Look What the Cat Dragged in, Phase III

Several years ago I documented our cat Stella Luna’s odd obsession with bringing wads of dried grass into the house and depositing them in various locations. Later, her interest morphed into transferring gloves, hats and socks we kept in a basket by the door to other parts of the house.

In the last few years, she’s pretty much limited her artistic efforts to a carefully placed toy mouse or catnip pillow, announcing each installation with a forceful yowl. This activity invariably takes place shortly after her staff has gone to bed for the night. We drift off to sleep mildly curious to see what awaits us in the morning.

As she did earlier in her artistic career, Stella’s now exploring another new medium. She’s been working with fabric lately, using scraps and strips from my work table to articulate her own creative vision. Frankly I don’t think it’s as strong as her earlier work, but at least somebody in this family is putting in studio time.

Dating myself

Yesterday I indulged in what my friend June termed an art date with myself. R. Crumb's Genesis drawings are on display at the Art Museum, and I wanted to hear what chief curator Bruce Guenther had to say about this icon of my misspent youth. He lectured for an hour, engagingly, before turning us loose in the exhibit. A little over a year ago, The New Yorker published an excerpt of Crumb's work; I happened to lay my iPhone on the opening page, floating in God's void.


Crumb spent five years researching and illustrating all 50 chapters of Genesis. Granted, a Bible chapter is, what, a few paragraphs at most? -- it was still a lot of material to absorb. I'd figured I'd cruise through and look at the drawings, maybe read a bit of the text when something caught my interest. But damned if the story didn't suck me in, even the begats, over and over again. Genesis is juicy material, and Crumb, (Mr.) naturally, illustrated some of the begettings. Of course, the book was for sale in the museum gift shop, but I didn't want to schlep it all over town and on public transportation (I'd taken the bus in). It is a must-purchase, though. My birthday's coming up; just saying.

A wall-size Sol LeWitt piece was in the final stages of installation in the main-floor sculpture gallery. It consists of six primary geometic shapes superimposed on each other in pairs, white on a black ground, in all possible permutations. Very simple, but it grabbed me in a cool, rational, satisfying way. What a totally different aesthetic, and intent, from R. Crumb.


As long as I was going to be downtown anyway, I'd made a Genius Bar appointment to have my iPhone, which has been hiccuping since I "upgraded" to OS4, diagnosed. I had a couple of hours to fill before then, and I was hungry (must have been all that begetting). Southpark, one of our favorite default downtown restaurants, is just down the street from the museum. It was a gorgeous day, and they had tables set up on the sidewalk. So I ordered lunch and spent an hour or so eating a tuna salad sandwich and reading the book I'd brought with me.

A California friend had emailed me about a local gallery show featuring the work of two artists she knew, so I walked down 9th, across Burnside, and a few more blocks to the venue. En route I saw this conceptual art installation. Only in Portland, I hope.
With a couple of exceptions, the paintings (small format watercolor abstracts) didn't engage me. The gallery next door, though -- this is in the Pearl District, which is art-scene central -- had an intriguing exhibit centered on the graphic representation of editing, literary analysis, cultural history, and classroom teaching. Highly conceptual, hard to explain, but it spoke to my English major/editor heart. Here's a link: pdxcontemporaryart.com/anna-gray-ryan-wilson-paulsen.

I still had some time before the rendezvous with my Genius, so I dropped into the Contemporary Craft Museum, where I've been a member since shortly after we moved to town. There's usually something intriguing on display. The current exhibit hadn't piqued my interest when I read about it in their newsletter, but in person it was provocative. The title of the show is Dropping the Urn; the artist, from Beijing, is Ai Weiwei (I'm trying to put out of my mind the declarative English sentence that sounds like). He takes centuries-old vases and urns and repaints them, or reproduces their form but with the decorative glaze on the inside, as if they'd been turned inside out, or -- literally iconoclastic -- drops and breaks them. Here's a writeup: www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/exhibitions/index.php?f=2010_07_weiwei

Finally it was time to hit the Apple Store. I pawed iPads for a short while, and then handed my phone over to Kid Genius. He ran some diagnostics which revealed very little. His advice was to sync the phone (which also does a backup), then do a full reset, which wipes all data and restores the phone to virginity, and then sync to reinstall my data. This is not as scary as it sounds, but I was hoping to avoid having to fiddle with all my settings again; I'd done a Reset without Erase earlier. Of course, today Apple released version 4.0.1 of the software, which might have helped with my problems. "Minor bug fixes" indeed. We'll see.

