Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Making Art

Last week I spent two days making art with Mitch Lyons. Wow! I didn't know what hit me.
Work just poured out of me. I haven't had such fun since I took a workshop with Melody Johnson. I felt real connections between these monoprints and fused quilts--the immediacy of each, the work with raw color. I also felt a correlation to the illustration of Denise Fleming. Somehow these three different art forms are close, and I want to explore them. I think it is that in each of these three methods, the artist works with pure color. In the clay monoprints, pigments are added to white china clay; in Denise's paper pulp painting, pigment is added to cotton pulp; and with the fused quilting I have done, in the style of the Chicago School of Fusing, hand-dyed cotton fabrics are the result of bold pigment added to cotton. Pure color is very important in each form. That's not saying that a lot of planning, sketching, technique and preparing doesn't go into these pieces, they do. I'm grasping for words here...not articulating very well. I'll think on it.
I know that I'm itching to sew the monoprints. Colored clay printed on pellon and remay. Don't know that I can fuse it, but I know I can sew it! I will provide photos tomorrow of the prints.

1 comment:

Julie Zaccone Stiller said...

Fabulous works Cheryl. Very inspiring! Looks like so much fun. Monoprinting is always a blast, don't know why I don't do it more. And I think you are really onto something with the pure colour idea in this post. I agree and shall think on it some more to see if I can come up with something else to say about it. Thanks for the tipoff to something I hadn't been able to express!

PURLS OF WISDOM

"Color is the real substance for me, the real underlying thing which drawing and line are not."
--Sam Francis

"The great man is one who never loses his child's heart."
-- Philosopher Mencius

"We wear our attitudes in our bodies."
-- Patti Davis

Colour embodies an enormous though unexplored power which can effect the entire human body as physical organism.

Colour is a means of exercising direct influence upon the soul.
--V. Kandinsky
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way.. things I had no words for.
--
Georgia O'Keeffe

Nothing is really work unless you'd rather be doing something else.
--
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Faith is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
--
E. L. Doctorow

Somebody once said that people become artists
because they have a certain kind of energy to release, and that rings true to me.
--Dale Chihuly