Podcasts and Lectures and Classes…Oh My!

It doesn’t matter what field you’re in, continued education is a must.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, we’re not born with all the information and skills we’ll need for the rest of our lives.  If you’re not growing, learning, and exploring, everyone around you will leave you in the dust.  The same goes for our physical, emotional, spiritual, and artistic lives.

Truth is, we can’t know everything about everything.  I know a lot about textile art, but I have limited knowledge about other mediums. Listening and learning from others gives me insight into the lives of other artists, while giving me ideas to translate to my own art.  Here are a couple of examples to punctuate my thoughts.

The other evening, I went to a lecture by a photographer who takes people on safari in Tanzania.  He takes those interested in photography on safari shoots.  I’m not a photographer, but I was looking for that one tidbit to add to my creative toolbox. He didn’t disappoint.  He was giving examples of different shots and he said, “Edit before you click”.  Brilliant! His point was too many of us take one hundred pictures, come home and plough through the truckload of shots.  It made me think of Coco Chanel.  She is known for saying (directed to women), “Get dressed and before you leave the house, edit, take off one thing.”

I listen to podcasts every day.  I’m hooked on Daphne Cohn’s The Creative Habit.  After I subscribed, I went back to the beginning and I’ve been listening to them in order. I want to hear the progression of the interviews.  I think of it like collecting building blocks.  The artists she interviews come from all walks of life.  They have different educational backgrounds.  They work in different mediums.  They have unique business models.  The one thing they all have in common is the love, desire, and commitment to creating art.

Last year I decided I wanted to take a class to learn something I’ve never done before.  I have a friend I met in graduate school who is a phenomenal weaver; thanks Sarah Haskell (www.sarahhaskell.com).  I decided to take a weaving class, not with one of those gigantic looms, a small handheld loom.  I wanted to understand the motivation for an artist working in fiber, but differently than me.  I wanted to explore texture.  I wanted to experience something aside from sitting at the sewing machine.  I enjoyed the class and may continue to create weavings, but I’ll stick to art quilts.  What the class did do for me was reinforce the desire to take other classes and expand my repertoire.

I know there aren’t enough hours in the day to explore every class, podcast, magazine, book, exhibition, etc.  Be selective! Be mindful of your priorities! Have an idea of what you want to achieve giving you a direction to expand your interests, abilities, and vision.

How will you apply these ideas to your own areas of expertise, interest, or desires?

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Remove Your Obstacles and Do What You Do Best!

I admit my studio has been a source of pain and confusion.  At the end of last semester, I took on a huge project and created four pieces of art in 9 days.  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, as a creative, creating under a tight schedule can lead to overwhelm and anxiety.

When I finished my project, and left the studio and didn’t return for a couple of days as I recovered from the frenzy of creating.  It was an exhilarating time, but now the aftermath of the creativity was chaos.  It has looked like a tornado went through my studio, dislodging and displacing supplies, fabric, and tools.  Unfortunately, that chaos had a lot of negative energy and delayed my return.

Organizing in the house I decided to buy a new piece of furniture.  Previously I had my tools like scissors and rotary cutters hanging from hooks.  It worked for a while until I didn’t return things to their rightful place and scissors disappeared into the abyss.  I was on the hunt for something that would appeal to both my sense of style and function.  Lo and Behold, I found it!

The piece works because it has drawers that are like trays.  I can lay things out and see them all at once.  I’m not digging through drawers hoping to find the needle in the haystack, sometimes I mean that literally.  It has also allowed me to take an inventory of what I have and what I need to continue on my creative path.

It doesn’t matter how you create, finding ways to make creating easier will be a catalyst for your inspiration.  How many of you musicians have sheet music in boxes, in the piano bench, in boxes on the floor?  Painters and colored pencil artists have an abundance of raw materials, canvases, pads of paper, often stacked up in the corner of a room or under the bed.

Your organization levels will free your energy to be directed where it needs to be, focused on your art.  I find this important because telling your story is crucial to our ongoing need to contribute to the world in which we live.  We all have a piece of the “quilt of humanity” and if you’re piece isn’t there our world will be incomplete.

I watched the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards last night and the message was clear, “everyone’s story deserves to be told.”  How will you tell your story?  What can you do to free up your energy from clutter and disorganization to free flowing creative ventures?  I’d love to see what you’ve created to release the chaos and engage your creative energy in an open and fierce way.

Separation Anxiety

Yesterday I shared my venture into cutting strips from a large piece of fabric.  I ran out of strips on my first time through because I didn’t do what they tell carpenters to do, “Measure twice, cut once”.  That was lesson number one today, plenty more on its way.