I left the A-store, resisted checking out the sale at Chico's across the way, and was rewarded, up on the transit mall, with the almost immediate appearance of the 19 bus.

I really should take myself on art dates more often.

Surface Design

My dear friend Mona gave me the t-shirt, so I had to join the Surface Design Association to make an honest woman of myself. Do you like what I've done with the cat hair? It's part of an ongoing mixed-media series, and perhaps my signature motif.

Speaking of surface design, here's the organza piece I re-dyed in last week's workshop, folded over a couple of times, which quadruples its intensity. The more I look, the more I see in it. Trippy, man:


I couldn't help but notice a similar lattice motif echoed in Jerry's latest artwork:

There will be dye

Above is my OCAC work table at the end of a productive dyeing day. Below, another shot of my area on Sunday afternoon, as the workshop was winding down.


Below are a few more examples of the liquid resist work I did there. The small pinky square in the lower right was a nondescript scrap I'd painted at some point with acrylics. Daubed with potato dextrin and brushed with green dye, it's marginally more interesting. The middle piece is organza that I'd indigo shibori-ed in a previous workshop, now given the potato dextrin treatment and a coat of the same green dye. You can see a lot more detail, of course, if you click to enlarge the photos.


Despite my infatuation with potato dextrin, I was pleased with some of my results using other techniques. For instance, I marked several pieces of cloth with this silkscreen design (below), plus some random stamping here and there. First I re-cut the stencil I'd used in a previous workshop with Jeannette; this time, instead of putting thickened bleach through the screen to remove color, I used thickened dye -- putting color on, instead of taking it out. I also used the same stencil with a corn dextrin resist, rolling thickened dye over it later. When I washed out the resist, the stenciled form appeared in the color of the original fabric.


The horizontal blue piece at the bottom is an antique dresser scarf that was originally white. I dyed it in the same indigo workshop as the organza up above, with similarly blah (a.k.a. "very subtle") results. It was buried under books on Jerry's bedside table until last week, when I reappropriated it for my workshop stash.

It was big fun playing with the various silkscreening permutations. In the process, I also created some lovely patterns on the dropcloth:


Painting with dyes, especially on damp fabric, is a much freer and more improvisational process. Applying the dye with a syringe instead of a brush turned it into a Jackson Pollock-y process: keep moving, don't hesitate or ponder; work fast but gracefully. You can pause between colors to decide if it needs more. Now I know how those expensive "designer" sweatshirts I used to covet at Noma in Gualala are done.


The grid pattern on the lower left was done by laying a piece of patterned plastic under the fabric, then rolling over it with a dye-laden (but not too laden, I eventually came to realize) foam roller.

Yes, those are cut-up jeans at the top left. I didn't buy an inch of new fabric for this workshop. Everything is either overdyed commercial fabric or yardage I'd previously dyed myself. The dark-red material appearing here and there used to be the lining for the striped velour drapes that Jerry sewed (!) for the bedroom and living room of the first house we bought in the Bay Area. We still have a pair in our bedroom here.

The Potato Dextrin Process, by Robert Ludlum

Okay, I'm kidding about the Robert Ludlum part. It just sounds like something he'd write. I know you were breathlessly waiting for a download from the art workshop I did last week, Working with Liquid Resists and Thickened Dyes.


First, the word "resist," used as a noun, means a substance or object selectively placed on portions of the fabric you're working with to protect it from the dye or bleach or other transformative medium you plan to apply next. The "resisted" (transitive verb; interesting...) areas will be unaffected by whatever happens to the rest of the fabric.

