Conversation between Dorothy Caldwell and Claire Benn--watch the livestream or catch up later

A special opportunity to see two superb textile artists in conversation with each other is coming up in a couple of days. I've been lucky enough to take classes with both Dorothy Caldwell and Claire Benn and am eager to watch this event. Dorothy and Claire work in abstraction, in close relationship with the land and its component elements. The conversation this Friday will be available both in real time, and then later on youtube.  Here are the details:

Friday, March 12, 4:00 p.m. EST

Link to the facebook page of Fibre Arts Take Two where the video will be hosted: https://www.facebook.com/fibreartstaketwo

Link to the YouTube live stream, where the conversation will be archived: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbSWEfUADOE

 

"Lines and Rows" workshop with Claire Benn

Last month I wrote about my preparation for a workshop with Claire Benn, working up designs for hand-printed napkins.  Once at the workshop, my direction changed from clean-line designs to something else.  The two above are my favorites, both done by stamping with matte medium to make a paper-laminated screen.  The one on the left used a 3" square of acrylic, the one on the right, a variety of stamps I made in a bowl shape.  The virtue of the paper laminated screen is that it can be made any size (here I'm aiming for an image 18x18), and can be re-used many times.  I've worked with a "paplam" screen once before, a very large one made for Accident II.  In that case, I wrote on words with the matte medium.  So, in addition to stamping, I can also try drawing some designs onto the screen.

Below are two more pieces made with the bowl stamps, the first stamping directly with dark blue dye onto lighter blue cloth.

In the one below, I stamped with discharge paste onto the blue cloth, and then later stamped again with dark blue dye.  I like these also, but I'll probably explore doing more designs with a screen, since I can do the whole napkin in one pass, rather than hand-stamping each unit of the design.

 And here's one I did from a thermofax screen, based on a hand-drawn design.  The thermofax is limited to about 8" across, so I needed to print three times to get across the 18" field.  I think I'll try another version of this design on a paper laminated screen.  It turns out that for this project, I like the imprecision of the paper laminated screen rather than the precise reproduction one gets with a thermofax print.

I'm pleased with the new direction, and will continue to work on more designs, as well as variations of the ones I came up with at the workshop.  

A new project

I will be taking a week-long workshop with Claire Benn in early October on "Lines and Rows: Rhythm and Repetition."  Claire describes the aim of the workshop:  "to focus in on the power of the repetitive mark, building lines and rows to create cloth that has rhythm and simplicity."  This will be a chance to followup on work I did with Claire in 2014 (which led to my Accident II quilt) and also work I did with Dorothy Caldwell in 2013.  Claire asked participants to prepare ahead in various ways, including laying out 100 of the same thing in lines or a grid, looking for pattern everywhere, and narrowing one's focus to a small number of types of marks/shapes of interest.  I've spent the last few weeks, since the close of my show, working on this, and look forward to developing ideas further at the workshop.  I have a humble goal in mind, which is to make fabric that I can then turn into table napkins.  I've long made napkins for our own use at home, and also as gifts for others, but have made them from commercial fabrics. A few years ago, I made some from Marcia Derse's beautiful fabric, which is commercially produced but based on her hand-dyed/painted fabric.  I have been wanting to come up with some designs that would work for making my own fabric, and Claire's workshop gives me that opportunity.

I made the design at the top by cutting up black construction paper.  The idea for the design came from a drawing by Karl Benjamin:




I am entranced by this drawing--something very appealing to me about the piled up block shapes.  I pulled out one column of the blocks, changed them from white to black, and increased the space between the blocks.  Multiplying the columns, changing the order in some columns:

This is still very close to the Benjamin drawing--too close for me to feel comfortable using it--so I decided to try the same idea with triangles, and came up with the design at the top of the post, which I will enjoy playing with more.  I'll also do some trials with wedge-shapes.  Here's a postcard I made some years ago, but never sent because I like it too much: 

I got another interesting shape by manipulating a photograph in Photoshop.  Here's the photo, which was a collection of 100 blossoms from a chestnut tree:

Through cropping and various manipulations, I came up with this:

I collected 100 examples of several things, but my favorite was pine needles.  Here are a few different arrangements of 100 needles.  So much potential here for beautiful line drawings!  Another option is to turn one or more of the photos into a thermofax screen, which could be used directly for printing.  (You can double-click on photos to see them larger.)

Another direction is to work from the lovely lines of the piece below, made by free-motion stitching with a variegated thread that changed in color from black to white--hence the "missing" spaces in the design.  This was a sample I did in a workshop with Paula Kovarik in early August. Which reminds me that I'm long overdue on a post about that workshop!  As soon as I got home from that, I had to set to work setting up my show, and forgot to get back to it.

And some other line drawings of elements that interest me.  

Stylized from a drawing of clover I did some years ago

I like drawing cups, which make me think of friends talking over cups of tea.

Drawn recently at a local park.  The top one was a line of very fuzzy strand-like blossoms on a branch.

And these are designs I sometimes use in quilting.  The second one from the right (squares) particularly interests me.

So, I think I'll have plenty to work with at the workshop. . .  

I will eventually be working in color rather than black and white.  Here are some sample colors I dyed up last week:

Working with words and shapes

It is almost six months since I participated in a week-long workshop with Claire Benn at the Crow Barn in Ohio.  The workshop gave me a chance to work on multiple ways of producing graphic shapes and lettering on fabric.  Most of the examples above will reappear below, as I describe the work.

