Pamela Thiele Art Quilts

walking on eggshells

Sometimes a dog gets bored. I know this. Depending on the dog, this can be problematic. When Luka, our labradoodle, is bored, she thinks about philosophical concerns, which appears as if she’s napping. Or she stares at us until we do whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing next.

Button the standard poodle looks for something to occupy her time.   Or, as we humans might think of it, gets into mischief.

Now Luka is deeply invested in being a GOOD DOG. Also she takes very seriously her role as senior dog in the family. In other words, when Button starts doing something she should NOT be, Luka comes and tells us.

The problem is, we don’t always get it. I imagine Luka thinks training humans is incredibly hard. I bet she hopes that someday there will be a breakthrough and we will start to understand what she so clearly is communicating.

Yesterday Button was having a poodle day. There are days like that we all have, I guess. First she discovered Lauren’s tote handing from a knob on a drawer on the living room sideboard. The tote was not zipped. So what’s a dog to do? Not her fault.

She stuck her nose in, very delicately, neither removing the tote from the knob, nor making any sort of noise – an underappreciated skill indeed – and lifted out the purse-sized pack of tissues. Luka came and nudged my arm several times as I was working on the computer. “Good dog, I’m working,” I believe I said.

Then Luka went to find Lauren, who was transplanting her Spring seedlings into larger pots, and who responded much as I did. So Luka came back to me and sat down near me, staring at me.

Eventually I had cause to go upstairs, where, on the landing, I noticed an empty plastic package which once held tissues. And on the living room floor, looking VERY innocent, Button.

Believe me, tissues in a dog’s poop are not much fun for dog nor owner.

Later in the day, I was finishing my exercises, but being, evidently, slow about it. I heard Luka barking at Lauren in the yard. Lauren said something like “don’t bark!” It dawned on me that Luka had been barking at me directly prior to that. And then had laid down in front on me, showing me she had nothing to do with whatever was happening in other parts of the house. “Oh no,” thought I.

So I reach the top stair, and before me, scattered all over, and I do mean ALL OVER, the living room and dining room, and a little bit in the bedroom, and a couple of pieces in the kitchen, are the teeny, weeny pieces of EGGSHELL from a bag Lauren had been saving up to add to the garden. They were everywhere.

So I moaned, apparently quite loudly. Luckily Button still had the plastic bag they were in so I was able to make sure she didn’t eat that. Lauren, who thought something horrible had just happened to me (see dramatic moan), came running in. She moaned. She thought she had them in a secure place, which was, of course, part of the challenge for Button.

Eggshell vacuums up pretty well. Even LOTS of eggshell. Amazing how some of those teensy particles can stuck to things. Scientifically interesting to some, no doubt, although not to me, is how far they can stay on a paw and travel to other rooms.

I praised Button for giving me the plastic bag without a tuggy-of-war, and I praised and apologized most heartedly to Luka, the GOOD DOG.

And there is hope, for Luka. Because this morning, when she barked her special Button-is-Doing-It-Again bark, it did dawn on Lauren, pretty quickly actually, that maybe she should check out Button. And believe me, we don’t leave Button alone much but there are moments when she is unsupervised and this was one of them. She and Luka were on the deck, taking the air, surveying their kingdom.

Ah, yes, and Button was eating the fertilizer out of the newly planted seedlings now living on the deck.

Gallery Opening

I went to the greatest gallery opening a week ago. Everything was done right. And I left re-inspired and eager to go home and make art. Talk about having an impact!

My friend Carol Ann Waugh, a fiber artist, has a joint show going on right now with a paper maker here in Denver at the Ice Cube gallery in RiNo.  It’s fascinating to figure out all the things Carol did that made this show really work.

To begin with she has terrific marketing skills. As someone who worked in marketing for many years in back in New York, I love to see good marketing in action and I had a blast seeing what Carol did to promote her show.

People think that being an artist is solely about making art. Alas it ain’t so. But all the peripheral crap is equally necessary and probably a lot harder than creating the art itself. And is creative in its own way. Although it will never get credit.

Carol hit on a theme, probably with the other artist, of black and white, and exploited it in her pre-opening postcards. The show’s title rocks! “The F Word”   Provocative and funny. (F for fiber, duh.)