A resist can be as simple as a wood or plastic block, strips of masking tape, or string. Many forms of Japanese shibori use the fabric itself as a resist, folded, stitched or scrunched so that the indigo dye penetrates unevenly. Remember tie-dye? When you wrapped those t-shirts in rubber bands or lengths of string, you were preparing fabric for resist dyeing. Who knew? We thought "resist" had only one meaning back in the '60s.

In this workshop, we played with two types of resist new to me: corn dextrin and potato dextrin. Both are powdered starches that mix with water to form a gloppy paste. You can brush or silk-screen them onto fabric, or stencil or stamp or rub them on. All kinds of found and repurposed materials come into play -- construction fencing, computer parts, plastic mesh produce baskets, ravioli presses, potato mashers. Believe me, when you get into this stuff, you'll never look at a hardware store, or your own kitchen, in quite the same way.

Potato dextrin is particularly cool to work with because, as it dries, it cracks in very interesting ways, as shown in the following photo. You can just spread it around on your fabric in a random manner, and then comb it around a bit. It's very much like finger-painting.


When the dextrin is dry, you apply dye all over, in a color or colors of your choice. You can use a roller with corn dextrin, since it dries smoothly. With potato dextrin, you have to dab the dye with a brush, as shown below, to make sure it penetrates through all the cracks and onto the fabric. Potato dextrin is all about the cracking.


Below are four of my pieces, all glopped up with dye and ready to sit overnight. You can always tell my work area by the ubiquitous Nalgene water bottle.


You let the dye dry and cure, and then wash off the resist to reveal your pattern. The photo at the top of this post shows the same four pieces, all washed and dried. Here's a closeup of one of them showing the wonderful crackly texture.

Net arts, Ne tarts, Knee tarts, Neat Arts... Netarts

Netarts (KNEE-tarts) is on the Oregon coast, just west of Tillamook. My art quilt group spent last weekend there on its annual retreat. We rented a couple of condos right on the ocean; the photo illustrates our not-too-shabby view. Both Gerrie and Terry blogged about our doings in great detail, thus saving me the effort, thank you very much. They both got amusing shots of moi, getting in touch with my internal Resourceful Pioneer Woman, the morning that the power went out. I've posted a mere three dozen or so beach-and-environs photos on my Flickr site.

One morning, we visited the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center. Both Terry (in red, next to me) and Gerrie (in blue, on the right) have pieces in the current show, It's Good to be Green. Here we are gathered around Terry's entry. I like the way her gardener-girl seems to be part of our group.

Of course we made more than one stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory, as documented on those other blogs, for our traditional ice cream lunch and discount dairy product shopping. This stunning example of cheddar-craft stopped me in my tracks. Tillamook: No Country for Vegans.

Here's another work of art, the dinner Chef Jerub prepared the evening I got home: Chicken in puff pastry and asparagus with a creamy pesto sauce. Yum.

Paper cuts and final cuts

A couple of interesting exhibits at RAW (Reed Art Week), which ended Sunday. I went especially to see Nikki McClure's mind-boggling papercuts. I hadn't heard of her til I picked up a calendar last fall in the Contemporary Craft Museum gift shop. Now I'm totally smitten with her work.

In the room next door was an installation called The Last Supper Table. The artist, Julie Green, had illustrated Death Row inmates' last meal requests on blue-on-white ceramic plates, each stamped with their date of execution. Twelve plates (out of the 300 or so she's done) were set around a table with wood, institutional-style chairs, the kind you'd find in a 1940s prison visiting room. A card, propped like a placecard behind each plate, described the meal as requested.

