My blogs often tell the stories of the piece work I do when
my life gets busy—which is most of the time.
Last week I was making kohlrabi, but I’m often making roots, fruits, animals,
vegetables, hands, or tree clumps that comprise my bigger pieces. The cerebral part of the process comes when I
get the chance to assemble the pieces and arrange them in an art piece. I usually need a big window of time when I can
internalize this creative part of the process.
Deciding what works where and why is a very personal, reflective process. I need silence in the art studio, free of fretting
about upcoming deadlines and the routine of transporting boys to their activities
for a long block of time. It’s the time
when I connect at my deepest level of consciousness with each piece. I need to mull over the tentative composition
and color balance in a critical way.
This week that happened for a new piece that features birches by a lake.
Of course my week is also filled with small blocks of studio
and travel time when I can work on the labor intensive parts of my craft. One of those involved warping a loom for my
next commission piece. I picked out the
yarns I’ll use for that piece last week and had a chance to do some weaving. I love my weaving time, because it allows me to
let my mind wander over the recent events in my world. This was especially true this week because I’m
weaving a structured fence and it felt like my hands were working independent of
my brain. I looked down and thought wow,
look how much I’ve made! I find that it
helps to keep a piece of paper and pencil beside me when I’m weaving to make
lists of problems to solve should they intrude in my weaving process. That lets me clear my mind and quickly return
my focus to more mental wandering.
I also did have an artistic epiphany this week amidst my
birches. For the past several years I
have yearned to create three-dimensional evergreen trees, but I’ve never felt
that I could capture the structures to my satisfaction. I’ve reveled in creating deciduous trees—birches,
maples, sycamores and oaks—but not the pines of my childhood. When I was young we used to take our family
vacation at the Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario. We’d stay at Pinedale hotel just outside the
park and spend all day and into the evening on the beach. The dune system on that part of Lake Huron is
stabilized by eastern White Pines, which are a favorite of mine because the
needles are long, soft and elegant. They
were planted there in the sixties in a misguided attempt to stabilize the fragile
oak savannah ecosystem. Anyway, I was
staring at the large roll of thin, rigid aviation wire that Ben Gibson gave me
last summer. I realized that if I
wrapped long fiber chenille around it that it might look like a pine
bough. Fortunately, our old wooden fence
in the back yard has toppled over, making it easy to access our neighbor’s
eastern white pine so I snipped a small branch (Eileen, I hope you’re not
reading this! Or if you are, I hope that
was OK!). I took it down to my art
studio and dug around in my yarns to find that if I combined four different colors
and textures together it resembled the bark of the pine branch. I made some prototypes and I think I’m off to
the races.
In family news, the school year is drawing to an end. Last week was Jacob’s spring concert at
Jackson Creek Middle School and this week was Tommie’s at Bloomington High School South. The auditoriums were packed
with families and friends waiting for their little pumpkins to shine in the
light. And shine they did! Now we’re crossing days off the calendar to
the end of the school year. The last event
of the week was Second Saturday Soup.
Our generous neighbors open up their house and make three big pots of
soup and invite friends and colleagues to the event. Jim always tries to bake something for the
dinner. This week I found two more bags
of chopped apple pie filling hiding in the back corner of the lowest shelf in
the freezer. These really are the last
of the farmer’s market Mutzu apples from last summer. It was a big hit—but it was completely
consumed. Which is great, but it meant
that I didn’t get a slice for breakfast. What’s a pie princess to do?
Until next week,
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