As you entered the gallery, two floor to ceiling panels each displayed 3 black and white works of Carol’s. And three of the paper maker. I have to confess that I didn’t notice that the paper maker had anything hung there until I was about to leave the show. Her works were solid white (with embossing) and my eyes read them as part of the background panel. This may be just me but I wonder if she would have been better served by creating something with white AND black to go there. Something that held its own better next to the pieces Carol had done. (This no doubt brands me as a philistine in the paper making world. But sometimes subtly is too subtle.)

Almost all of the rest of Carol’s displayed work was in glorious color. It really popped in the space. The paper maker, on the other hand, chose to display pieces that were light or dark grey, or white. This made her work seem repetitive to me.

I’ve always liked what Carol is doing with her art. And it’s been interesting to see how her art has evolved in the two years I’ve known her. One thing I love about her work is that it often shows her terrific sense of humor. Without being silly. (Although if silly is your thing, go for it.)

For this show, she apparently worked on some new pieces that show her stretching her technical skills and creating the piece as a whole, rather than a sum of parts.

Quilting is often a sum of parts. We create blocks, we piece them together, and add borders, and Voila! A quilt happens. I make quilts this way a lot. I follow what the fabric tells me to do.But there’s another way to do it and that is to plan out the quilt in advance. Not necessarily every minor detail but the overview.

This is how a lot of art quilts are made, I believe. With a sense at the beginning of where the end will be. In the interim, there can be a lot of embellishment and surface painting. And the quilt may indicate when enough is enough. But there is an overall sense of unity that prevails.

And that’s what I saw this time in Carol’s art. Has it always been there? I have no idea because I had only seen her smaller pieces. Where it’s not something that surfaced in my brain. Could be me. But somehow I sense she has moved into another level here.

To have larger pieces is exciting as well. Carol told me she was more comfortable working small but I have to say her large pieces really seemed coherent, finished, and of a piece, so to speak. I truly grooved on them and noticed people responding to them with enthusiasm.

This doesn’t mean she has to go on making larger pieces. Simply that whatever she learned from the process of going bigger will be something she can bring to her smaller work from now on.

Lauren observed that Carol’s art works viewed both from a distance and up close. Each has an intensity which is exhilarating. Each draws you in and draws you closer. This is what art should do. Art should be an interactive sport. And one look should not be enough. You should want to get to know a piece better and try to figure out what the artist was doing. Carol’s work did that for us, and we noticed other people also doing the walking closer bit.

I have two concerns about of the show. One is I think the price points should be higher on Carol’s work. I understand the importance of getting people to buy. And thus having works under $100 to get people to consider owning something by you, the specific artist. But her work is more valuable than that, and how do we as artists get people to realize our value if we don’t price our works high enough?

I realize I moved here from a part of the country where cost=value. It’s the age-old conundrum – sell MORE less expensive pieces or sell ONE more expensive piece.  I imagine when I have a show I will really wrestle with this one. I don’t know the answer.

The other concern is that Carol has an amazing series of small black and white pieces which ran up the side of one wall and across it. They were awesome as a group. She is selling them for $25 each or 4 for $80. I imagine she debated this with herself. Again the low price point gets people to buy and to begin to think about owning her art and perhaps even collecting it. That’s good.

But to me, the mass of pieces was an art work all by itself. I kind of wanted it to be sold as a whole and for a few thousand dollars. It’s just amazing to see it and it would really be a fabulous piece in someone’s home or a museum. Perhaps a collector would be able to see it as a group. But to display it as an entity onto itself, rather than something whose individual pieces can be bought,  would have been a real statement. I dunno. I go back and forth on this one too.

I am beginning to think it isn’t art if it isn’t seen. Yes, Emily Dickinson wrote her poems despite years of rejection letters. Her need to write overran the depression of rejection. But her instincts about wanting to be published were right – she wasn’t a poet until she was published. Posthumously, in her case. And we aren’t artists if we aren’t visible.

As quilters, we do have our work seen by family or friends. But that’s not enough. If we want to grab the title, artist, we need to put our stuff out there. So gallery openings become key. They force us to take a good look at our work. They make us figure out how to market it, which helps us figure out what we are doing. Because unless we can describe our art in concrete terms that at least some part of the public can comprehend, we aren’t communicating. And art is fundamentally communication.