I was fascinated by the individual selections. Some were quite specific: hot and spicy chicken breast, two slices of sausage pizza with extra cheese (why not?), a slice of German chocolate cake, French vanilla ice cream, and a Dr. Pepper. Or steak with A-1 sauce, jalapeno poppers with cream sauce, onion rings, and a salad with cherry tomatoes, ham chunks, shredded cheese, bacon bits, and blue cheese and ranch dressing. The unexpected combination of steak, asparagus, brussels sprouts, feta cheese, cake and watermelon. The sheer "bring it on"-ness of BBQ turkey legs and BBQ brisket, plus avocados and a bowl of cheddar cheese. Cheese cheese cheese cheese. Not too many vegans on Death Row.

No doubt planning your last meal gives you something to focus on and anticipate, besides the obvious. A couple of plates, much smaller than the others, expressed the desire for no final meal at all. If I were facing execution the next morning, I think that'd be my choice, too.

But I'm not sure; those onion rings sound pretty good.

The year of reading books

One of my intentions for 2007 -- I don't do "resolutions" anymore -- was to make more art quilts. I'm in awe of friends like Terry and Gerrie who are so insanely productive. I started out strong, but by the time spring rolled around, the lure of the garden was stronger. By summer, I was spending entire afternoons in the back yard, simply reading for pleasure.

That's an accomplishment, too, I've decided. I was one of those nose-in-a-book kids who had to be coaxed to go outside and play. After I started my own business in the '80s, I had no time for anything but professional journals, user manuals, manuscripts I was editing, and other required reading. Reading for pleasure -- and books in particular, as opposed to just magazines -- had somehow drifted to the bottom of my priority list. This year I gave myself permission to read -- obsessively, if I felt like it -- again.

For whatever reason, I decided to keep track of the books I read this year. Here they are in chronological order, fiction and non- intermingled. I've put asterisks next to the ones that I particularly enjoyed or that resonated with me for some reason.

When I reviewed the list just now I was struck by how little fiction I'd read -- just seven books out of three dozen. I would have guessed more. I was also surprised to realize how many of the nonfiction titles are biographies or personal memoirs. I never used to be drawn to biography. Perhaps opening yourself to the possibility of learning from other people's lives is another function of getting older. Or maybe it's a matter of seeing how their experiences stack up against yours. I've gotten into the habit of reading the obituaries in the paper, too.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
I Feel Bad About My Neck (Nora Ephron)
Mycelium Running: how mushrooms can help save the world (Paul Stamets)
The Mayor of MacDougal Street (a memoir by Dave van Ronk)
1000 Places to See Before You Die
The Beast in the Garden: a modern parable of man and nature (David Baron)*
Out (a novel by Natsuo Kirino)*
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)*
Photoshop Elements for the Digital Photographer (Beckham)
Digital Photography with Photoshop Elements (Cromhout & Fallon)
Songbirds, Truffles and Wolves (Gary Nabham)
Island of the Colorblind (Oliver Sacks)
Complex Cloth (Jane Dunnewold)
Transforming Fabric (Carolyn Dahl)
The Happy Isles of Oceania (Paul Theroux)
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (Thomas McNamee)
Not Buying It: My year without shopping (Judith Levine)
Infidel (Ayann Hirsi Ali)*
Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood (Rebecca Wells)
The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)*
Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)
The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen (a cookbook; Eric Gower)
The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden (William Alexander)
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson)
Bee Season (Myla Goldberg)*
Unbuilding: Salvaging the Architectural Treasures of Unwanted Houses (Falk & Guy)
Plant This! (Ketzel Levine)
The Breakaway Cook (cookbook; Eric Gower)
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Bird & Sherwin)*
Children of Men (P.D. James)
An Exhaltation of Larks (James Lipton)
The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine (Rudolph Chelminski)
Not Enough Indians (Harry Shearer)
Final Gifts: Understanding the special awareness, needs, and communication of the dying (Callanan & Kelley)*
Bush on the Couch: Inside the mind of the president (Justin Frank)
Dishwasher: One man's quest to wash dishes in all 50 states (Pete Jordan)

I'm still reading the last two; an interesting juxtaposition.

