2013 – Page 2 – Deidre Adams

Vermont Studio Center residency – Part I

Have you ever had the luxury of being able to do pretty much whatever you want, all day and every day, with no demands or interruptions whatsoever? Well, I myself have not, but for an artist, this is about as close as it gets. A huge studio, 3 great meals a day prepared by other people, and the ability to come and go as you please without worrying about the time of day all combine to make this an incredible environment for creativity and productivity.

One of the VSC co-founders, Jon Gregg, stood up during dinner the first night to welcome all the new residents and had some advice for us. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but he basically said, “All you people (artists and writers) have come here and have put all kinds of pressure on yourself about what you’re going to do while you’re here. Well, there are 7 billion people in the world, many of them just struggling to survive, and when you think about that, you realize that no one cares.” Way to put things in perspective! We were thus freed from the self-imposed responsibility to do great things.

Why then, did it take me so long to get into the groove? Having brought a great variety of materials and supplies, I was at first in a quandary as to what to make. I guess it’s that idea again that constraints and limits are, paradoxically, rather freeing. Also, the working environment here took some getting used to for me. There are lots of people in this particular studio building, and the walls are thin. So we all have to be really quiet. Everyone goes into their studio and closes the door, and we’re all very hush-hush. You can hear people walking around because the floors creak, and sometimes there are tiny scratching sounds when people are drawing or painting. The rest of the sounds are intermittent, as people go in and out, drag their chairs across the floor, hammer on things, or use hair dryers, etc. I need to have something to listen to in order to engage my left brain while I’m working on art, but I hate in-the-ear headphones, and that’s all I have. So I’m still getting used to that.

And most importantly, I’ve never been to New England before, much less in the fall, so I had to spend some time just taking in the glorious scenery.

Once that’s out of the way, how to proceed? First, get everything hauled into the studio and get set up. Spend some time thinking about where to put things. Ponder. Look out the window at the fall foliage and the gorgeous rusty rooftops of the structures next door. Ponder some more.

There is a wonderful art supply store here, so the next order of business was to have a look there. I found some inexpensive large rolls of paper and a variety of new pens and other marking tools to experiment with. Whenever I feel stuck in the studio, I have to trick myself by just playing around for awhile to get around that mindset of taking myself too seriously. I decided to put up some big pieces of paper and just see what I might do with those.

Here I’m just testing the waters and trying to think a little differently. I don’t normal draw on paper. The piece to the right is one of the treasures I found on one of my walks.

More work in progress. Playing with some black marking tools, which turned out to be water soluble and smear when you paint over them. Kind of fun and uncontrollable.

Then, since I’d brought my portable sewing machine, I had to make sure I used it for something. I played with repurposing some cast-off strips from prior work.

Then I started making some more of my stitched paper pieces that I’m calling “Excavations.” I first wrote about these here. I was rather nervous about doing this at first, because the stitching on paper is super loud, but I asked the people around me about it and they all assured me it wasn’t bothering them. I told them to pound on the wall if they needed me to knock it off, but so far it’s been OK. I have a lot more to say about the excavations pieces because working on them here has helped me clarify my thoughts about them, but this post is already getting rather long, so I’ll save that for another day.

Here’s how the studio looked after two weeks.

Limited progress on this one. More found treasures at right.

October 15th, 2013|Art|6 Comments

Looking forward – and backward

This morning I’m getting ready to leave for my artist’s residency at Vermont Studio Center. The past week has been a blur, mostly spent on the computer wrapping up some projects that had to be done before I leave, trying to prepare and freeze all the good stuff from the garden and the CSA that wouldn’t get eaten by the guys while I’m gone, and tearing through the studio trying to figure out what to bring. Since I’m driving, I have the luxury of bringing pretty much whatever I want, though I did decide that panels are too bulky, so good – there’s one thing I can eliminate.

So I thought this whole residency thing was going to be just about the most exciting thing ever, but as usual, my Doubtful Self has decided to start talking to me and giving me all sorts of reasons to be apprehensive about it. Suddenly I started to feel a whole lot of pressure. Doubtful Self said, “You need to make sure you don’t waste this time. You need to make sure you create something important and awesome, or else what’s the point?” Of course, there’s two ways to look at this, one of them being that it’s just a big vacation and a chance to make art, free of the pressures of daily responsibilities and little things that we don’t realize are taking up a whole lot of time until it’s too late – Internet, I’m looking at you! But Doubtful Self wouldn’t hear of it. She said, “This is a chance to start doing something with all those ideas you keep having but claim you don’t have time for.”

It’s so true. I have somewhere near 267 ideas – 4 or 5 of them very well formed in my mind – that I could really make some progress on. But which ones? When I have too much choice, I freeze. I know that setting limits is a fantastic way to be really creative, but I’m really scared of getting there and realizing too late that I had set the wrong limits. So I’m going to load up the car with a whole bunch of stuff, and just see what calls to me when I get there.

Meanwhile, as I was going through and organizing the studio, I found some cool stuff. It’s always great to look back and see things from the past, because sometimes you can mine it for new ideas. These are little collage studies I did quite a few years ago (2005?) in a workshop with Barbara Lee Smith and a British embroiderer whose name I can’t remember now, sorry! We used lots of papers – black, white, and gray – and created textures on them with all sorts of marking tools – pens, pencils, ink, paint, rubber stamps, and some fun rolling rubber stamp thingies. Then we took all of those papers and tore them up and collaged them onto 9-inch square backgrounds and added more marks, fabric, stitching, or whatever. Looks like we were eventually allowed to add in a single color. The idea was that these would serve as studies from which we would then create a larger work out of fabric. I remember doing a quilted piece, but who knows where it ended up. Anyway, I think these were quite instructive as compositional exercises.

And here’s another set, done in a workshop with Jason Pollen, I have no idea when. Lesson learned: Always date things, because you never know when you might care again in the future, and your memory is not going to be as good as you might hope. These are 7-inch squares of black paper, onto which we made first marks with white gesso and then tinted with acrylic paint. The big takeaway from this workshop was the little squeeze bottle with a steel nib used for drawing fine marks. I still use that all the time. This is why workshops are so valuable. Even if you don’t end up using much of what you learn, there will always be a nugget of pure gold that feeds your psyche and/or process.

September 21st, 2013|Art|1 Comment

Go get yourself a great piece of art!

Today is the start of Week 2 of the SAQA Benefit Auction, the biggest fundraiser of the year for Studio Art Quilt Associates, the premier nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the art quilt through education, exhibitions, professional development, documentation and publications. SAQA’s outstanding advocacy for textile artists is instrumental in making it possible for many of us to bring our work to the wider world.

The auction is a fine venue for acquiring a great piece of art work while supporting this organization. Prices will start at $750 each today at 2:00 pm EST. Note: If you have a favorite artist, you’d better be ready. The most well-known artists’ pieces are gone within seconds. Prices drop to $550 at noon tomorrow, then $350 the following day, etc. But if you wait, you might not get the one you’ve got your eye on!

Please support SAQA by taking a look.

Week 2, Page 2a

Week 2, Page 2b

Bid early; bid often!

September 16th, 2013|Art|Comments Off