Advice for Artists

Artists working in all mediums will find something of value in this free e-book by Andrew Simonet.

In 200 very pithy pages, Simonet covers topics like The Role of the Artist, Planning, Mission, Money, Time and Principles. The guidance he gives in the Mission chapter about writing your artist statement is particularly helpful.

Andrew Simonet is a choreographer, writer, and founder of Artists U, a grassroots planning and professional development program for artists. He co-directed Headlong Dance Theater from 1993 to 2013. 

Another fabulous text'art retreat

Thank you, Dianne, for hosting another retreat for our text'art group. This was our fifth annual get-together at Dianne's lovely cottage in the Eastern Townships.

In past years, we would agree on one or two common activities, like indigo dyeing or silkscreen printing or batik with soy wax or making our own stamps. This year, we pursued our own projects but came together several times a day for conversation, good food and a little wine. We shared ideas, recipes, and iPad tips, as well as our mutual interest in fibre and art.

I dyed about 12 meters of cotton, making low-immersion gradations from one colour to another, and some half-meter pieces for skies. At right you can see a gradation from cool yellow to fuchsia.









Helena, Colleen, Dianne, Lauma and I are shown after a swim, looking over the lake and enjoying a tea break.  Pamela and Michele were unable to join us this year, and they were sorely missed, but we are already looking forward to next time.

Rue du Saint-Sacrement, take 2

On April 16, I posted an image of a newly-finished work, which I made for a show this coming November. The show, titled "Urbanité x 2", will be a collaboration between painter John Vazalinskas and me, comprising exclusively urban subjects. The focal point of the exhibition will be the two works we each produce of the same scene.

Rue du Saint-Sacrement 2, 24" x 24"

I wasn't completed satisfied with my first effort, and so I have made a second piece. Though not as lively as the first, I think it is more coherent, more unified. It looks better beside John's painting, and they will complement each other nicely on the promotional material. I like the way that the rose and turquoise in the sky are echoed elsewhere, in the buildings. I find that the colours and values suggest an evening light.

Rue de Saint-Sacrement, 24" x 24"

In the first version, the red wedge shape above the house seems too dominant to me, and this was glaringly apparent when I saw a mock-up of the poster for the show.

Original photo, taken in Old Montreal

And no, this is not the start of a new series!
!

Impressionists at the Shelburne Museum

"In a New Light: French Impressionism Comes to America" continues at Vermont's Shelburne Museum until September 1. It is housed in the beautiful new Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, near the entrance to the extensive, park-like grounds of the museum. In the photo below, you can see one of the haystacks that have been created in homage to Monet's paintings.

Pizzagalli Center, Shelburne Museum,
with natural wood and stone throughout

The exhibit highlights the Impressionist paintings from the Shelburne's collection, and also includes works on loan from private collectors and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Of note is Monet's Le Pont, Amsterdam, the centrepiece of the show. It was the first painting by Monet acquired by an American collector, bought by the parents of the Shelburne Museum's founder, Electra Havemeyer Webb.

Le Pont - Amsterdam, Claude Monet, 1874

The title of the show, "In a New Light", refers to the fact that until the recent opening of the Pizzagalli Center, the fine paintings in the Shelburne collection were shown in historic homes, without gallery lighting.

With about two dozen paintings by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, the show is certainly worth a visit if you are in the area. Informative notes in English and French are posted beside each work.

Guided tours are available daily at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Nancy Crow at the Shelburne

Took in the Vermont Quilt Festival on Friday, and the next day spent a few hours at the Shelburne Museum, where Nancy Crow is having a solo show of her more recent work. Every year, the Shelburne hosts a solo show of a Big Name art quilter in its Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery. Nancy Crow, Seeking Beauty: Riffs on Repetition is on view until October 31.

Markings #1: The Known and the Unknown , 77" x 72", Nancy Crow, 2006
100% cottons hand-screened by Nancy Crow
Hand-dyed and machine-pieced by Nancy Crow

Crow is best known for her free-form piecing, not unlike that found in the Gee's Bend quilts. She is a much-respected teacher who has influenced many with her breakthrough approach. I had not realized that she has been exploring mark-making and monoprinting for the last number of years.