To see a really well done gallery show, go visit Carol. Her website is www.CarolAnnWaugh.com.  You’ll find the viewing times for “The F Word,” which runs through June 12^th 2010. And other ways to see her stuff.

Jury Duty

Yesterday I had jury duty – another Colorado first. I went expecting the same horrible conditions that we had in New York as jurors. That is, a dirty, windowless room with poor lighting.

But not here. The jury waiting rooms had windows! Clean windows – so you could see outside! There was good lighting. And just the right amount of info about what was going to happen. Plus vending machines with soda and snacks! This is how the real world is. New York is another planet.

Best of all, once the various cases on the docket for the day called their jury pool, the rest of us were dismissed for the day! At 9:30 a.m.!! I felt like I had been let out of school for the summer!

Now let’s remember for a minute how it was in New York. The airless room. The hostile clerks. The grumpy guards. The bizarre other jurors. Not to be too judgmental. But it certainly was not an advertisement for our justice system.

The worst experiences I had were when I lived in Brooklyn Heights and was called to serve in the Brooklyn courts. To begin with they took our fingerprints. I have never understood why. Since I didn’t plan to every do anything illegible, I let it happen. But it disconcerted me.

Then there were my fellow jurors. Back in those days one served for two weeks, which turned out to be 5 and ½ days if you never got on a jury. And I never did get on a jury. So over the course of the week, you got to know the rest of the jury pool pretty well.

For instance, there was the guy who didn’t trust anyone with a beard. Yes I’m serious. And there were the people who had relatives who worked for the city. Initially they would say very proudly, when asked – and we were always asked because most of the cases were people suing the city – they would say (for instance) “Yes my husband is a cop and my dad and brothers and uncles are firemen.”

However once they realized they would never get on a jury because they were related to city employees, they lied. To a person. Time and again.

There was the inevitable question about what newspaper you read. All but two of us always said “the Daily News” or “the Post.” The two who didn’t say one of those were a young man and, natch, me.  We each read the Times. Until he tuned in to how that went over with the attorneys and said “the Post” and got on a jury.

The one thing about how awful the setting was, was that everyone was desperate to serve on a jury and get out of the waiting room. Which is why people started lying, I believe. And we were BORED. Nothing more boring then sitting around during endless voir dires and listening to other people answering the attorneys’ questions.

I never lied because, initially, I wanted to believe that the system worked and then, after three days, I just wanted to be dismissed. By telling the truth about what paper I read, I knew I would never be chosen in insular Brooklyn.

One day I came close, however, to being selected until an attorney asked each of us undergoing questioning if we were natives of Brooklyn. Well, it so happens I was born in Brooklyn, Iowa and so when he got to me, I said “yes but…Iowa.” The court broke into laughter which the judge sternly stopped with his gavel. “I understand there’s a Brooklyn in Michigan, too,” he said and everyone shut up. And I was dismissed. Born in the wrong Brooklyn. Read the Times. Definitely NOT jury material.

Giving Up the Ghost

Not to be too melodramatic but today I finally threw away two t-shirts I have been nursing along for, oh, let’s say, 20 years. The last 6 years of which have not been pretty. Still, it took all my strength and a lot of courage, I’ll have you know!

I can convince myself and indeed, did, that the extreme fading they underwent was making them more attractive, yea, verily, more fashionable.  Provided one was concerned about being in fashion during a time when faded holey shirts were vogue.

Because, yes, I confess, they did have a hole here and there. Like around the neck, in the back where I had removed the labels 19 years ago, under the arms, and then there are those holes which just sort of appeared – like in the middle of the back and about 2/3rds down the front. Where on earth do those come from?

In my own defense, I must say I’d stopped wearing these in public about 5 or 6 years ago. If one doesn’t count mowing the lawn or gardening or walking the dogs.

Which I was informed one SHOULD count as public and I ought to know better. So I stopped wearing them outside the house about 4 years ago.

I used them as pajama tops in the summer. I felt sexy in them. Which is not something I wanted to give up without a fight because I am in my early 60s and I am greatly removed from being svelte and I LIKED feeling sexy even with the holes and the fading.

Although I should confess it’s hard to tell what colors they started out as…or even what colors they are now. I guess I would say that one is a kind of grey and the other is a steel blue. Okay, that’s grey too, I know, but it’s a different shade of grey.