When cutting fabric to be affixed to a foundation I iron on a fusible web.  It’s like double sided tape, but is used on fabric.  It allows you to iron one fabric to another with a permanent (for the most part) bond.  Even though the pieces are bonded, I still sew the pieces down for a permanent resolution.

Affixing one piece of fabric to another requires peeling the paper off the back.  This is often a time of reckoning because under certain circumstances (older fusible web, not enough heat) the fusible web will not stick to the foundation fabric.  When that happens, it requires the decision-making tree to kick in and begin a process of asking the big question, “What next?”

Obviously, this is what happens in the fiber world, but in your creative genre the signs and symbols may be different. Think about what may go wrong in your medium, and what actions you take to rectify the situation.  It can be one of the most creative avenues available to you.  When I first started quilting, my teacher told us never buy more than a half yard of fabric because it will force you to exercise your creative muscles.  Don’t get me wrong, the first time I ran out of fabric I felt like I was dropped in the middle of the desert with no compass.  I eventually found my way and have progressed to new and more complex forms of separation anxiety.

Truth be told, we all have scary moments in our lives.  How we handle it depends on our previous preparation protocols.  Think of problem solving in other areas of your life and what your process was to resolve the situation.  This is one of those moments when art imitates life.

Crossing Paths

Things can change in a minute as life teaches us each and every day.  I took some fabric that I was going to use as a backing for a mini-quilt.  I proceeded to cut up scraps of fabric and when I put the quilt sandwich together, I flipped the fabric and what was the back became the front.  It’s this type of extemporaneous creating that adds to the creative experience.

The piece I created was originally titled vectors.  I like to name my pieces, but sometimes the work yells that it’s got the wrong name and I need to reconsider both the intention and design.  I went from calling the piece vectors to crossing paths.  The piece was a visual representation of what is coming up in my meditations.

 

We just finished a year and it’s usually a good time to reflect on what transpired in our lives.  I thought back to when I had traveled for work and was away from home four to six months at a time.  I lived in various parts of the country, urban and rural areas, highly affluent and socioeconomically challenged communities.  I learned something from each person I had the pleasure of meeting at these diverse locations.

What did I learn?  I learned that small town living is intimate while at the same time being a bit enmeshed.  I learned that economically challenged communities are always looking for new ways of reinvigorating their communities while trying to provide opportunities for those who live locally.  I learned that the foods in western Texas are very different from the foods in northwest Pennsylvania.  What I learned first and foremost is that people are people.  All we want is to be included, heard, and seen.

I wanted to show that we never know who will cross our paths and we definitely don’t know the impact they will have on our lives.  Who has crossed your path that had an impact on your life?  How are you expressing that creatively?  Perhaps you’re writing a story. Maybe you remember a song that played on the radio while you visited a particular location and every time you hear the song memories of that place rise to the surface.

Working in oncology services I met many people who commemorated their last chemo with a celebration, a work of art, and written words.  People and experiences will continually cross our path trying to get our attention and teach us something that will propel our lives forward.

What has crossed your path?  How did you mark that experience?

Let’s Reframe Old and Warn

I just finished reading “Hidden In Plain View: A secret story of quilts and the Underground Railroad.” Tobin and Dobard examined the history and role that quilts played in helping slaves on their treacherous, dangerous, and life-saving journey to freedom.

I started quilting over twenty years ago and I started as a “traditional” quilter. I bought books and patterns and created quilts that were designed by other quilters. I utilized “contemporary” fabrics, but the patterns were tried and true, and I knew that decades if not centuries of quilters had created these same patterns before me.

Because of the limited resources available to slaves, and freed slaves, it was common for old quilts to be used as batting (the middle layer between the quilt top and backing) for a new quilt. However, what if we took a different view of old quilts? Tobin helps us “reframe” the experience of keeping old quilts.

In the epilogue of the book, Tobin states, “What is old and warn is spiritually textured.” That statement is not only applicable to quilts from the Underground Railroad, but anything that has a history. One example is the cost and value of antique furniture. Individuals have found value in what’s old; it has value.

We find that old things that are “spiritually textured” have a history and a story. Telling stories is the center of our existence. It allows us to convey our experiences and our connection to what transpired in the past. It allows us to feel a part of something greater than ourselves. It gives us a connection to a past we couldn’t know about any other way.

How do we unlock the spiritual mysteries of those quilts (possessions) that are old and worn? What draws us to these items; obviously we are drawn to them for a reason. What is it about the unspoken story that attracts our own stories to meet on the spiritual plane? What do you think about old and warn being spiritually textured?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below…thanks for joining me on the journey.