The art quilt pictured above is the showpiece of the exhibit. A detail is shown below. It is tricky to do justice to the colour, but it is very beautiful and easily my favourite of the works on display. The quilting echoes the lozenge shapes of the marks. It is not clear whether Crow does the quilting herself or, more likely, outsources that work.

detail, Markings #1: The Known and the Unknown

A description of the technique of monoprinting is posted at the entrance to the exhibit:

A monoprint is essentially a printed painting. Although a monoprint, the artist manually removes or adds ink to a plate which is then printed using a printing press. In the subtractive method, a metal or plastic surface is covered entirely with ink or watercolor media which is partially or wholly removed to expose areas of the picture being made. This process can be carried out using brushes, cotton swabs, sponges, fingers, etc. In the additive method, layers of pigment are applied to a clean plate in various ways. Once the picture is completed, it is run through a press with dampened rag paper to form a unique one-of-a-kind print. Before cleaning the plate it is possible to add more ink or watercolor to the ghost image remaining to create a second image over the original matrix. In this way the artist can create a series of related works.

Artist Nancy Crow has adapted this process for cloth to create her fabric monoprints. 

Detail from one of the Mono-Prints above.
The machine-quilting follows the lines of the marks.

Self-Portrait: Focus Mono-Print #24a, 21.5" x 39.75" Nancy Crow, 2012
Marked & Printed by Nancy Crow
100% cotton/ Procion MX dyes, machine-quilted

Like some other art I have seen in the last few years, Crow's works are meditations, seeking transcendence in repetition. They are more about the process and less about the product. Here is what she writes about the experience of making these works:

I am walking the walk. Totally focused. Paying attention. To bed early. Up early. 10 - 12 hour days. Dedicated computer time reduced to 30 minutes per day. No phones in the studio. All necessary preparations predicated on efficiency. Wet studio organized. Using the fewest tools to facilitate mark-making and drawing. Stacks of fabrics prepared. Corralling black thoughts. Going forward. Making mistakes. Not looking back. Learning. Loosening up. Feeling the thrill. Day after day. Keeping the routine. Short ones. Long ones. Over and over. Riffing on repetition. Seeking beauty. Believing. Self-portraits of who I am. - Nancy Crow, February 19, 2014

Crow is an artist who, over a career of 40 years, has challenged convention and pushed herself to go beyond her own limitations.

Through Our Hands: what a find!

This British-based website is the product of a collaboration by twenty of the world's top-tier quilt artists, including many of my favourites: Elizabeth Barton, Deidre Adams, Mirjam Pet-Jacobs, Linda Colsh and Jette Clover.

What will you find here? Stunning images of their work. A free quarterly magazine to download. News of recent and upcoming shows, both individual and group, worldwide. Reviews of their shows. Information about books written by these talented individuals. Books, notecards and small works for sale. Videos of the process behind various works, of guided tours of shows, and of interviews.

Download the free quarterly magazine.

You may also subscribe to their e-newsletter.

Talking about my work

Thank you to Gabriel Landriault of the Arbor Gallery, who gave me this opportunity to talk about my work after the hanging of the Cityscapes show.

Photos from Cityscapes opening

A sunny day brought about 25 visitors to the Meet the Artist event at my current show. The cityscapes showed well in the historic house, with its white walls and gallery lighting.

Thank you to Gabriel Landriault, Director of Communications for the Arbor Gallery, for these photos from yesterday's opening. And, to those who dropped in, thank you for your interest and your support.

Shanna Steals, curator of the show, poses with me for Felicia,
reporter for the local newspaper, The Review. 

I'm looking forward to attending Michele Meredith's solo show in Rigaud later this summer.

A chat with a staff member of the gallery who formerly worked
 in the New York neighbourhood of 57th and 5th.

Having a word with Tim and Franki Elliott.
Tim recently closed his successful solo show of fine paintings at the Skelly Gallery.

The Montmartre cityscapes get their share of attention from Tim Elliott, Rosie Mayo, Betty Marok...

...Judy Jenne, and an Ottawa-area fan of 12 by the dozen.

Cityscapes: Collages in Cloth and Stitch, runs until August 17 at the Arbor Gallery in Vankleek Hill, ON. Hours are Wednesdays, noon to 1 p.m., and Thursdays to Sundays from noon to 4 p.m.

Must fibre artists be outliers?

One of the associations I belong to is, at heart, a group of plein air painters. I joined the Hudson Artists because they are a local community group and offer exhibition opportunities, but I often feel like an outsider within the group, especially when they are packing up their easels and paints and heading off to an outdoor retreat.

Likewise when I visit galleries in Montreal. So many of them feature work that is conceptual or installation or video. Having my work accepted in these galleries seems like an impossible dream.

I ask myself, "Why do you persist with this medium? Isn't it obvious that there is no serious audience for work in fibre?"