So today I was moving the spring/summer stuff into my closet and putting the fall/winter stuff away and thinking, as one can at this time of year if one is not careful and has not eaten enough chocolate, that maybe I should weed the wardrobe out a little.

Like those tank tops I tell myself I will wear under my summer shirts except 1. I get too hot and thank you menopause and 2. the pretty royal blue one has a barely noticeable area across the front that’s pink where I splashed some bleach on myself when I was doing some dumb experiment and the orange one is, if truth be told, perhaps a shade too small and the….you get my drift.

After going through the tanks, I was ready to tackle the next pile of clothes and, alas, they turned out to be the solid color t-shirts. (As opposed to most of my t-shirts which have either political slogans or commemorate various attempts of the Denver Rockies to get to, let alone win, the World Series.)

I did rescue the still green tee that merely has holes (okay 4 of them but that’s all) on the back where I removed the label. (I guess I get impatient to get the labels OFF.)

But I sat down and talked to myself sternly and – sigh – I did it. Those two tees, that weathered 20 up and down years of my life with me, got put in the laundry room as rags.

I did decide this meant I could keep the tanks for now.  And the laundry room is j u s t   d o w n  t h e  h a l l, so, if I want to, I can rethink this whole sorting-through-stuff endeavor.

Adela and the Quilt

We went out to L.A. this past weekend to meet Adela, the GrandDaughter! And to deliver the baby quilt, among other things. Like ohing and ahing and holding the baby.

THE baby quilt and Lauren's needlepointed baby block

Adela is beautiful. Honest. I say this dispassionately and objectively. She is a stunningly beautiful baby. She was 2-and-a-half weeks old and growing every day. Smart. Great conversationalist. Wonderful sense of humor. A really charming baby and that part is true.

I gave her, via her parents, the black and white (and red) baby quilt. She is fascinated by a couch pillow her parents have, which is a black silhouetted trellis with vines against a cream background. So the large, less-than-subtle graphics of the baby quilt really worked.

Her mom put it in her crib and she did stare at it while falling asleep. She is still so small and new that she takes up very little of that crib and it will be a while before she’s large enough to need that quilt.

This hasn’t stopped me from thinking of the next several baby quilts I intend to make. All of which will be bright colors and baby-appropriate fabrics. It’s quite a departure for me to use those fabrics – I normally use large florals and never ever pastels. But for this baby – I am happy to use those sweet prints that exist for kids. In fact, it fills me with joy to make baby quilts for Adela.

More Recipe Madness

So after I discovered that actually looking at a recipe I thought I knew by heart can make a slight wee bit of difference in how the finished dish is, (this is about those hard as brick cookies I discussed in a previous post and how nice they were after I discovered that indeed I had been using a tad too much flour and instead made them the right way….)….

…I decided to look at my signature dish, risotto. I was taught how to make this yummy, labor-intensive food by my friend Philip, too long ago to remember when. And obviously too long ago to remember what really went into a good-tasting risotto.

So I got out the cookbook Phil had given me at the time – “ha ha,” I had thought, “I can do this without a recipe” – which is kind of my approach to making quilts sometime or really most of life – which is perhaps, I’m guessing here, why my quilts never come out the way everyone else’s do….but that works with quilts….

….but it sure doesn’t work with food. Anyway I looked at the cookbook and discovered I had indeed forgotten a small ingredient – the homemade broth. This might be, I mused, why my risotto has been a little dull for the past several years. Instead of using 5 cups of homemade broth, I have been using 5 cups of water. Hmmm.

So I made a broth, from scratch  (stupid expression when I actually used two roasted chicken carcasses and lots of veggies and herbs) on the day I wanted to make the risotto. and THEN  I reread the cookbook and noted that the broth has to sit overnight so the fat will congeal on the top and one can remove it. Ah…okay, so I postponed the risotto a day.

The next day I got out all the ingredients – the right ones this time – and set up everything and got the sauce (so to speak) simmering (and incidentally discovered that if you pay attention and trust the process, you don’t have to keep adding butter and oil so that each teeny piece of veggie is covered in oil and you get sick after the fact from too much oil…no indeed, the veggies et al form their own sauce, who knew?)

…and the rice was in the pot getting coated with oil and butter and I checked the recipe again (a record number of checks for me) and noted that the broth needs to be simmering too. And instead I had just taken it out of the refrigerator.

