Untitled, ©2008 Deidre Adams

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m so happy to finally get some time to go back into the studio, as of yesterday. This is a shot of a piece I started a long time ago but haven’t had time to work on. Yesterday I finally sat down and finished the quilting, about a full 8 hours’ worth or more. I don’t do the entire 8 hours in one sitting; that would be a bit excessive. The time is broken up by meals, trips downstairs to do laundry or let the can in/out, and once, to see the latest present she brought us (more about that later).

This is how a piece looks after quilting but before blocking, full of lumps and bumps and wonderful (at least to me) texture. The next step is to throw it in the washer to equalize the stitching, then I’ll pin it up to the design wall to dry and thus flatten it out. I almost wish I could leave it bumpy, but I haven’t become that independent in my art making just yet. I still worry too much about what others think.

I know I’m not the only artist who is conflicted by the dilemma of how best to balance the drive to make art and the drive to avoid being broke. This is partly why I haven’t written a post in a while. I’ve been in a sort of paralyzed, deer-in-the-headlights state trying to figure out what I should do with my life. This is how the inner conversation goes:

Self 1: “You’re an artist. What are you doing wasting time at this job doing stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with who you are in life when you could be in the studio developing your work? Who knows how many good years you’ve got left?”

Self 2: “That’s just crazy talk. How can you even think of quitting when the future is so uncertain? The economy is tanking — what if you end up homeless? Even in the best of circumstances, you’ll have no money to travel or do anything fun. Besides, it’s really a fantastic job — the people are great to work with, the pay is good, and you have security.”

Self 1: “Well ya know, you’re not getting any younger. If you don’t do something soon, before you know it, you’ll just end up being a tired old lady sitting in a cube, staring at a computer screen, wondering where your life went.”

Self 2: “But we have a 15-year-old who’s going to college in 2 years. It’s become glaringly apparent that he’s not likely to be getting a full-ride scholarship anywhere, so how will we pay for that if you’re unemployed?”

And so on and so forth, round and round. But this past week, Self 1 finally won out. I finally got the courage to tell my supervisor I’m leaving. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. Besides giving up a great job, my supervisor is one of my best friends, and I’ll miss talking with her on an almost-daily basis. But the future is wide open now, so it’s sink or swim!

Façade IV: Chrome Oxide
39 x 60 inches

Here is the finished version of the piece I wrote about on Jan. 3. This series is inspired by walls of old buildings which have been painted over numerous times, with the top layers wearing away to reveal what lies beneath; sometimes there’s also graffiti, and all of it blends together to form a rich visual texture. My process in painting these is somewhat analogous to what these walls undergo. I add various elements, then subtract parts of them by adding more layers, while the layers of paint are affected by the physical texture of the underlying support — in my case, it’s fabric and stitching.

This leads into what’s been an ongoing dilemma for me: how to categorize this work. I’ve been calling them “mixed media textiles” because I don’t want to use the dreaded “q” word, and they’re more than paintings. “Quilts” suffer a bad rap in the art world; no matter how serious the artist nor how important the work, the medium is considered a “craft” and is therefore inferior to painting. Thanks to the efforts of many artists in the field and organizations such as SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc.), some progress has been made toward overcoming this image, but the battle isn’t won yet.

Façade IV: Chrome Oxide (detail)

Well, you have to expect that the first few posts are going to be awkward ramblings until the neophyte blogger can find her voice and get into a rhythm. There is so much to learn, and while I am slightly more technical than the average artist, I’m finding this all very bewildering. But my original intention for this journal was to keep it more art-related and try not to wander too far off track with boring details.

So to that end, here’s some art-related content. I’m working on two pieces now that aren’t coming together easily. Sometimes this happens, either because my original vision wasn’t very clear, or because it turned out to be hard to articulate. Let’s just take one of them to discuss for now.

I started the painting on this one a few weeks ago. I had a very clear idea of the colors I wanted to use and how I wanted to divide up the composition, but it just isn’t working at this point. It feels like 3 separate panels, and they aren’t integrated. I like each separate section, but they just don’t make sense together.

To attempt to solve this, I changed the color for the middle section. It became very flat at that point, so I used some dark values to bring out the shapes from the original piecing and make it more dimensional, and I changed some of the values in the vertical sections. It’s still not where I want it to end up, but it’s getting there.

I’ll keep working it at it.