cotton fabric, cotton batting, cotton thread, metallic foil and acrylic ink on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
This little guy is full of steely resolve. The bigger birds had better not mess with him.
It's hard to tell from the photo, but the three small dark squares on the upper left are metallic foil -- steel colored. I don't know where all of these birds are coming from. Every week when I read the IF word, a bird pops into my head.
I love New Year's Day - the whole bright, shiny new year is stretched out ahead of me. It holds only possibility and potential in it - no mistakes, no problems, no disappoint, no disillusion. This is going to be a good year, a year full of hope and of change. My only resolution is to make time to create more art. I do have a formidable list of goals and will be working hard to realize them.
Last year I started off with the best of intentions to create one small piece of art each week. I got waylaid in the early part of the year when deadlines, working full time, business trips and life in general got in the way and I missed a number of weeks. This year I will continue that project (6" square work mounted on canvas using the prompts from Illustration Friday) and strive to do better. I really enjoy the format of IF and love the community.
I also decided the new year needed a new project and I cast about for inspiration in early December. I remembered that I had bought a few packs of Lotería cards from Judy Gula in Houston this year and thought they would made a good basis for a journaling project. The Lotería cards are used to play a game like Bingo and each of the 54 have different pictures and labels on them. I'm going to make 5" square fabric collages with them, using either the card itself or something about the card as inspiration. The iconic Mexican nature of the images and their overall kitschiness appeal to me.
The first card is El Gallo (the rooster). I have trouble with the Every Day thing, so I'm shooting for Nearly Every Day. I also need rules (well, self-imposed rules anyway, -- outside rules, not so much) so each piece will start with a square of wool felt and have some hand stitching on it.
So, who else is journaling on a regular or semi-regular basis in 2009?
cotton fabric, cotton batting, cotton thread, found object paper and acrylic ink on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Clandestine is such a fun word! This is my sub rosa raven, sneaking furtively along on his surreptitious business.
cotton fabric, bamboo batting, cotton thread, found object papers, mulberry paper and acrylic ink on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Not actually sure if a bird song counts as a voice (and I *know* they don't follow sheet music), but that was the first thing that came to mind.
cotton fabric, bamboo batting, cotton thread, found object paper, mulberry paper, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Hands can be similar in that we usually have two each, usually with five fingers each.
You can tell a lot about a person by their hands...
cotton fabric, bamboo batting, cotton thread, found object paper, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
The starling picked up a bundle of string somewhere on his travels. Perhaps he was hanging around my studio?
cotton fabric, bamboo batting, cotton thread, found object paper, acrylic ink, inkjet-printed fabric, stamped image and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
I think that beetle looks pretty fierce, don't you?
cotton fabric, linen and cotton thread, bamboo batting, acrylic ink, printed mulberry paper, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
After a few weeks' hiatus from IF, I'm back -- it feels good to have time for art again. I used thread and my sewing machine to sketch a "chapulín" or grasshopper in the Toltec style. The Toltecs were the (perhaps mythical) ancestors of the Aztecs and a pre-Columbian civilization of Mesoamerica. A favorite author of my formative years, Carlos Castañeda, uses the term Toltec with a different, shamanistic meaning. The sculpture and paintings of the Toltecs (and Aztecs and Olmecs) are highly stylized and powerfully graphic.
There is a beautiful park in Mexico City called Bosque de Chapultepec. The word chapultepec is a combination of Spanish and Nahuatl and means Grasshopper Hill. The park is home to one of the best anthropologic museums in the world, a zoo (with pandas!), a museum of modern art, a natural history museum and the residence of the president of Mexico. My husband and I spent our honeymoon in Mexico City many years ago and stayed in a hotel on the edge of Chapultepec Park. Grasshoppers are a pretty ubiquitous symbol in the area.
cotton fabric, acrylic ink, printed origami paper, and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Ants can lift up to 50 times their body weight. They are the heavy lifters of the animal kingdom. I hate them in the house, but find them fascinating outside.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to go do something fun and art-related in Massachusetts. I was delighted to find alpacas at my destination. These baby alpaca, called cria, are absolutely adorable. When they noticed me taking their picture, they all wandered over for a closer look. Their faces are so expressive!