Which is why God invented the microwave. Which certainly works great on heating up a cupful of broth at a time.

And I remembered to grate the cheese for a topping. Rather than having to rush back to the kitchen halfway through dinner and do it. I am speaking hypothetically here. Not that that’s what I’ve had to do every other damn time I’ve made this dish….

End result. A stunning dish of chicken and veggie risotto. Really yummy. Genuinely yummy. I am now expanding my risotto menu to other types. It’s fun, actually, when the end result tastes delicious and does not have the consistency of glue. In fact, no longer tastes like glue, either. There is something to this recipe following thing. I may try it again someday. Maybe with those chocolate cookies I make that crumble if you look at them cross-eyed. Hmmm. Wonder how much flour they actually take. Although I am still not going to follow directions for my quilts. Enough is enough.

If at first….

Sometimes when I start to make one quilt, I wind up with two.

Does this happen to anyone else? I think it occurs for me when I have an idea about using certain fabrics together and it becomes obvious over the course of time that they just don’t go. I like juxtaposing fabrics that might not go at first glance but sometimes at second, third, and fourth glance…. But when they don’t meld, it really doesn’t work.

For instance, I had picked up some gorgeous hand-painted Japanese-inspired fabrics at last year’s Denver National. I just loved them. They warmed my heart.

And I wanted to combine them with some large floral designer prints. Natch. I love those too. And that kind of worked. And then I added some panels of very large koi prints. And whoa! That was a bad idea. A mega bad idea.

Removing the koi, I still wasn’t getting an image of what the quilt should be. Normally I pull fabric, audition it on my design wall, and I just know what I should do. It cries out for the blocks I should use.

But the remaining fabric was not doing that. I think part of the problem was that I didn’t want to cut the hand-painted fabrics up too much. Some – okay. But not into little pieces.

Meanwhile the rest of the fabric was screaming, nine patch with interior windowpaning. Noisy though that was, I could see it was indeed the right thing.

And the hand-painted fabrics were saying SIMPLE BLOCK. Maybe even a very simple version of the bear’s paw, if you eliminate all of the little triangles. Ah yes, I could see that.

So I started combining painted fabric with large prints to get the faux bear’s paw blocks. And big florals with busy little florals to do the nine patch. I liked what I was getting. I figured I would alternate nine-patch and faux bear’s paw, and have quite an interesting quilt.

Well, that didn’t work. At all. Too much to look at, is my guess. Which is when I realized I was making two quilts. Okay well then I needed to do something to make the individual blocks in each quilt stand out. This is why there’s windowpaning, right?

But even that proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. Initially I wanted to use a simple print to unify the tops. I chose some grays and auditioned them. Boy did they take the tone of the quilt down. Huge mistake.

Then I decided to piece windowpaning, creating a crazy patchwork to do between the blocks. This I LOVED for the nine-patch. And it destroyed the faux bear’s paw.

I finally realized that the bear’s paw formed its own fake windowpaning with the long stripes at two of the edges. So I took advantage of this. No windowpaning – just the appearance of same.

The two came together pretty quickly. To my deep delight and chagrined pleasure. I mean, the fabric knows. I just have to keep listening to it. The nine-patch became Jubilation! She loves me again! And the faux bear’s paw: Meet me at the corner.

Big Relief

I have finished piecing the top for The Water is Wide. And I like the quilt again. I didn’t like it when I got the center section completed. This happens to me a lot. But I know now to move forward and see what happens. And happily, once I put the borders on, I like the quilt again.

The borders are my old favorite, piano keys. In different widths. What I’ve done this time is to make the order of the fabrics consistent in the two side borders and the top and bottom borders. This is new for me.

Amazing how such a relatively small thing can seem earth-shaking. I mean to me, this detail is huge. I thought about it; I debated the pros and cons to myself; I slept on it (metaphorically).

Generally I want a random look in my piano keys. But I thought the quilt’s structure – the fact that it is very structured, actually – demanded a more structured border.

As always I had the help and artistic advice of the dogs. Luka was in and out of the studio. Luka needs to keep an eye on the clock at all times because she is convinced we humans will forget something important, like snack time and dog supper. So she alternates between reminding me and then Lauren, what the time is and how close we are to a dog event.

