My college educators were always emphatically stating it, “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition”! We were repeatedly subjected to famous works and told to notice the use of repetition as a unifier, for thematic emphasis, as a defining aspect of an artist’s style... I stored this information somehow, somewhere. I use the tool of repetition in almost every piece I make, but it wasn’t until I took on the task of painting these little berries, one after another, tiny brush, little careful dabs of red paint, that I felt it as a mantra. Dip, dab, repeat, repeat, repeat... After the initial idea, so much of art making is small steps repeated again and again. There is beauty in repetition. Has someone said that before? Was it me? Well it’s worth repeating.
on cultivating an image
My daughter did a fantastic job on this summer squash. I am seriously considering hiring her to do my marketing and presentation.
an attempt will be made
to recapture a moment I was in while walking in my neighborhood yesterday. I looked over at the small grey run down house with the rusted orange pinto parked in the driveway. I saw the young naked maple reflected in the street puddle out front. Rain was starting to fall and perfect rippling rings were disturbing the surface of the grey puddle.
It was simultaneously a sad domestic portrait and an expression of the remarkable qualities of water, with its powers to reflect and cleanse, distort and sanctify.
writing a language I can’t read
I am working on four quilts with tree images; oak, birch, cottonwood, and dogwood. I’m spending a lot of time staring at, fondling, and sketching branches. Each species has distinct qualities, of course. The curves and rounded ends of dogwood branches somehow remind me of the japanese lettering my daughters are learning, while the points and angles in a stand of oak have some quality in common with jutting, swooping arabic. The task of capturing those aspects in cut cloth and stitched thread is daunting, like writing a language I can’t read.
socked in
This low cloud blanket hanging over Eugene through the last week threatens to settle itself in my head and limbs. I am becoming a creature of fog and shadow, slow ideas and movements, perpetually numb fingers and toes, constantly breathing in and sipping at the medley of teas I am endlessly preparing for myself in a fruitless effort to get warm. If I don’t become lost in the fog on my way out to the mailbox, I may certainly become trapped beneath this expanding and precariously stacked collection of tea and coffee cups on my work table.
it’s all perspective
Last night I started reading “Goodbye My Island” to my youngest (a welcome respite from Harry Potter). The book was written by a friend of my mother’s from our years in Nome. It is a story about the population of Native Alaskans who, for generations, spent their winters hunting and gathering on a small rocky island in the Bering Sea called King Island. The entire community would relocate to Nome (for them a veritable metropolis of 3000 people) in the summer months, where they fished and sold their ivory carvings to tourists.
By the late 70’s early 80’s, Nome with it’s greater amenities, available public schooling, and unfortunate collection of drinking establishments, became such a draw or a trap for King Islanders that they collectively ceased their age old migration pattern. King Island’s hunting village was abandoned as was a way of life few of us can even vaguely relate to.
I grew up with these King Island children. They were in my girls scout troop. They were my next door neighbors. I played their games in the vacant lot on 3rd street, and watched them fist fight kids from Shishmaref after school.
It was not until I began reading “Goodbye My Island” last night that it ever occured to me what a bizarre collision of worlds went on in my childhood home. I, like most of the white kids I grew up with, moved to this isolated frozen landscape from a big warm city in the lower 48. Cooie, Love, Bubba and the many other King Islanders I knew were saying goodbye to their roadless, windswept, tight knit community, to live in the bustling, dirty, crowded, city of Nome.
crazed quilter
When I first formed the picture for this quilt in my mind it was colored in the austere tones of December, black branches on a grey sky. Somehow I ended up with this riot of color, flame branches and lemon cloudlets against an impossibly blue view. I’m not necessarily disappointed, I am just baffled how I got here. I look at the cloth heaped on my cutting table, (from which I drew my palette) and see further reinforcement of my original intent. A pile of mostly greys and blacks with just a few swatches of blue, pink, red, yellow, meant for accent. It is almost as if I get drunk on the color layout process. I am so stimulated by the way a blue shifts with a red beside it that I grow giddy and irrational. Only when the last swatches of color are ironed in place do I stop spinning and begin to realize just what I’ve created. It’s like I’m the Victor Frankenstein of the quilting world.