The workshop was called "Graphics and Graffiti."  Most of the sample work that Claire took us through had to do with ways of using letters/words, but we were also encouraged to do graphic work more broadly.  Most of what I did falls into three categories:  writing/marking with ink (on both paper and fabric),  screen printing with shapes drawn from my "Regret" quilt, and using a paper lamination screen to print a large block of narrative text.

Writing/marking with ink:
The first day of the workshop was devoted to working with paper, using markers and then various implements with India ink.  Many of the exercises we did were inspired by the work of Denise Lach, who takes calligraphy into the world of abstract art.  Claire had us choose a phrase or sentence, and work with that over and over again throughout the day.  Several years ago, I asked a rabbi if he had a blessing for someone for a broken heart.  He replied, "The Kotzker Rebbe said, 'There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.'"  This sentence touched me deeply, and it's the one I chose to work with for these exercises.  My favorite version is the one below (which came late in the process), in which I formed the letters of the word broken with the fat end of a wooden shim.  The letters B, R, and O are in the top line, K, E, and N in the bottom line.

Screen printing with shapes drawn from my "Regret" quilt
I have long been drawn to repeated but varying abstract patterns, with some favorites being Matisse cutouts and Kuba cloth.  Early on in my quilting, I thought of replicating such a design in applique, but decided I would rather wait and come up with my own repeated shape.  Now, years later, it occurs to me that the shape I used in my quilt on regret might also work as a smaller repeated shape, with perhaps some other related shapes added in.  Here's an early attempt:  the shapes were cut out of freezer paper, adhered to a silk screen, and printed with black thickened dye.

 For this next piece, I used one large piece of freezer paper, with shapes cut out of it and set aside; pulling the dye through the shaped holes gave me black shapes on a white background.  The photo was taken after I had made repeated pulls of the same screen; you can see some of what just one pull looks like on the far right.

I added another pull or two for more overlapping black shapes, and then added some splotches of yellow.  I like this piece a lot--not so much as a whole composition, but as material to cut up to put on note cards or to be used in some other kind of composition.

Here's another screen made with the freezer paper shapes set aside from the piece above, screened five times on a large piece of cloth.

Then I went back over with the screen turned 90 degrees from the first pull.  When doing multiple layers like this, you need to wait for the first layer to dry a bit before printing again.  I didn't realized that the first pull after the wait would come out lighter--seen in the bottom left corner in the photo below.

This mistake led to a lovely variation in texture.

Using a paper lamination screen to print a large block of narrative text
One of the techniques totally new to me was making a printing screen out of a piece of polyester sheer fabric, with no frame.  This method allows you to make a very large screen, as the fabric is about 54" wide and as long as you want.  It's called "paper lamination" because the basic process involves making paper stick to the back side of the sheer, in whatever design you put on with liquid matte medium.  So, it's a great method for making a screened image of handwriting, or any kind of line drawing.  Below is a photo of part of the screen that I made.  Most of the image is looking at the front of the screen; I've turned over the sheer on the left side, so that you can see the back, with the paper stuck on.   (Double-click on the photo to see more detail.)  Sorry if this isn't clear--it's the kind of process that is better demonstrated than written about.  Just trust me that it makes it very easy to do a large screen with direct application of line drawing.

 The text I'm using here is part of a narrative of the night Jeremy died.  I wrote the narrative shortly after the accident, in 2004.  Writing down what happened helped me stop going over and over it in my mind.  Last winter I started a quilt that incorporated the text of the narrative, which I stamped into a mud-colored cloth.

The letters are 3/8" high, resulting in a piece that is 35x48." (I haven't yet posted about this quilt--I'm waiting to make a few final decisions about it.)  As Claire explained the possibilities of working with a paper laminated screen,  it occurred to me that I could work again with the narrative of the accident, but use a very different method, to a different purpose--where expressiveness would be more important than legibility.  I made a screen, trying out different kinds of handwriting styles: script, print, all caps.  I printed two versions, one with a range of color on white cloth, and a second all black on gray cloth.  I especially like the potential for expressiveness in the multi-color one.

 I have recently begun the planning process for a very large piece (about 80x90") done with this process.

And a couple of other things:
Flour paste resist is another possibility for a large piece using the accident narrative.  This method, too, would allow me to work very large.  This technique involves spreading a layer of a flour/water mix on the cloth, and then scraping a design in with a skewer or other instrument; thickened dye pulled over that leaves black letters on the white background of the cloth.

Another way to get black lettering is to use a soy wax resist on black cloth and then discharge the black, leaving only the lettering that stays under the wax (which is washed out after the discharge process).  I tried several versions at the workshop, of which this is my favorite:

But I don't so much enjoy working with the wax, and the paper lamination and flour paste resist give me plenty to work with.

Many thanks to Claire Benn for a great workshop!  She'll be doing a similar workshop again this fall at the Barn, if you're interested, as well as a second one on "Exploring Gray through Surface Design.  You can see more of Claire's work here.

If you've never been, the workspace at the Crow Barn is great, and the whole set up is very conducive to positive relationships with other students as well as with the teachers and staff.  Here I am with Stephanie Meisel and MJ Kinman, both of whom I first met at a Barn workshop taught by Dorothy Caldwell.  Students tend to come back to the Barn, so paths can cross again in later workshops, which is really nice.