Looking back on my year of reading books, I suppose I actually have accomplished something. Portland has many fine independent bookstores, which I patronize especially when buying gifts or books by friends. But I also bow deeply in the direction of the excellent Multnomah County library system and the ability to browse the catalog and reserve books online. Also, I've found that due dates, like the deadlines that used to drive my professional life, are an enormous incentive to productivity.

Maybe next year will be the year of doing art. I'm thinking seriously that imposing some deadlines in the studio might be the key to making that happen.

Sometimes art DOES match the sofa

In New Mexico this past summer, we visited our friends Mary and Gary, who moved there from California several years ago. Mary is a painter, a surrealist, who's developed a body of work featuring human-esque or hybrid human-animal forms floating through space. I fell in love with several of the pieces in her studio.

Shortly after we got home, my husband -- who, you might recall, got me good last Christmas -- started secret negotiations with Mary to buy one of her paintings. About a month ago he presented me with a detailed printout of their scheming. (Whatever did we do before email? Clandestine phone calls would have been so much harder to conceal.) It was all there -- the clever but ultimately futile effort to induce me to look at the new work on Mary's web site -- which I did -- and articulate my exact desires -- which, to their apparent consternation, I didn't -- as well as the practical details of dimension and of price.

The only item they couldn't pin down without my buy-in (my husband is a very wise man) was... which painting. So I got to pick, and I believe that Jerry was absolutely sincere in his assertion that his first choice had been the same. It's called The Swimmer. She arrived on Friday, after some in-transit shipment-tracing angst, and we got her uncrated and installed yesterday morning.

We're both thrilled to have one of Mary's paintings in our home. Every time I walk into the living room and glance at that wall, I smile. She looks absolutely perfect in that spot. Yes, I've seen the slogan on t-shirts and posters: "Good art doesn't have to match the sofa." But sometimes it does, and I count that as a bonus.

Back in the studio, finally

One indication of how little time I've spent in the studio lately is the number of podcasts queued up in my iTunes library. I subscribe to This American Life, Livewire! and The Writer's Almanac, among others, and I listen while I work. When I'm feeling productive artistically, I'm almost up to date. As of a couple of weeks ago, I was months -- nay, entire seasons -- behind.

But I did finally attack one of the fabric pieces I discharged in Jeannette's workshop several months ago. What I did originally was apply a thickened bleach solution to a piece of salmon-colored fabric using squeeze bottle and bubblewrap. It was purely an experiment; I didn't think much about the composition at all. Later, at home, I brushed the fabric here and there with a dilute solution of turquoise Procion dye. Dang; blew it. I hated the results. But I liked the color combination, and decided to use the discharge pattern as a loose guide for some reverse applique. (For the non-quilters: applique = layering a cut-out shape of another fabric on top of the main piece and sewing it on. Reverse applique = layering a chunk of different fabric under your main piece, stitching an outline of the desired shape on top, then taking a sharp pair of scissors and skillfully cutting away the top layer within the stitching lines to reveal the underlying fabric.) I enjoy reverse applique because the result is always somehow surprising.

So I seamed a piece of medium-turquoise hand-dyed Kona cotton to a piece of dark turquoise silk that used to be part of a jacket lining (thanks again, Francine) and used this as the backing fabric. Some freemotion quilting, some snipping, and... it looked like a dropcloth that had been folded down the middle while wet, then unfolded. Better vertically, maybe, kind of a sky-sea suggestion? Nah, not really. I considered overlaying portions with organza or another translucent fabric to get some movement, some kind of interest, going. Or maybe chopping it up, just treating the fabric as background, and piecing it together with a strong design element -- for some reason I'm picturing a heavily skewed X shape -- in the foreground.

But a comment from my amazingly astute husband led to the realization that some dark blue spots needed to migrate to the lighter side, and vice versa. So I patched additional fragments of the silk and cotton on the back of the cotton and silk sides, respectively, then cut through, selectively, to the third level. Subtle differences, but much more interesting, and the horizontal orientation works better now, I think.