And then Button came down toward the end of my piecing the border in place, and laid down and napped. (She is a true poodle, in that food is not really an important part of her day.) She was sharing her calm with me, which I greatly appreciated. Especially because I was concerned about how I didn’t like the quilt, it was all wrong, I’d made some huge mistakes….yada yada yada.

Button pointed out that I had accomplished exactly what I’d wanted to; the quilt actually worked; and there was not too much red, which was a major concern. She agreed that there should, however, not be a red piece in the border, to keep the balance of red in the quilt where it should be.

Now I simply need to find the right backing, do the quilting, bind it, and make the label. Piece of cake. Or, in Button and Luka’s case, piece of kibble!

BAH HUMBUG!

Judges’ comments drive me nuts! I am not going to write all those platitudes about how I know it’s a hard job yada yada yada. SO WHAT! I am refusing to be sympathetic about how judging a show with 400 quilts might be a tad daunting. I don’t care!

Do their eyes start to cross after the 200^th quilt? NOT MY PROBLEM! Do their knees ache? DON’T CARE! Don’t care at all!

Is it hard to think up something to say about every quilt? GIVE ME A BREAK! This is quilting – something we all love.

I am a tad irked, a little bit riled, a wee smidge perturbed, because the judges for the Denver National obviously didn’t read the teeny write up I wrote for each quilt, because if they had, they could not have possibly written the dumb-ass comments they made.

Or they hated my quilts so much, they were clutching at straws to say anything other than Yech!

The two quilts that got comments were Our Love Was Like a Ruby and Maybe It’s the Acid Rain. Now I admit I entered Acid Rain because I thought it would shake things up a bit. It’s not conventional. And Ruby is subtly subversive. But the comments were so far removed from the quilts that I am just nonplused here.

For instance, this year, the judges noted that my quilts were not square. DUH! This is what I said in my write up. My quilts are NOT square ON PURPOSE.

Did they think I didn’t know this? Was this supposed to be a light-bulb moment for me? “Oh my gosh,” was I supposed to say, “waddaya know, my quilts aren’t square? What a surprise!”

Geez Louise! Did they think I prepped the quilts for entry into a national show without noticing that they weren’t square?

I find the trend toward squaring up and even blocking today’s quilts to be insane. For god’s sakes, we’re working in fiber. Not canvas. And ours is not a medium which is going into frame – like a painting. There is no need to be square, nor precisely rectangular. Unless you are someone with too much time on your hands. The art should dictate the size and the sides—that is, if it looks best with one side longer than the other, that’s cool. Go with it. As I do.

Then the judges noted that I use commercial fabric. When did this become a no-no? It’s how I use that fabric, that matters. I would think. Call me crazy.

But am I going to be condemned for using designer fabric? That’s nuts.

I happen to hate the smells associated dyes and the other components you have to use. And I hate mess. I may be an unruly quilter, but I am not a messy person. I just don’t want to dye my own fabric. This should not be a capitol offense.

Then they noted that there was no place to rest the eye (this comment was for Our Love is Like a Ruby). What?!?! I don’t WANT the eye to rest. I want the eye to be ENGAGED! Again this was INTENTIONAL on my part. It’s art, not a sleeping pill.

And they opined that my quilts should be flat. HUH?? They ARE flat when they are on a flat surface. They are flat lying against my walls. They sure looked flat to me. They don’t bunch up. They don’t have wrinkles. And again they are textiles not canvas. Fiber, not paint. They live and breathe and have batting. Although the batting isn’t bunched up either. So what the hell are those judges talking about?

This seems the most gratuitous comment I have ever received. Worst even than the comment last year for my quilt “You decide.” “No, you decide.” – the same quilt which was juried into 500 Art Quilts, just published by Lark Books – THAT quilt – last year was judged as too monochromatic. Is there a chromatic gauge they use? Is there an okay level of monochromatic that I somehow overstepped the boundary of?

Or are they just tired and hungry and wanting to get this judging thing over with?

At any rate, I will keep entering quilt shows because I think it’s important to get the art out there. And I realize that means I will keep getting these inane, unhelpful, irritating comments – until one day there will be a judge who will actually look at my artist’s statement and say “Hey, she is doing what she said she wants to do. Pretty cool.” I know that judge exists. I just have to keep entering shows until I find her.