Segment of Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1070

And then I read something like the current blog item from Elizabeth Barton. On June 10 her post, titled "Stitched Histories: A Memory of the World", opened with a reference to the Bayeux Tapestry, which is listed as one of UNESCO's 250 "Memories of the World", along with the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta. As Barton writes, "...the scope for decoration, art and story telling has always been a strong part of the craft of making marvellous tapestries, weavings and embroideries."

One of William Morris' many designs for textiles and wallpaper, c. 1880

She refers to champions of textile art, like William Morris, and to feminist artists like Judy Chicago, who used needlework to make a powerful statement in The Dinner Party, which I saw in Montreal in 1982 and, more recently, in its permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum.

"The Dinner Party", detail, by Judy Chicago, 1974 - 79

A profile on TextileArtist.org of ten contemporary artists who work in embroidery celebrates their use of hand and machine stitching. Reading about them and seeing how they express their ideas with innovative combinations of embroidery with paint and photography, plastic and paper, encourages me to see fibre as a viable medium.

To quote Elizabeth Barton, "It is the extraordinarily tactile element of fibre art that appeals so much, I think.  Free flowing stitches (whether created by hand or machine) and the sewn edges of fabric shapes (whether appliquéd or pieced) reveal the personal gestures of the artist in the same way that drawings do."

Barton quotes reviewer and critic Ciara Connolly, who asks, "What is the point of a [fibre work] that looks like a painting?” and who concludes that it "is the very looseness, the wabi-sabe, the mark of the hand, that is so evident in much fibre that differentiates it from painting – and makes it so effective because we can almost see the artist at work."

Connolly, in turn, quotes French poet Edmond Jabes. “I dreamed of a work which would not enter into any category, fit any genre, but contain them all; a work hard to define, but defining itself precisely by this lack of definition, a work which would not answer to any name but had donned them all”.

I am inspired by this vision of what textile art has been, and what it can yet be. I am encouraged that Montreal's Concordia University offers undergraduate and graduate programs in "Fibres and Material Practices". And I am more than ever convinced that groups like SAQA, which work towards placing fibre in art venues worldwide, deserve my support.

The Belgo Building

On Saturday, the Canadian Art Foundation hosted its first-ever Montreal Art Hop. A similar, annual event has been held in Toronto for many years by the Foundation, which also publishes Canadian Art magazine.

I took advantage of the Hop to follow a guided tour of six galleries in the Belgo Building, 372 Ste.-Catherine Street West. Built in 1912 to house a department store, the six-floor building has gone through several incarnations, including as a centre of showrooms and offices for the rag trade. Currently, it is known as one of the largest concentrations of contemporary art galleries in Canada. Almost forty galleries can now be found in the Belgo Building, some private, some government-supported, some no-commission, and some artist-run. It even has its own weekly bulletin.

Part of the fun of visiting the Belgo Building is stumbling upon something unexpected, and that's how I felt about the work of Sarah Bertrand-Hamel at the Joyce Yahouda Gallery, a great "find" which wasn't even on the tour.

Bertrand-Hamel is currently finishing a Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Fibres and Material Practices. The guide to the show reads, "The artworks ... consist of handmade paper created by Sarah Bertrand-Hamel through which the artist manipulates fibres, colours, textures and translucency. Stitches, folds or wrinkles become lines, letting drawings ... appear. Inspired by Gee's Bend women's contemporary quilts, Greco-Roman mosaics and medieval stained glass, the paper artworks are engaged with architecture.... An important aspect of her practice is fragmentation. The fabric scraps, the stone tesserae, and the coloured glass bits are here replaced by paper pieces. Whether it is with her pencil or sewing machine, Sarah Bertrand-Hamel draws. Fascinated by impermanence and singularity, the artist creates images that she repeats and reinterprets, fragments and recomposes. She is interested in transitions and shifts between these images."

The three works on view were made of small pieces of paper, stitched together by machine, with threads left untrimmed. They were stretched taut inside a framework of raw wood.

The Belgo Building seems to be the kind of place that rewards the casual visitor with many such interesting finds, and I plan to go back again soon.

Solo show opens mid-June, Arbor Gallery

So excited to announce that my solo show, "Cityscapes: Collages in Cloth and Stitch" will open soon at the Arbor Gallery in Vankleek Hill, ON. For two months, more than two dozen of my urban landscapes will be on display, including some of my most recent work.

For more information, and for a sneak preview of the show, please visit the gallery website at www.arborgallery.org.

Montreal Art Hop tomorrow

Art. Talk. Tours. June 14. All day.

Neighbourhoods include the Belgo Building, Saint-Henri, Griffintown, Old Montreal and Mile End.

For more information, please visit their website.