Listening

A little bit more stitching this week.  Staying with Xs and Os for now and neutral colors, but I can't help thinking about how they will join and what I might do with the background white, but that will come later.

Mainly I've been absorbed in painting all week.  I'm continuing to explore the idea of color contrasts from Studio Journeys this month.  I've been thinking about all the ways of getting variety in two complementary colors, so here violet and yellow.  I've been playing with different hues of paint, different values, intensities, temperatures, and transparencies.

And in this one, exploring blue and orange.

I decided to do another blue and orange to try leaning a little more towards the warmer blues.  I also wanted to play with a central composition that does not extend to the edge of the paper.

I've made a strange discovery lately.  I always liked to paint either in silence or with some wild dance music in the early stages to get everything flowing.  While I'm stitching I enjoy listening to podcasts, lots of them artist interviews.  I especially love The Savvy Painter and The Jealous Curator.  In the interviews, many painters talked about liking to listen to podcasts or books on tape while they paint, but many said they found music distracting.  That seemed so alien to me.  I thought I'd be distracted by the spoken word.

I was way behind on listening to podcasts, so I thought I'd try some while painting.  I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed that!  They actually seemed to help me focus on painting and were still easy to follow.  I was listening to an interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who had a stroke and observed what was happening in her brain.  She described the left hemisphere shutting down and being unable to process language and reason, but the right hemisphere being free to see the bigger picture and have stronger intuition.  It made me wonder if that's what spoken word does while painting.  It keeps that language side of the brain busy enough that it quiets it down, and you are left working more intuitively.  That's how it seems to work for me anyway.  I felt like I was more absorbed in the painting process and that critic in my brain wasn't allowed to talk.

 I also discovered a new-to-me highly addictive podcast out of the BBC called Desert Island Disks.  Celebrities from all fields are interviewed and asked what 8 songs, 1 book, besides The Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare which they are automatically given, and 1 luxury item they would take if stranded on a desert island.  It's really fascinating to hear the stories that go along with the music they choose.  Bill Gates interview was especially fun.

Simplify

My word for the year is "Simplify."  That mainly means a lot of long overdue decluttering and cleaning up, but it's also about mental focus.  Trying to narrow down the things I do to those that are really important to me.

Last year I was catching up with posting my 2016 stitch components, along with showing how they were joining together, and also showing my 2017 daily stitch project.  I needed stitching to have a separate post each week, but this year I'm going to mix my stitching in with painting in one weekly post.  The stitching is coming along slowly.  When I do it, I enjoy it, but I am not feeling compelled to stitch everyday, so I'm letting this project evolve as it will.  Here's one I did over the course of a week.  I am already thinking that I might like to join them together and do more in the white background area.

I seem to be more absorbed with painting than stitching this year. I thought I was going to do the 30-in-30 painting project this month, a painting a day for 30 days.  That didn't last long before I simplified it to 30 paintings in a month, since I often work for days without finishing one, then might finish 3 on the same day.  And then I decided to simplify that even more to just painting for 30 days straight.  That now fits me.  I am a slow painter and often have to work on a piece for at least 5 days before it's done.  Even when it looks loose and random, it takes days for me to get it that way.

I seem to always be reacting to what I just did.  I was painting dark, heavier paintings for quite a few days, then wanted to switch over to much lighter ones.

The thing I come back to over and over is my love of mark making.  That's definitely my favorite part of stitching or painting.

Lots of Painting

I'm feeling deeply immersed in painting these days, and that's just the way I like it.  I'm continuing with Nancy Hillis's online Studio Journey class, which gives some structure to the month.  For Feb. we will be focusing on color contrast.

I also decided to participate for the first time in Leslie Saeta's Thirty Paintings in Thirty Days challenge.  I thought it would be good for me to try to finish a small painting a day since I usually am slow and ponderous with them. But I quickly realized that that's not how I work.  I need to have a bunch going at one time, then finish them as it happens, which doesn't really lend itself to a painting a day.  I decided to skip posting on Leslie's site and aim at completing 30 paintings in 30 days, rather than getting caught up in one a day.  The main objective is to try to keep moving and get things done.
My constraints for the project will be 12" square pieces, and I want to try to experiment with something a little new to me in each one.


I started working with a different palette for me.  I was taking a walk at sunset on a crisp winter's night, and was attracted to all the pastel colors in the sky.  I think I've spent my life avoiding pastels, so thought they would be fun to play with.

The first one a little heavier on marks.

Then the second one simplified a bit.

 I'll be posting more of my paintings on Instagram and am planning to do a weekly summary of how it's going here.

Improvisational Art

Happy New Year to me!  My health is settled, my family is settled, at least for now, so I'm ready to start my delayed new year and seem to have that fresh-start boost of enthusiasm.   I've started working on my word of the year "Simplify" by doing some much needed studio clean out.  Now to begin my new projects.

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me over the years is that I'm not too interested in doing anything but intuitive art.  I remember taking early quilting classes and being very excited to see the first 8 or so blocks join together and discovering the secondary patterns that formed.  Then once I had a good idea what the final quilt would look like, it became mechanical and boring.

Same with realistic painting classes.  I liked the challenge of learning the techniques to make something look realistic, but as soon as it did, and I knew what the finished painting would look like, I lost interest.

I really like doing improvisational work where all decisions are formed in the moment, when one stroke informs the next, when one shape determines what needs to go next to it, and without any idea what the finished product will look like.  It feels a little dangerous since you never know where you are going, and there are many things that don't work out along the way, but it keeps me feeling alive, and that's the whole point of doing art for me.

This approach works well with painting because I can easily cover something up or move it, but the approach is much harder to apply to stitching.  I really don't want to rip out a week's worth of handstitching to move a piece over 1/2" when it's throwing off a composition.  Still, I've decided my stitch project for this year is going to focus entirely on intuitive stitching and responding to what is already there.

I'm starting with 7" neutral background blocks and am stitching on the same one everyday for a week without any, or at least much, of a preconceived idea what they will look like.  I'm sure this will produce plenty of horrendous looking, ill-composed blocks, but maybe they'll highlight the good blocks when they are all joined together?  Or maybe they will end up in the trash.  I'm starting with a fairly neutral palette, but will take it where ever it wants to go.  Just to give myself a little grounding point, I'm going to start with my favorite shapes of X's and O's in mind.

That's the plan for my 2018 stitching project, but in a true improvisational nature, I'm allowing for the possibility that I'll abandon it all together after a pile of ugly blocks.  We'll see how it goes.

First week started with a scrappy X:

Second one with a blobby circle: