaded by cathyb53

Not fabric/quilt art - this is a collage I made last winter while we were in the Bahamas, where there's a lot of flopping around mostly naked. Something about the indolent heat of August here in upstate New York brings it to mind.

Matthew's 30th birthday

Wish I could remember to take decent pictures of the things I make before I give them away! This is my son Matthew, celebrating his 30th birthday, in Maine; he's holding the little quilt hanging (which you can't see very well - the best part is below the frame of the picture) I made for him. I know, pretty girlish present, huh? Anyway, the little quilt was made entirely (well, except for the black) of my own hand-dyed & printed fabrics; below the frame of this photo are the beaded-bead embellishments and the tiny "liberated" log cabin squares. The label on the back is a fabric-printed old photo of me holding him at about a month or so old, as well as some more piecing of my hand-dyed fabrics.

The point of making this piece was to force myself to begin cutting into my own dyed, painted, & printed fabrics and using them as if they were "normal" (commercial) fabrics. A small start, and a nerve-wracking one, but at least I did it, instead of just hoarding up my "special" pieces and admiring them as cloth. More to come!

Wild Birds Art Quilt

Wild Birds Art Quilt

This small art quilt was inspired by lyrics to a song by Jan Harmon; I sing a lot of folk music with my similarly-inclined friends, and this was a song I have always loved, especially when sung by my dear friend Jo Houghton. The chorus, part of which is the words on the front of the quilt, is:

"They're all dressed up in feathers with colors outrageous,

They soar from this earthly-bound kingdom of cages

On delicate wings, so small and courageous,

Thank heaven for wild birds."

I started it last fall, when the rich autumn golds and oranges and purples were all around me. I used my own hand-dyed fabrics, commercial fabrics, rubber stamps on painted watercolor paper (the birds) and fabric (the lettering), and beads. Instead of using the more traditional batting, I fused front & back on to Fast-2-Fuse (a stiff, heavy fusibile Timtex, the stuff the bills of ball caps are made with); this allowed the machine quilting to be purely decorative & free of the necessity to hold all the layers together evenly.

I admit it - I did get carried away a bit on the back! The frame around the "label" portion is a digital copy of a paper-and-scissors collage frame that I made 3 years ago as part of my daughter's wedding quilt - I'm quite fond of it, apparently.

Sadly, it was not accepted into this year's Small Art Quilts show at Main Street Gallery in Groton, NY. This was my first submission to a juried show, though, so I'm not too discouraged. And who knows, it may be accepted into another show - or I may just hang it in my living room, where I can see it every day!

SoulCollage Cards

Yo! I did it again! Now I've got the Flickr.com thing down, and the scanning/uploading thing, AND the posting pictures to my so-called blog thing.

Now all I need is something to say - here's where I freeze up. Ever known me to be short of words before? Don't worry, it won't last long.

I remember now - I started this whole Blog thing so that I could share my SoulCollage (c) cards without hogging up space on the group website. Maybe the main purpose of this blog will be to share my work & processes with my fellow-minded artsy friends. I want to ask for genuine feedback, but I'm very new at this, and very tender about the whole business of "putting myself out there", as they say. I fear looking like a fool. Saying "Here - look at what I made" seems very arrogant somehow, or - even worse - as if it might appear arrogant. Like I'm all "here, look how cool I am, now you have to tell me I'm very clever or artsy or 'creative' or whatever" - when my real intention is just to share my work with others who are into the same kind of thing.

That's not what I'm here for. Nor do I have the currently-popular "low self esteem" issue; it's not that I think what I do sucks, it's just that showing others (family! friends! strangers!) what I do, in a field outside of my comfort zone (quilts, anything fiber-related - I'll show that stuff to anybody, anytime!), is new and nerve-wracking to me. So OK, I know what to do: I'll post another thing right up here & shut the hell up already!

OK. This is another Soul Collage card, called "Above and Below". I think I need to figure out how to put captions under the pics - probably there's a way to do that, right?