Three White Walls

So what would be the point of any pictures. Before anything gets moved into the studio, I'm going to take advantage of the white wall and reshoot some recent pieces indoors with proper lighting. There's a another deadline coming up for a mixed media show that I'll tell more about if I get juried in. In case you thought I was laying on a beach someplace, I spent some time uploading pictures to a rather cool artist's resource - another free place to get one's work out into the public eye even if it is digitally. The Irving Sandler Artists File is a digitized image database and artist registry that is open to the public. The Artists File is not curated and there is no fee to join or use the service... Oh, and by the way, there is no category like textiles or fiber so I listed myself under mixed media which is technically correct anyway. When you click on "artists portfolio" you get a birds-eye-view of up to twelve pieces. I put mine in the order that I made them and the continuity (omg - could it be VOICE?!) is interesting. It makes me realize that I need to redo my main website gallery and do away with the cutesy little cropped images that lead to whole ones and show them in some kind of order created and there are things that need to be relegated to "older works". I'm pretty lucky in that my name starts with LAC. I get listed on the first page of the "L"s. Now I wonder who goes in an looks at this site. Time will tell I suppose.

Too hot out to be out

Another UFO unearthed and diddled with. This was from an experiment using alginate to thicken the dye and I wasn't thrilled with the loss of color intensity so I painted over it with Setacolor transparents. A little overexposure in the pool yesterday and the paint fumes combined to make me sick as a dog for most of the last 24 hours so it was supposed to be good for me to work outside on the deck painting this piece except that it was easily 90 out and muggy. I feel like a bowl of overcooked noodles.

What light through yonder window breaks?

Well Juliet, it's the east and a damn good thing I'm an early riser. Thing is, the old room had the very same view but as you can see, I rarely looked out the window. I also never took advantage of a perfectly respectable closet. Chaos and Mayhem and I used to battle to a stalemate but as I've given in to the desire to work larger, C&M have driven me elsewhere, usually out on the picnic table and recently as far away as Florida. I am taking my workspace back. In the process of looking for backs to build some pieces that are just dying to meet a deadline, I have uncovered vast acreage of dyed & painted fabric that, at one time, I thought had potential. This batch is stewing in a dark dye pot right now. There, with the dark painted circles, was a sister piece to "Rubric". No pangs and no heartache over reassigning these UFOs to a useful existence tells me that the direction of my work has left this path behind. I wonder what else I'll uncover as the shake out continues? Stay tuned and look forward to a fiber give-away on a grand scale in the near future. I have plans to divest myself of a LOT of stuff. I'm also thinking about doing a little investigating into some basic Feng Shui before I start putting things into the new studio. Does anyone have any research recommendations? I know nothing about it beyond that I have no intentions of sitting with my back to the door.

the Mob Scene series

At the moment the piece that's on my design wall has it's back to me, literally. For lack of table space I built the layers right on the wall and it's waiting to be pinned and trimmed, a dark over-dyed disappointment assigned a new and useful life as the backside of this piece. <--This one, my favorite from last weeks dye fest, will be the first up on the wall when the studio is done. The fabric was pre-soaked with soda ash solution and then allowed to dry out before I started dye painting with no thickeners. The little creepy business that happens where the colors meet but don't mix is interesting and something I want to work on making happen again. Dry fabric and nearly dry brush with fairly concentrated dye and no auxiliary chemicals at all.

New Studio

Here's some before shots in the earliest stages of conversion from what was a teenaged boy's den of iniquity into my new studio. The walls are all patched now and the first coat of off-white paint is scheduled for tomorrow. There will be a big,brand new window in the north wall, a huge mirror on the facing wall to pick up more light from the existing floor to ceiling window and one whole wall a floor to ceiling design wall - I just haven't decided which one yet 8x8 feet, perhaps more. There is going to be a solid walnut sewing table with a cut-out for my Janome, a some wire basket shelving and maybe a wing back chair and ottoman by the big window for handwork. All this - the sweat, scrounge and skill - a gift from my biggest fan, my husband Jim.