This is one of those questions that guarantees the page will remain blank, the canvas untouched, the design wall bare. This is a question best left unasked. It’s like asking, “Do I look fat?” Whatever the answer, it will do nothing to placate the nagging doubt. Ask 100 people how they define “art” and you will receive 100 different answers, and anyway their definition likely is not yours. Getting caught up in what is and isn’t “art” is pointless and ultimately not helpful when it comes to creating. Or so I keep reminding myself. Still, these are the kinds of questions that lurk in my mind, sullying my ideas before they’ve even made it out onto the wall or page.
Yesterday I returned home from a week in Ohio where I was lucky enough to be with a terrific group of women all there for a workshop with Sue Spargo. Sue developed an original way of working with hand dyed felted wool; creating layers using other fabrics, ribbons, velvets, cotton, linen, wools and then applying embellishments and stitching to create yet another layer, before machine quilting. Her work is exquisite and unique, and while many have taken her techniques to use in their own creations, her layering and designs are easily identified as “Sue Spargo”. So much so that I began using her name as a verb and noun, as in – “this needs to be Spargoed up” or “I’ll just add a little Spargo to it,” or “once I’ve Spargoized it, I think it will be finished.” All of which meant that whatever it was, it needed layering, embellishing, more, more, more!
My dilemma has been that because Sue’s style is so utterly unique, it is difficult to use her techniques and do anything that doesn’t feel to me like something she’s already done and done much better than I ever could. As a designer/artist, I don’t want my work to look like someone else’s. When I began designing jewelry, my cousin’s wife, who had started a jewelry business and was designing stunning pieces, had a huge influence on me and in the beginning the things I designed, looked a lot like her work. However, over time, I began to find my own voice and my work became more and more unique to me and my vision. This is what I hope will continue to happen with the things I am designing, using fabric and stitching. I have to trust that over time, just as with my jewelry, I will create things that look more and more like my own creations and unlike anyone else’s.
Last week’s workshop began with the idea of a landscape. As I thought about what I wanted to create, I incorporated some of Sue’s son, Jason Spargo’s gorgeous hand dyed wools, for the sky, moving into more sunset like colors, to greens and earth tones. But first I began with a very rough sketch.
A Sketch beginsAnd it continues…My initial sketch begins to take shape
As I developed my idea, I added to the large shapes…
Now I will begin stitching using a variety of threads and stitches. As I look at it, I am thinking I need to add something to the right hand side as it’s looking a bit claustrophobic. It is likely that this will become quite a bit larger than its current 18″ x 26″. This piece is still very much in its adolescence. But is it art? I don’t know and I don’t care. It is in the beginning stages of a much longer, wonderful, and thoroughly enjoyable process that I have only begun to explore. Asking that question ruins the process and makes me want to tear everything down in an effort to pursue some elusive enigmatic goal that I may never realize. Someone once said to me – “Start where you are.” And so I am.
In January I had the opportunity to go to one of Sue Spargo‘s fabulous workshops in Tucson, Arizona, a place I’d never been. While there I met some lovely people, one of whom was Anna Bates, who has a blog, Woolie Mammoth, a YouTube channel – Quilt Roadies, and blogs for The Quilt Show once a week under the heading – Anna and G on the Road. During the course of our five days together, Anna interviewed me and wrote a lovely post about me and my work. Though I realized afterward that while I sent her photographs of my early designs in fashion and knitting, even a photo of one of my hand thrown and hand painted pots, I didn’t send photos of my jewelry! (insert wide eyed emoji). So here are a few additions to her post…
Because of my conversation with Anna, I reflected on the past (almost) forty years now, when I began my studies at Parsons School of Design and now, when I am learning everything I can about quilting, quilts, dyeing, and manipulating fabric in different ways to create an image, a feeling, an idea…
Another of my knit designs for Elle MagazineAn early design ensemble from my days at Parsons School of Design
All of which led me to a recurring topic – finding one’s artistic voice. How does one find it? How can it be nurtured, cultivated, encouraged?
While listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, two musicians were discussing this very idea and one of them repeated something they’d been told by another artist friend, who basically said – the only way to find your voice is by doing, and in the doing, you will not only find your voice, but it will make itself heard.
I love that! And it aligns with what I have learned through my experiences designing, whether that was fashion, knits, jewelry or quilts and fabric art.
A few months ago I decided I needed to learn how to piece. In quilting terms this is the ability to make something that looks like this: (This hen block was designed by Janet Nesbitt of One Sister.)
So I signed up for Sarah Fielke’s 2019 BOM and began making Janet Nesbitt’s Half Crazy Quilt (which the pieced hen shown above is part of). In addition I joined a craftsy, now Bluprint class – Learn To Quilt with Amy Gibson. And while most of that class I was able to fast forward through, there were a couple of key take-aways that have helped me, such as getting seams to meet up perfectly and squaring up.
With each of these projects I’m learning and in learning how others do it, I am practicing and expanding what I can design, and hopefully my own voice will become clearer and more refined.
I was going to entitle this post Fear of Dyeing (and Silk Screening) but Where’s the Pun in That? But it was too long so I just went with the edited version… a girl can have a little pun.  Okay, okay that’s enough. I’ve filled my quota of puns and I’m barely out of the starting gate.  It’s all going to be very serious from here on out.