I took the piece to Jeannette's house the other morning -- she'd invited the OCAC critique group she spawned a couple of years ago for tea and pastries and to meet the lovely and talented Ailie Snow. Surprise, my meager show-and-tell received considerable praise and comment. Definitely horizontal, keep the rough edges, and hey, look what happens (I'd already noticed) when you hold it up to the light! It reminds me of one of those heavily embroidered Indian fabrics with tiny round mirrors worked in.

The current plan is to back the piece with organza or something equally sheer. (I've targeted as raw material a huge but unspectacular gauzy shibori experiment; yep, I have a rotary cutter and I'm not afraid to use it). That way it will meet the Official Definition of a quilt (three layers held together by stitching). More important, the backing will help stabilize the patchwork of fabrics on the reverse, not to mention hiding some of the ugly quilting stitches.

Then I guess I'll hang it in a window. With light shining through it, it actually looks kinda swell.

Greetings from Placitas

We're visiting our friends Floyd and Linda in Placitas, NM, about a half hour north of Albuquerque. They have a wonderful view of the Sandia Mountains, which change dramatically with the light. A friend of theirs quoted the painter Richard Diebenkorn, who lived in this area for a while. He said something to the effect that he thought he'd miss the ocean, but he realized after he'd been in New Mexico for a while that the sky was the ocean here. I can see what he meant, though I'm still a holdout for proximity to large bodies of water.

Every August 4th the Santo Domingo pueblo holds a feast day in honor of its patron saint. Thousands of tribal members converge from all over. They don ceremonial garb, paint their faces and bodies, and form a huge procession, carrying gifts of bread, candles, and pine branches. Corn dances follow. Cameras are strictly forbidden on the reservation for this event, so I have no photos. Floyd's advice was "click it in your head"; I'll do my best.

Our afternoon entertainment was measuring our vitals with Floyd's nifty electronic blood-pressure monitor. You stick a finger into a hole, press a couple of buttons, and the tiny cuff expands to check your BP and pulse and give you a digital readout. Oh the thrill; it's like this generation's equivalent of a handheld video game. Once the competitive excitement ("whose pulse is the lowest?" "yeah, nice reading, but you're on drugs!") wound down, we went out for dinner at a Hyatt resort in Bernalillo. I wasn't expecting much from a hotel restaurant, don'tcha know, but aside from a couple of off-notes, our meals were delicious.

En route to dinner, we stopped at Art Gallery 66, which features whimsical sculptures, garden art and painted furniture as well as prints and paintings. My purchases, before tax, added up to $66. How did I do that? Jer called my attention to these grasshoppers in front of the building, posing on a rusted objet.

The evening's main attraction was an excellent thunderstorm, which we enjoyed from Linda and Floyd's patio until the flashes and rumbles started coming simultaneously and from almost directly overhead. We retreated to the living room, had dessert, and went to bed fairly early in anticipation of an early start on today's big adventure, Tent Rocks National Monument. Words cannot really describe, so I'll let pictures speak.

Garden Party

Last night we attended a dinner/art opening at the Japanese Garden. I'd gotten tickets because the thought of a summer evening in that exquisite location sounded really appealing. It was a pleasant enough affair, with a jazz trio, friendly folks to chat with, good wine, and a light, Asian-inflected supper in a tented area adjacent to the Pavilion. I ran into fellow STASH member Linda, an unexpected bonus. The view east, across the city and toward the Cascades, was spectacular, as always. What a spot, as Jerry likes to say.

I was surprisingly put off, though, by the gathering as such. I hated the fact that a crowd of people were eating, drinking and generally yakking it up in "my" tranquil green garden, my special retreat, my single favorite place in Portland. I had no idea I'd react in such a proprietary way. I'd never been to the Garden this late in the day; I was looking forward to it, and I'd brought my camera thinking the evening light might show me something new. There was no evening light to speak of -- it drizzled, off and on, all day and into the night -- but the Garden was still beautiful.

I felt better after we left the party for a while and took a short walk to the waterfall and koi pond. And I did buy some Art, a piece by Jan Rentenaar. It's a tiny ceramic sculpture of Usagi, the rabbit who lives on the moon. Here he is posed on some appropriate fabric from my stash.

