I usually do my best and most focused work after the sun goes down. When the pressures of the world are farthest away. This is what I got up to last night sorted by project.

This is probably the longest email I’ll ever write for this thing.

Postcard #1

Yesterday I started with a task I’ve been putting off for a while—making stencil masks for the letters in my current collage project.

I originally sketched the letters out with artist’s chart tape. I wanted to minimize the amount of graphite on the canvas—it could muddy the paint or clear glaze later—and with this method I only needed to make small marks where each line begins and terminates. It also let me really feel the size of the letters on the canvas. All in all, I’d do it that way again.

However, I found laying out collage over these lines obscured the borders of the letters too much and I was fighting to understand where the border would be. Eventually everything outside of the letters will be painted over with oil paint and the letters given a strong outline—that’s the end goal but with the lines underneath I couldn’t SEE it. So I needed to make stencils which would allow me to isolate each letter.

I ended using tracing paper and then laying that over newsprint in order to cut both. Then I painted the resulting stencil a warm grey. I think when I next do this I’m going to use a sturdier kind of paper. But I am nonetheless happy with the result. If it works it works.

It struck how the work I do to design by hand is not that much different from the design processes digital designers go through—creating masks and thinking in layers. It strange how universal some aspects of art are. I imagine our ancestors have been isolating certain elements to look at them better for about as long as art has been happening.

Would those ancestors recognize my version of it more than the digital version? Shock of a computer program aside, I’m not sure they actually would. But I certainly find more pleasure in doing it the long way.

Dance Regalia

Next I worked on creating a palette of materials for a piece of dance regalia. The dance is only about a month away and I wasn’t sure until last night that I was going to make anything new at all.

However, my first attempt at a ribbon shirt looked good but didn’t hold up well to traveling and repeated wear. And its a little too tight these days anyway. I thought Id just lay out the new dance shirt I bought and see if any ribbon I had looked real good with it. If there was ribbon that felt right Id go ahead, if there wasn’t then I’d have done my best and would be free to work on other things.

I really like how this shirt fits and feels. The puffy sleeves are a little to whimsical for my day to day but I love how they move and catch the wind. That makes it perfect for the dance.

As I laid out materials I found my self digging not just in my ribbon basket but in my grandmothers scrap fabric. As I was pulling things out an image started to form in my mind—a combination of a painting I had recently seen and American folk art wall hangings.

I started to imagine the green fabric as hills, the tweed (sadly hidden under ribbon in this image) as low buildings, the monk cloth as snowy roofs and the long strips of green rayon and blue wool painterly accents.

Its my intent to make a simple quilted landscape in the yoke section of the shirt which captures Heart Mountain Relocation Camp, a place where my great-grandfather worked, and on which I have been meditating quite a lot. I will make it with my grandmother’s (his daughter’s) fabric in the style of American folk and outsider artists.

I will probably base it on this painting which a friend sent to me from a trip to Chicago, remembering as she did my great grandfather and his time there. The artist is Jishiro Miyauchi who was interred at Heart Mountain Relocation Camp for full length of its existence.

Misc. Notes

• I ended the night looking through some books on folk art I have on my reference shelf. I wanted a sense of what kind of fabric shapes and combinations outsider quilt makers and fiber artists were using. But even though both books had fabric art on their cover, neither spent much time on them. That really disappointed me.

• I listened to William Gibson’s The Peripheral for most of my work session last night. Noticed a recurring spider motif in there that reminded me of the spider motif used in Nick Harkaway’s Titan Noir, which is in its self a pastiche of Gibson’s earlier work. Question pending more investigation: What is the connection between spiders and cyberpunk?

• I fight with myself over my work space all the time. When its too messy I feel overwhelmed, when I work to keep it clean I feel like I’m always taking things out again and never actually getting to work. But last night I looked at my living room and felt a sense of pleasure at seeing the product of my work.

  

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