Yes, well, my little boat has been kind of marooned for a while. But I am slowly learning to row again.
I have not been short of ideas since last post, dear Readers, just desperately short of carry-through, short of ideas with legs. What good is an idea without legs?
In need of remedy for artist’s block, I decided to go delving into my venerable stash of projects begun and abandoned, of ideas that charmed at the time but never made it off the drawing board. All to see if any past diversions could possibly make it to the execution stage. Here, we are talking projects from years ago, and from way before the eco dye magic put its spell on me. But I am still entranced with plants. So I hauled out of mothballs a collections of sketchbooks I had worked up some time ago when exploring my theme of disappearing seed diversity ( I am a maniac gardener and seed collector and these passions fuel my art)
For exhibition, I had completed a suite of work entitled “Bye Bye Beans” based on the idea of a Scarlet Runner Bean as an icon of seed diversity. The working methods I adopted in order to create the work were so different from the dye pot dramas of eco dyeing – where you never knew if the dye pot protagonist would live happily ever after or die a murky death in the end….That difference was highly attractive to me in my “stuckness”. I could plan and it might actually work out. My art would not be in the thrall of dye pan-demonium. For the ” Beans” series, I had carefully explored several ways of presenting the concept, using a variety of printing and textile techniques and recording all slavishly in a series of sketchbooks. No serendipity or Fly By The Seat of Your Pants here! No post-process suprise-delights as in the eco dye pots, but still, as in eco dyeing, an excavation of patterning. So to get a little wind back in my sails, to to speak, after a long time away from serious artmaking, I decided to look up this old love. Here is what I found (tap the image for info)
The sketchbook pages show ideas for pieces in the Beans series that led to the final five or six works that comprised the first “suite” ( I will take pics of the finished works and post next time). So now they are again ideas under review for the next Bye Bye Beans iteration.
Lest you think I have abandoned eco dye work…Here are a few pieces I managed to get done this summer, showing native Coreopsis verticillata with indigo and a tad of sumac here and there ( I am into ” restricted” these days and that can be a good thing). I printed three linen tops that had seen better days, colour-wise.
To finish, a few images of a Spring bookbinding challenge for CBBAG Ottawa Valley: we had to create a binding for a collection of recipe cards. I took the opportunity to learn gelli printing. I used one printing plate (a woven grass place mat) and a restricted palette of acrylics. The recipe cards are housed in wee pouches with flaps.
Next time, I hope to show also some pics of the bookmark project I mentioned in the July post, along with the “Bye Bye Beans” suite (finished) from the series whose concepts I am planning to reprise.
Thank you to all the new readers and hello again to regular followers. I would like to tell you that I was very touched all over again to re-read the consoling comments on my July post from readers old and new.
THREADBORNE 