Patterns

A message from Nada Clyne:

I've been going through a fallow period.  

It's a kind of hibernation with no

interest in creating anything at all - 

a time to simply be and do what is 

before me without initiating new ideas and projects. I work on tasks I ordinarily shirk, completing a framing job, putting together an inventory, cleaning my studio.  And when I'm not doing, I sit and look out the window, go for walks, be quiet and at ease with myself.     

It used to be that I feared these times or felt guilty that I didn't embrace the artist's work ethic.  After all, don't books say that we should show up and do something in the studio every day? But I've discovered the artistic process doesn't work that way, not for me at least. Now I embrace these times of simply being and absorbing, knowing that one day soon, I'll be at the behest of the creative energy, working and working to manifest the impulses and ideas that come so thick and fast I can hardly keep up with them.  And I love those times too! 

Over time and (and with much struggle!) I have come to honor the patterns. These energetic ebbs and flows that impel me to create have a life of their own.  If I stay attuned to their rhythms, I can fully enjoy both riding the creative wave and floating in the shallows that engender new work.  It's a way of being fully in my own life as it is. It requires trust and not defining my worth by my output or by my role as an artist. It's embracing myself as I am moment to moment.

  

These words came to me this morning just as I woke up:

….I wrap the world around me

     like a blanket

     and snuggle into my life

     as it is

Where My Feet Are...

Some thoughts from Tom

Technology influences art.  What you create and how you create it are unique to your individual skills and imagination.  But your creative process is in part defined by your choice of medium and its technical limitations.  I think this is true in all media, and I feel it very strongly in my chosen form, photography.                                                                                    

When I first became interested in photography, it was a chemical process. In black and white photography, sensitized film is exposed to light, causing a subtle change in silver salts that are chemically treated to form microscopic particles of metallic silver, black to the eye and varying in quantity  according to how much light struck the film.  The more light, the larger the concentration of black particles.  Areas where less light struck produced fewer black particles. This produces a negative image on transparent film that is projected onto paper by basically the same process to produce the final positive image.  Things have changed dramatically with the coming of computers and digital cameras.  Photography is now a digital process, where light is electronically recorded.  The information is stored in binary code, manipulated and output for view on paper or monitor.  Matthew Brady would have recognized my darkroom and 35mm SLR as a miniaturized, refined version of the photographic equipment he hauled around with horse and wagon during the Civil War.  But digital?  Wow!

 Both forms record a three dimensional scene, a frozen slice of time and space, and translate it into a permanent, two dimensional image.  But the capture, manipulation and output of the final image is much faster and simpler than before.  Technology has taken a process that was once the domain of specialized craftspeople, simplified it and expanded it far beyond its original form. When I used film, the limitations of a finite quantity of film and the time-consuming process of developing and printing images forced me to think carefully before shooting.  Should I take several pictures of a particular subject, or save film for something that might present itself just around the corner? Whatever decision I made, I wouldn’t know the outcome until hours or days later, when the film was developed.  And when shooting black-and-white, colors reproduce as shades of gray, so form and light were much more important than color.  I learned to “see” in black and white. 

Digital photography offers me freedom from the old chemical process.  I can confirm proper exposure with a glance at a histogram, and view my finished image immediately.  And the number of photos I can take is limited only by the size of my memory card.   Digital photography has simplified a process I gave up, in part, for lack of time and space. I embrace these new changes and step gladly into the future with one foot, but at the same time, I feel my other foot stuck in the past.  I no longer need to pass up shooting a waterscape because a beer bottle floats in the foreground.  It is easily removed on the computer.  But while I have endless tools and opportunities to alter images, I find myself only making changes that I would have done with film.  I adjust image exposure, correct perspective, and remove small imperfections that detract from the overall composition.  Beyond basic adjustment, change comes slowly for me.  Why?  I think it’s a mix of both fear and comfort.  Fear of the unknown, of mastering a new technology that alters a routine and thought process anchored in lessons from the past.  And comfort.  I’ve never created an HDR image or stitched images digitally into a panorama.  I would like to, but something holds me back.  Creating compositions within a 1x1.5 frame proportion and capturing only what I see are self-imposed restrictions, much like a poet writing in the rigidly defined forms of sonnet or haiku.  I use self imposed limits for both the challenge and comfort. Challenge for me has been a conformity with the past rather than an open embrace of the future.  But change is on the horizon.   Recently I’ve been experimenting with the “clarity” adjustment in Photoshop, altering and softening image midtones.  The result is a softer, almost watercolor-like quality that works differently with different images.  The effect can be very subtle or very pronounced.  And it’s a refreshing change from crisp, sharp images that I routinely produce. 

