Embroidered Collage

And that's actually rather freeing.

I can only complete so many creative projects in my lifetime, whether I spend much time on them or little. 

There may be more or better projects if I spend much time, but I can't know for sure, and they will still be only a limited fraction of the ideas I have had and the things I would like to have tried.  It sucks, but it's life.  And realizing it makes it easier for me to be at peace with the little amount of time I currently have available.

The idea came from my rewording of a statement by Dan Goodwin in his article at Creativity Portal called One Full Flavor.  His emphasis was on how the concept can be used to bypass the too many options part of creator's block, resulting in multiple completed projects instead of dithering and still wondering where to begin.

I've been having similar problems with too many choices, but because I've been feeling time and space constraints, not because I've been feeling blocked. I used to be able to spread out all over the room and just create what I wanted and know that if it didn't work, then no big deal, because there was always more time. 

Now I have to get in the habit of putting things away for when Alanna is mobile.  Her care takes much of the evening and after her bedtime there are online classes and dishes and spending time with my husband.  If I want to get anything done I need to make choices and if it's messy then I need to actually schedule time for it.

Somehow it makes it better to know that, in the long run, I was always going to have to choose.

What project do I most want to do right now?  I want to do more of the exercises in Keys to Drawing with Imagination.  It stretches me and I can easily slip them in.  I've also just signed up for a butterfly wing themed atc swap, so I'll need to decide how I want to pursue the theme this time. I'm leaning towards acrylics.  I haven't pulled those out in a while and want to do some color studies.

Does knowing that you will only ever complete so many projects change your view of what to do next?

This post should definitely be multiple posts but I just don't care tonight. Phbbbt to the "blogging and readability guidelines".

Stitching Feels Good

  I finally got/made time to do a little stitching last night while watching CSI.  This little butterfly is less than an inch square on wool felt and mounted on a collaged card.  This was a test piece so you'll see more of it later.

I'd actually been contemplating not stitching in future artwork!  It just seemed like it would be so much easier to not be trying to think in layers of what had to be done before what and stitching is usually the most time consuming part, too.  But sitting down and actually doing a bit of stitching again wiped that idea out.  This is right.  Combining stitch and other media is right for me.  Always nice to have a little internal affirmation...

I Wrote Good Stuff

During my lunch hour I was perusing the archives on my blog.  I'd been having a case of "clean journal syndrome" and was thinking about ditching the whole thing.  As I was browsing through various categories I started thinking, "I did good. Wow."  Somehow, with the distance of time, it seemed so much less worthwhile to keep, until I looked again.  I think I want to recombine the archives and the recent posts and do a bit of updating.

I Need to Be Journaling in a BOOK

  After my frustrations with the Overgrowth page I decided to try to apply the journaling anything goes mental attitude to a loose page of 9x12 paper and failed miserably.  Even though I was enjoying the way I was working and had great ideas for developing the composition the whole process was taking me off track mentally to places I didn't want to go.  Besides, if I really want to stitch on a page and it's too awkward I can always tear it out, stitch on it, and then tip it back in. 

The background is watercolor, with some of Marissa Lee's paper from when she sold collage packs on top, and then a collage image.  I started adding lines with colored pencil as well.  I'm not sure at the moment if I'm going forward with it or setting it aside.

Self-Expression DOES Matter to Me 

I was looking at many of the websites of a group of mixed media artists that I belong to as well as at my Etsy favorites and I realized how much my work reflected me.  I didn't want to make something like what they made, even if it met all my other criteria.  I wanted to make it like me.

And that was my Doh! moment.  Of course I'm doing art for self-expression.  Oops.  I got tripped up because I was thinking about how I don't approach my art with something to say. But I do want to create it my way.  And then because it is my way, it is my self, expressed.

Thinking back, one of the reasons I was thrilled when I first discovered collage was because I could create something just out of my own head without having to have the precision and intent that words require.  A visual piece could just be.  It didn't need to say.

Conclusion - Revitalization

I may be moving along more slowly than I did in the last few years because of the changes in the rest of my life, but I'm still on this journey.  I still love it.  My original vision is still important.  I can't let going slow trick me into thinking that I don't care as much or let slowly become slower and slower and stop. And I won't.

Postscript

Can you tell I've been doing a little more struggling than I've been letting on?  *grin*  And the baby hasn't been sleeping well this week either - so neither have I - which has definitely not helped the mental state.  I feel better now though.  And maybe she'll sleep tonight...

When I decided to shift my perspective away from trying to make a profit from my art as a business, then I had to really look inside and figure out why I was doing it at all. 

One thing I cherish is the the making of something over which I have total control.  I strongly value working collaboratively at my job and love how all the different parts of a business interact, but it's nice to pull into my own little world.  Yet I could get that feeling by going back to cross-stitch and other traditional needle arts using other people's patterns.  It would certainly be less stressful.

A common answer to "why create?" is "self-expression", but that just doesn't really apply.  Although my self is in my art, putting it there is not why I create visual art.  It is why I write, but that's a whole different matter.  

I came up with three reasons.