cotton fabric, acrylic ink, printed mulberry paper, found object paper, gel medium, cotton thread and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
This time I incorporated a cucumber beetle cut from a page of a vintage children's book that my friend Melanie gave me. I antiqued the beetle to knock down the color just a tad - even though the page was old, the colors were a little too bright for this piece. The flowers are free-hand sketched with black thread on a sewing machine. Now if it would warm up outside so the garden really could start growing! I'm sooooo ready for Spring and an end to the dreary Winter landscape and the cold temperatures.
cotton fabric, acrylic ink, printed rice paper, transferred inkjet image, gel medium, cotton thread, linen thread and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
It takes a LEAP of faith to believe that a bumblebee can fly. The ubiquitous myth states that science has proven that the bumblebee can't fly but because no one told the bee, it does anyway.
NB: A physicist, Z Jane Wang, at Cornell proved that bumblebees do in fact follow aerodynamic principles of flight. They can't glide, but I don't see how that makes much difference to the bee.
Note to self: Wait for the gel medium to dry next time before adding stitched lines with the sewing machine...
cotton fabric, acrylic ink, acrylic metallic paint, found object paper, mulberry paper, stamped letters, printed, transfered letters and gel medium on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
I wanted to celebrate the spectacular lunar eclipse that we watched earlier this week. I stamped and transferred luna on a batiked fabric multiple times. The Luna moth is cut from a child's vintage textbook that my friend Julie let me choose pages from recently. Of course, I picked pages with insects.
cotton fabric, cotton thread, acrylic ink, metallic paint, found object papers, stamped image, gyotaku and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Boy, theory is a topic you have to think about. I've got music theory in there as the sheet music, the theory of evolution in the fish, plus a veiled reference to Darwin in the fortune. I might re-visit this topic in a month to see what else my subconscious has to say about it.
The chop of yú in the lower left corner is one of Fred B Mullett's Red Pearl stamps. He sent lollipops with the order (gotta love that) and his written personal guarantee is the funniest, most subversive decree I've read in eons - almost worth an order all by itself!
cotton fabric, cotton thread, acrylic ink, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
I'm not sure what my thought process was here. "Choose" brought to mind menus and choosing a meal (of course the fabric has recipes on it, not a menu, but it represents a menu in my head), plus the either/or, positive/negative embodied by the half-and-half flower. I stamped the word "go" over everything as I often have trouble coming to quick decisions, finding myself thinking, and re-thinking and over-thinking instead of just deciding or choosing and moving on. So, I'm GOing with this as choose. Ha.
cotton fabric, hand-dyed wool thread, cotton thread, acrylic ink, printed mulberry paper, embossed cotton rag paper, nori paste and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
Not my favorite word as a fiber artist. However, I made an abstracted version of "patchwork" with various-sized squares of heavily-embossed paper and used a fabric that's "blanketed" with words as the background.
cotton fabric, hand-dyed wool felt, acrylic ink, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
I printed the pear (yes, a real pear!) with a matte acrylic paint and the leaf with a metallic acrylic paint for the contrast in sheen.
Working on these small canvases has been an interesting experiment and I like the direction I'm heading in. There's something to this journaling thing...
cotton fabric, bamboo batting, acrylic ink, cotton and linen thread, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
The moth is sketched with thread onto a cotton fabric printed with a halftone of one of my ink drawings (it's really pale and doesn't show up much in the photo, or irl for that matter). I missed last week's IF due to a big deadline but really, how could I not do "stitch"?? Even with more deadlines looming.
cotton fabric, printed mulberry paper, origami paper, acrylic paint, and hand-carved stamped flowers on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
cotton fabric, printed mulberry paper, acrylic paint, acrylic inks, stamped letters and postage stamp on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
cotton fabric, printed mulberry and rice paper, acrylic paint, water-soluble pastels, image transfer, cotton thread, dyed raffia on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