Where the magic begins?

Message from Cate:

I know it looks like a big mess, but I like to call it organized chaos. My tools are always in the same place, so I know where to find them.

The glass, well, mostly I set that up before I start a bead or run of beads.

Sometimes though, I'm working on a bead in the flame and inspiration strikes. Then I have to turn around to my stringer (thin hair-like strings of glass) and crushed glass stash behind me (of course).

I root around til I find what I want, all the while keeping the bead hot in the flame. "Why don't you keep things more at hand?", you ask. Well, that would be because the space I have to work in is 5' X 7'.

Eventually everything will be set up in my studio in Parksville, NY. And that, my friends, is a whole other set of posts..... 

There's just something about glass....

One of my great passions is making glass beads, which is called 'lampwork'. There is just something about taking a substance,

various beads by Cate Gundlah



changing its composition and manipulating it to

make something beautiful. I get much of my

inspiration from nature, or sometimes while

reading a magazine or watching TV- seeing how

colors work together, or not. Some of my ideas

come from the glass itself. Different processes

produce varied results. Some glass colors will

react when they touch each other; sometimes

Necklace, eye canes inlaid on
wound glass matrix, Iran, 1st
half of the millennium BC.
copyright Corning Museum of Glass



providing good results and other times not. Some artists produce glass rods super-saturated with silver and other metals, which produce beautiful reactions.

Glass beads have been made at the flame since

about 1700 BC. A more modern technique was

developed by Angelo Barovier on the island of

Murano and created what he called 'cristello',

which was a clear, soft, soda glass. As the art

and science progressed, chemist's realized that

by blowing a stream of air into the flame of an

oil lamp, the flame would become hotter. Initially

mouth blown air was used- which resulted in a

lot of light-headed lampworkers.

Then they stared using a hand bellows.

Bicone beads, 3rd century BC
to 1st century AD. Hellenistic
or early Roman. Translucent
and opaque glass wound on a rod
with pre-formed bands of cane.
2 and 2.5 CM
copyright Corning Museum of Glass

But that must have been  tricky since

lampwork requires two hands. Then someone developed a foot bellows, which allowed the worker to use both

hands. By the late 18th century the industry had sprung up all over Europe.

Nevers, France produced small glass figurines of people and animals. Lauscha, Germany made Christmas ornaments.

And Venice, Italy produced beads and millefiore,which are small chips of glass that look like flowers (like the top picture above, bottom bead). During this time glass rods, sometimes called canes, were produced to be used at the flame, and the process has not changed much in 200 years. Today, many glass rods are produced by machine. But some are still "pulled" by hand. This involves attaching a large gather of glass on either end with stainless steel rods, and the hot molten glass is pulled apart to form a long string, or rod, of glass. The rods are then cut into usable lengths.

These days the flame is produced with propane or natural gas. The oxygen is supplied by tank, or oxygen concentrators or generators, widely used in the medical field. Once a bead is finished in the flame, it should be garaged in a kiln at 960 degrees for a minimum of 30-45 minutes. This lets the molecules in the glass re-align themselves so that when the bead cools it will not crack and break apart.

Lampworkers are a very small community of artists. I'm very lucky to be a part of it.  

   



Poking The Muse

A message from Buff

What do you do when your Muse is asleep?  How do you poke her awake?  We’ve all gone through it as artists – you feel you’ll never again have a good idea, or even a halfway good idea.  You’re dissatisfied with your last body of work (which seemed like a great idea at the time) but now, you can’t even find the glimmer of an idea for your next great opus.

There are probably as many techniques as there are artists.  Here are a few of my favorites, and a few gleaned from my fellow CAG artists.

1. Tops on my list is to look at other art.  If I have a day free, I’ll take the bus into New York City and go to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Art Museum or the Modern.  There are also the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the American Folk Art Museum, the Natural History Museum; and myriads of smaller specialty museums and galleries.

If I can’t get to the City, I look at art books and magazines, and find virtual museums online [cite]  Whether in person or virtually, I make a point of looking at all kinds of art, not just textiles and clothing. The cross-fertilization of ideas is important and exciting.

