May 2009 – Page 2 – Deidre Adams

Greetings from Ohio

Chairs, ©2009 Deidre Adams

I have been in Athens, Ohio, all this past week. For three days I taught a Photoshop class, and then for the next three I attended the SAQA conference, where I met some wonderful new friends and listened to some interesting discussions about making and promoting artwork. I also went to the opening of Quilt National 2009. All of this is evidence that as a documentary photographer, I pretty much suck, because I did not get a single photo of any of these things. So instead you see before you a photo of the west side (loading dock?) entrance of the Bromley Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Ohio University, where I’ve been staying this past week. (At least I’m sparing you images of the wildly creepy basement of this place!)

Some thoughts:

Promoting one’s work: Outside of the obvious, there are many ways you can form relationships with people in business to get your work seen. Finding a business that has a symbiotic relationship with your particular work and making connections is one way to start. (From Lisa Chipetine’s Marketing Outside the Box session.) Alyson B. Stanfield also gave a keynote presentation on marketing and promotion, all of which is fantastic advice for artists. These are things I know I should be doing, but at this point in my life I want to pull back and make some work without any distractions. (Er … what was that about not making excuses?) Bottom line here: I will still not be doing the Facebook or the Twitter any time soon.

Pricing and commissions: Pricing is a big hairy conundrum and artists are all very different in their approaches. Carol Taylor surveyed a large number of artists and presented a detailed compilation of information about the methods used for pricing (ranging from very methodical calculation to “gut feeling”) as well as the sales numbers for a few of the artists. Apparently only one person out of all the survey respondents is making what I would call really good money.

Self-Publishing: Carol Ann Waugh presented a session on creating your own book. I found this idea very intriguing. Besides the one-off photo books that are available in many flavors now (blurb.com, shutterfly.com, Apple, etc.), there are also some print-on-demand (POD) options that are considerably less expensive, and the quality of the samples she showed looked pretty good. But then, there’s always a catch: evidently you then have to work your tail off to market and promote the book. (Could not have seen that coming!) Still, the idea has some possibilities for me down the road.

Quilt National: The show was fantastic, quite possibly the best QN ever, in my humble opinion. I didn’t realize that on opening night you are allowed to take pictures, so I didn’t have my camera with me. Went back the next day to get some pictures, but the option had been removed by then. But it is a great show, and many congratulations to all the artists whose work is included. And special congratulations to my friends Sandy Woock, who won a Juror’s Award of Merit, and Pam RuBert, whose quilt is featured in a Wall Street Journal article about the show. (Rant: Seriously people, can you just not ever write an article about art quilts without mentioning Grandmother?)

May 24th, 2009|Miscellaneous|5 Comments

Ritz-Carlton commission

The commission I’m working on is for the new Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe, set to open later this year. This was a very good contract for Translations Gallery, including several pieces by multiple gallery artists. In addition to the commission piece, they also bought this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

And this piece:

Horizon XI, 34 x 34 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Progress on the new version of Iterations is coming along nicely. Quilting and blocking the panels separately made things ridiculously fast. No endless scrunching and turning and readjusting. Then all I had to do was square up the adjoining edges and join them to one another.

To put the panels together, I just set them side by side and stitched them together with a closely spaced zigzag stitch. This required getting the trusty Bernina back out, since the Juki does not do anything but straight stitch. Note the use of the very sexy and high-tech masking tape for basting purposes.

After the panels were all attached, here’s what I ended up with:

At this point, I trim off the edges and put on the binding. This is a faced binding which I turn to the back so it doesn’t show. Now all that remains is to do the painting. After the first few layerings, here’s how it currently looks:

Several more layerings of color will be needed to achieve the final depth and richness I’m after. I should be finished by the end of this weekend if all goes according to plan. But other plans for this weekend include writing an 8-10 page paper for Art & Cultural Heritage class, finishing four 22×30 paintings for Watermedia II, doing client corrections on two freelance design projects, and celebrating Mother’s Day and my birthday, both tomorrow!

I’m certainly not trying to say I’m amazing — flat-out crazy for trying to do everything at once would be much closer to the mark. It is very hard to try to do so many things at once and do them all at your very best level of accomplishment. I’ve found myself having to compromise a lot this semester, which I really do hate. I’ve always been (OK, at least since graduating from high school) kind of a sociopath about wanting all As in school. But really, who cares? I’m not some young kid who’s going to be out looking for my first job and has nothing else but a grade-point average to prove my worth. Why can’t I just relax and not stress out about it?

Since I had three studio classes this semester, it really was too much and I just could not devote the amount of time to every assignment that I would have liked. I did make some work that I was pretty happy with, but I wonder how much better I could have done with more time and proper focus? Well, I’ll start posting some of it soon and you can tell me what you think.

I have finals next week, and then on Friday I’m leaving to drive to Ohio, where I will be attending the SAQA Art & Excellence Conference (held in conjunction with the Quilt National Dairy Barn exhibit). I’ll be teaching a 3-day preconference class called Photoshop for Artists. Then I’ll be heading to the Surface Design Association Conference, Off the Grid, in Kansas City. I’ve been wanting to go to the SDA conference for years, and this was the first time it seemed that everything was in place for me to do it. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in this textile-focused world for a few days. Should be a lot of fun!

May 9th, 2009|Work in progress|7 Comments