This week I have been writing grants to state and local arts organizations. I am writing small, emerging artists type grants in hopes that I might be able to attend a couple of workshops this summer. For readers of this blog, please consider your own arts agencies as a source of money for new quilt supplies or sewing machines or for tuition and travel to a workshop. The following is what I submitted as an artist's statement. I offer it to you as a personal meme.
Artist’s Statement
For most of my adult life, I have lived in a world of books, children and storytelling. Having been a librarian in rural West Virginia, I brought books and children together. I performed at countless venues as a storyteller and wrote and published picture books for children. While this was creative and rewarding, it was also depleting and not regenerative in the end. It was a black and white world.
What I have discovered in my recent past is that I need to live in color. I need to manipulate color, experience how it behaves when jostled and tossed around. I need to be open to the energy, the vibrancy, the vitality of lots of color.
Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Colour and I are one...-- Paul Klee (1889-1940)
I currently work in two mediums, the fused art quilt and the clay monoprint. They are similar in that each offers spontaneous immersion into pure color and each uses fiber as the vehicle to drive the art and mount the color.
As a college student I had dabbled in clay and ceramics, but I was certainly no potter. The clay printing process provided an even more immediate and organic relationship with color than the fused quilting. From my first experience with clay printing, I felt a rush—I was swimming in color! While there is thought and planning involved in making a clay print—choosing colors, adding textures—there is also the serendipitous possibility of an unplanned surprise. This can be very exciting as well as disastrous. To me this excitement, this aleatoric chance taking keeps an edge in my work.
My inspiration comes from the natural world around me, from the forests and mountains where I live. It also comes from other arts. I adore ballet and almost every kind of music. I like musicals and operettas, but I hate opera. I sing loudly in the car. Drama and a good story sustain me. The study of art history and the viewing of art, especially art made by women, has always been important to me. I like Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keefe, and Helen Frankenthaler. My contemporary favorite painters are Janet Fish and West Virginia native Carolyn Jennings. Finally, I am in awe of many contemporary art quilters—Melody Johnson, Emily Parson, Caryl Bryer Fallert, and Jane Sassaman to name a few. The notion that you can start with a needle and thread and create such beauty makes me want to try too.
My current interests, then, are to continue to work to deepen my facility with each of these two distinct techniques as well as explore where the two might intersect.
1 comment:
Cheryl, I keep missing deadlines. I've received grants before from our state agency and a well endowed feminist agency. One grant purchased a laser printer and the other 3 I've recieved helped me take time to write. I completed genealogy research that was the core of a series of poems based exploring history, landscape and heritage and personal cosmology. They where all for my life as a poet but that was long ago and I've just been out of the loop with tracking deadlines and keeping up with changes. But yes, I agree, artists grants are wonderful for making the impossible possible for many artists!
I hope you get it! Did you have to specify which workshop you wanted to attend?
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