2. I review my notebooks of ideas, which I have kept for years.  In these small spiral-bound books of drawing paper, I jot down ideas, notes on interesting things I have seen, designs and patterns I like, sketches of clothing, trees, flowers – anything and everything.  They are in no particular order, and not at all fancy; I use a ball-point pen.   

Margaret reviews her finished art.  She says, “One sure way for me to get in the right “mood” to work on my art is to look through work I’ve already done – especially work from a while back. I’m able to look at it with a more objective eye and always think of ways I might do things differently if I were to do it again. This gets the creative juices flowing.”

3. I also review photos I’ve taken over the years – mosaic floors in Italy; colorful houses, cemetery monuments and exotic plants in Mexico; flowers in my backyard; frost formations on my car after a cold night; interesting sand patterns on the beach as the tide recedes, etc.

Tom goes out and looks for inspiring scenes for his photography.  “. . . [W]hen it feels like I'm in a rut, I'll explore Google Maps for a new location to shoot.  Going out with a purpose, traveling unexplored roads and viewing fresh scenery helps sharpen my senses.  I like to arrive at a location at first light to find promising subjects to capture as the sun rises. . . While I don't always come home with good shots, watching the world come to life NEVER disappoints.”

4. I doodle.  I’ll take a large pad of newsprint and a couple of sharp pencils out onto the porch of my studio, then let my hand draw while my mind roams.  Sometimes I’ll switch to my left hand, to see what happens.  I cover the sheet entirely with animals, leaves, squiggles, letters, and patterns, all totally unplanned.  This is not so easy for me, since most of my life is full of plans, deadlines, and “to-do” lists.  If I can’t always “turn off” my left brain, I can tone it down a bit.  Doodles can give me an idea or even lead to a finished piece, translating them into fabric and ink.

Doodles #1

5. When I asked Kathy, she said,  “. . . mine is getting my work area cleaned up!!”  I totally agree! A neat space is very inviting.  Working with the materials as I clean up, however, is just as important.  Folding up fabric to put away, I’ll notice that this color is pretty interesting with this other color. . . and before I know it, I’m sliding into putting a piece together.  A number of years ago I was inspired by a bag of black and white fabric scraps and I turned them into an abstract herd of zebras.

Above all, I try not to worry (hard as that may be).  I’ve had ideas before and I’ll have them again; something will pop up one night in bed, at that gray area  between awake and asleep, where the active brain is quiet enough for the unconscious to shine. For this very purpose, Thomas Edison would sit in a chair with metal plates on the floor and metal ball bearings in his hand. As he would begin to fall asleep, and his fingers relaxed, the bearings would clatter into the pan and wake him up.  He would do this over and over.  And he was no slouch when it came to creativity, holding over 1000 patents by the time he died!

An Artist's Ideas and Materials

A message from Robert

When I lived in Lower Manhattan, I haunted certain stores on Canal Streeet that offered materials of all kinds: aluminum, acrylic plastics, mystery metals

and wood. Out front there were bins and barrels containing odd shapes,

forms and scraps. Some were sheets with interestingly shaped openings,

odd forms that had been parts of mysterious mechanisms. They beckoned

to me to take them away.




"Shiva"

I hungrily bought these things, knowing that I would use them in the future. Carefully stored in my workshop, they would linger and tantalize

me for years before I used them in new works. Colors and forms suggested by these random acquisitions were often the catalysts for new sculptures, assemblages and wall sculptures.

The range of colors and tones in these materials could also be altered with paints, pigments and sprays. I found myself creating free-standing constructions and collage-like sculptural wall reliefs. Some aluminum pieces were welded and others had elements joined with epoxy adhesives and rivets.

Drawings and paintings from nature- landscapes, plants and flowers, became the basis for prints that expressed colors in a different way. It is exciting to go from these two-dimensional works to contrasting three-dimensional sculptural forms.

My major influences have always been based on the concepts and forms of twentieth century art such as Abstraction, Collage and Surrealism. Picasso, Henry Moore and other seminal Modern artists have been my inspirations and heroes. I feel that with my contemporaries I am helping to build on the achievements of earlier generations.

New Work

A message from Margaret:

Winter Returns © Margaret Helthaler

I have recently become fascinated with iPhone photography. Here are some thoughts on the appeal of the process: http://www.margarethelthaler.com/1/post/2012/04/the-appeal-of-iphone-photography.html