Tactile Satisfaction

I love the way creating art feels.  I love the way creating art feels.  I love layering the paper and stitching rhythmically.  I love running my fingers over the fancy fabrics and the rows of beads.  I love good drawing paper and the swish of the brush.  I can get some of this with basic embroidery, but not the full range.

Community Involvement

Being part of art groups is important to me.  It feels good to connect over what I'm creating or over what someone else is creating.  Sometimes I'm able to give help, sometimes recieve it, and sometimes just enjoy the general atmosphere.  There's always a sense of possibility.

Option Expansion

In other words, the growing my skills.  I just felt that the concept needed a two word phrase to go along with the others!   I need to be learning and developing to be happy.  I can be content for a while with what I know, and I enjoy those quiet times, but then I always come back to asking myself what's next.  In art I can actually see what's next.  It's concrete.

As I write, I realize I could have applied these last two answers to traditional needlework communities and skills, so is tactile satisfaction really the only driving force?  Surely not.  I guess I have more thinking to do.  But in the meantime, I've been using these answers to help me determine the form my art will take by adding them to the focus on the evolution of texture and pattern that I figured out last year from working through Finding Your Visual Voice by Dakota Mitchell.

Yep, I killed another journal.  Again.  Sigh.

I didn't work in it at all this week.  It stayed on my scanner for days on end after my last blog entry.

But I DID create art every day.  I selected paper pieces.  I worked on art cards.  I even pulled out my idea development workbook and did some exploration in there and I hadn't touched it since July.

Once I get going on all those sorts of things I just don't want to work in a separate journal, too.  It becomes a chore and no fun. 

So I'm thinking that maybe I'll keep this journal around and next time that making art seems to take too much time and it's not something that I can get to, well, then I'll pull the journal out again.  I'll have a place I can accumulate a mark a day until I am somehow kickstarted or my time is arranged differently or some such so that I am again focused on doing art marks that grab my attention more thoroughly.

A few months ago this site was called "Mixed Media Art by Beth Robinson" and now it's called "Embroidered Collage."  When I made the change some weeks ago it was an acknowledgement of a narrowing of focus that had already occurred and a bit of a commitment to stay within that focus.  But it's only a medium.  And changing the name made me think even more about what I was creating within that medium.

I had started trying to do work in quarters and other grid like modular bits, even though very little of my attempts showed up here, but it just wasn't inspiring to me.  I felt hemmed in and that my work looked too cookie cutter.  So I went back over my completed works, trying to figure out what made me feel good. My favorite piece is still my 12x12 Kambaba Jasper, all those green and black swirls.  And I keep looking at Firestone and Water Dropped in my 6x6s, which have some of the same characteristics.

They use multiple semi-parallel lines in shapes and configurations that somehow represent flowing movement.  I've been calling them strata - after the layers of rock - as I mentioned in the collage entry a few days ago.  I've seen that term in a couple design books to refer to horizontal compositions made of layers, although I want to stretch the idea further than that.  This is the aesthetic that I am going to use as a default value, working into most of my art and using as a starting point when nothing comes to mind.

But that still told me nothing about subject matter.  Did I just want to make non-objective abstracts and layer patterns in different sizes?  It would probably satisfy me, but it would be much easier to market my art if I had at least a couple nameable concepts to promote.  Themes would also give me a place to exercise my compositional skills.  Some ideas that I'd thought about using in the past had been leaves, faces, animals, landscapes, portals, and water/fire/earth/air. 

I'm trying to start out with a little fewer than that, but I imagine that my mind will expand sneakily into the entire list, with some non-objective abstracts thrown in for good measure!  Tomorrow's landscape is the first piece I've completed after thinking about these things and I have a leaf and a cat piece in progress as well.  I feel like I'm starting with some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of ideas for the actual execution of the theme, but that's okay, because that's how I'll develop to be able to make more imaginative and unique works.

I REALLY want to be in this exhibit.  There's no particular extra prestige attached to it that I'm aware of, although any touring exhibit shown in university and gallery spaces has a certain level of prestige.  It's not particularly a selling venue, although it would certainly increase my exposure.

Mostly I want to be in it because of what the Embroiderer's Guild of America has meant to me.  EGA was one of the influences, internet communities being the other, that helped take me from "follow the pattern" needlework into the creation of art.  Even though I don't tend to use detailed handwork in my pieces, I value it strongly both for its tradition and for its future.

I have enough pieces to enter that I could fill out the form today.  But I hope to create another embroidery intensive piece or two by the April submission date, something that shows my development, if at all possible.  I'm a little worried about TRYING to create something impressive, though, since that always seems to backfire on me.  Maybe I'll just brainstorm a bit and keep in mind that a heavier level of embroidery on a couple 12"x12"s would be good.

If you're interested in submitting original needlework  - or even highly adapted work from a pattern - the information is on their website.  And here needlework just means anything in which a significant portion of the art is created with a threaded needle.  Based on the 18th Exhibit, which I was able to see in person, significant does not necessarily have to mean area in regards to the whole, although the majority of pieces were entirely needlework, but can also mean significant in terms of composition.