In my last post I promised screen printing, so here we go.  All the photographs below are of techniques described by Elizabeth Barton in her wonderful class Dyeing to Design over at the Academy of Quilting.
The last and only time I did screen printing was when I worked (briefly) for the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes while living in London having just graduated from Parsons School of Design about a hundred years ago.  Zandra Rhodes is known for her beautiful silk screened fabrics as well as being the “Queen of Punk” a distinction given to her back in the late 70’s.  All I remember from that time, aside from the time she told me to clean her bathroom, was using a huge squeegee-like thing to scrape paint across the enormous screens she used.  I wish I could remember more as it might have helped me get over my fear when tackling Elizabeth’s silk screening lesson.  I have to admit I was completely intimidated reading the lesson over, so much so that I read the lesson and then didn’t do any of the exercises mapped out in it for at least three days.  Then another person in the class posted her gorgeous silk screened fabrics and it motivated me to at least try some of the techniques suggested.
Using newsprint this was my first attempt at silk screening on white cotton
Have I talked about fear during the creative process?  I know, I know, I have.  But maybe you didn’t read that post and anyway, I’m feeling compelled.  I’m always surprised when I feel fear while designing or doing something art “worthy”.  Why feel frightened when creating something?  Why should I feel anything but joy?  How does fear, even a twinge of it, make itself known through all the curiosity and excitement? And while I don’t have complete answers for these questions, I do know it isn’t unusual for artists to feel tremendous fear when creating.  So much so that there’s even a terrific book written on this very subject called Art & Fear ~ Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland.  Heading up the chapter entitled: The Academic World is this quote from Howard Ikemoto –
   “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.
She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”
I went to Parsons School of Design for my undergraduate degree and majored in Fashion Design.  Much of what I learned had to do with the business of fashion design and that there’s no such thing as new, that everything is recycled and that in order to succeed one must be as determined, if not more, about the business as one is about creating.  The truth is, I learned little about being an artist and more about the challenges of being a designer in the business world.  By my last year my fairy tale notion of what it would be like to be a fashion designer was thoroughly squashed and in my disillusioned state I felt only  dread at the idea that I was about to go out into the world and seek a job, much less in the fashion world.  After floundering for a few years I abandoned fashion design in favor of a series of jobs/careers that I thought might be more fulfilling and less soul wrenching.  And while all the things I tried my hand at varied, even dramatically, they were all in the “Arts” of some kind.  What I’ve learned is that artists tend to have a difficult time making a living with their art, no matter what the medium is.
There’s a wonderful quote from Oscar Wilde that begins Part II of the book Art & Fear.
“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. Â When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.”
How does one price one’s art, something that might have taken hundreds of hours to create through trial and error, through missteps, through experimentation, through FEAR?  If artists used an hourly wage system to price their work, all art would be so expensive no one could afford it.  So most of us don’t.  We can’t.  And while in an ideal world no one would have to concern themselves with making money from their art, and instead would just spend all their time making it, few live in such a privileged world.  The fear of being able to sell our work, and how that inhibits the process is a whole other topic and one most of us can understand, but there is another fear that is far more complicated.  It is the fear one feels when confronted with something new, something one has never done before, but would like to learn.  There is the fear of failure or appearing incapable or of ridicule, criticism or being seen as incompetent by others, but also by oneself.  To create art, is to be at once vulnerable and confident, and it is a tricky balancing act to not lean more one way or the other. Both carry their own pitfalls.
Creating is a messy process.  Most people never see all the discarded bits, the beginnings and first steps taken to get to that finished piece.  What I love about blogs is that people are willing to show their process.  My favorite blogs, in fact, are the ones that do just that.
Adding color to the purple
When I am starting something new I often have an idea in my head.  What I envision is always spectacular, but creating that idea takes skill, talent and knowledge, things I do not always have. So I have to learn, practice, and explore in order to be able to get the skills to (hopefully) produce the image I envision.  Sometimes I’m successful, but more often I’m not.  Sometimes I realize it will take me years to achieve the level of expertise required to make what I envisioned.  So I have to accept that I won’t be able to do something as I’d hoped or modify what I’m doing to compensate or continue to practice, with the idea that eventually I might be able to produce what is in my mind.
Torn newsprint
For this piece I cut stencils out of a thin plastic sheet, before silk screening on top
This is the result of using those stencils that I removed for the red piece above
A technique attributed to Kerr Grabowski. Â This piece has yet to be washed, so who knows what it will look like!
Another technique described in Elizabeth’s class.
Regardless of the approach I take, perfectionism is truly the greatest kill joy and, for me anyway, the root from which almost all my fear springs. While some argue that without perfectionism, we would settle for less or not work as hard, they are misunderstanding perfectionism at its most destructive. I am referring to perfectionism that lacerates, the kind of self-talk that abuses and brutalizes.  It is that awful voice that needs to be muted before anything can be created.  Free from perfectionism I am allowed to explore and play.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with any of the fabric I’ve silk screened, and in some ways that’s beside the point.  I didn’t approach this lesson with a preconceived idea.  And that’s the beauty of taking a class like this one.  The assignments require you to explore and play first and then after you’ve done that, consider what you’ll make.  Most of these fabrics have been done for almost two weeks now and I still don’t know what to do with any of them.  Or as one of the many talented and wonderful people taking this class said, “I’m waiting for divine inspiration.”
Welcome to my store!
Please browse and look at our patterns available. We also offer Workshops! ~Ariane
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