Speaking of small creatures, China Rose has been particularly nesty recently. I just posted three more "awww...." shots on Flickr, for you cat people, starting here.

And speaking of art, I've had fabric on my design wall for the last few weeks, but it's been too hot and/or I've been too distracted and/or uninspired for any compelling ideas to emerge. What I am going to tackle, maybe even this afternoon, is a quite traditional ribbon-block table mat (think of a single large placemat). I'd set aside my fabric selection for this project years ago, before we even had a yellow-and-green kitchen. We have two sets of purple napkins, which will tie in well.

Sometimes it helps to work on something straightforward and mundane while the more interesting projects percolate in the subconscious. That's my theory, anyway, and I'm stickin' to it. It couldn't possibly be that I don't have a single creative idea left in my head.

Doing the "Artist's Statement" is Less Fun than Doing the Art

I'm planning to enter a couple of pieces in the Columbia Stitchery Guild's annual show next month. They require an artist's statement, which I know some people dread and hate to do. But I approached the task confidently; I am, after all, a professional writer and editor. I figured it would take 15 minutes at most to string together some art-speak BS and ship it off. It turned out to be a lot harder than I'd imagined. To begin with, it's a pretty ambitious theme: Who you are, what inspires you, what your work represents. You don't want to come off as foolish or pretentious. You try to avoid clichés and pat phrases. You aim to sound creative and original because you are, after all, an Artist.

What I submitted is true (write about what you know), concrete (don't tell; show) and coherent (first person narrator, minimal artsy jargon). I feel more secure about my writing than I do about my art. Here it is. But dang... how did all those passive constructions get by the editor? And I see I used the word "gravitate" twice, which is once too often. As we say in our household, "the editur never sleeps." But sometimes she nods off a bit.

My work is inspired by the natural world in all its manifestations, and by human-built structures that resolve into interesting abstractions -- in other words, by anything that catches and holds my eye. The pictures in my “ideas” file range from Hubble telescope images of towering galactic clouds to electron-microscope photographs of cells and tissues. I carry a camera almost everywhere to capture the center of a flower, the veins in a leaf, a silhouette of tree branches against the sky, a pattern of cracks in a crumbling wall, moss on bricks, peeling paint, the geometry of windows and roof-lines.

As a journalist, I was trained to “get it right.” Writing fiction was difficult, because it meant giving myself permission to make things up. As a visual artist, realizing that my landscapes didn’t have to be literal -- that I could take liberties with how objects really looked, rearrange them, add elements that weren’t really there, play fast and loose with the “facts,” abstract-ify and invent -- was a profound and liberating revelation.

I gravitate to hand-dyed fabrics in part because they don’t impose (although they sometimes suggest) an agenda. I’m also drawn to the ethic of re-use, recycle and re-purpose, which lies at the heart of the quilting tradition. Several of my pieces incorporate worn denim, suede from a much-loved jacket, or damask from a family tablecloth. I enjoy altering commercially-printed fabrics, making them more my own, through discharging, overdyeing, painting or printing. Recently I’ve been experimenting with wool, which takes plant-based dyes beautifully, adds textural interest and is soft and fun to work with.

A given piece typically draws on a combination of construction techniques, including appliqué, reverse appliqué, and piecing. My decisions are based on structural integrity, aesthetics, and the simple matter of getting the job done. I often lie awake at 3 AM mulling design options and puzzling over the practicalities of assembly. I conceived my first wool hanging, for instance, in terms of reverse appliqué rather than piecing, primarily because I was concerned about the bulk that might result from sewing wool to wool. But the material proved surprisingly malleable under the needle, I liked the look of the resulting seams, and I ended up piecing more than I thought I would. In general, I gravitate toward piecing as a construction method. I appreciate the nod to traditional quilting, the reminder that I am working with fabric rather than some other medium, and the element of discipline, and perhaps left-brainedness, it imposes.