Embroidered Collage

I needed a hand-pulled print for a Spring-themed swap and decided to do a butterfly.  I picked an interesting one from a Dover Pictura book and sketched it in the upper left of the grid.  I knew that would only give me so much understanding of what would happen when I carved, based on past experience.  So then I did the butterfly on the upper right - first shading the entire area in with a 6B pencil and then using a kneaded eraser to remove sections.

  I knew that I could get a little more detail when I carved the soft block, but I still basically followed the shapes I had set up in the sketch.  I stamped the image in the middle right block for a record.  The carved block itself and one of the prints for the swap are shown in the second picture.  I used a purple metallic stamp pad because I've had such a frustrating time with Speedball's block printing ink.  I can never get a thin enough layer brayered down on the block that it really looks good when printed.

I continued to elaborate on the theme in the grid in my sketchbook and did an enlarged version of the original Dover design in the upper portion, trying to capture the rhythm of the patterning.  It felt really good to be doing sketchbook work again.  I also liked using the Prismacolor Art Stix as my primary drawing medium.  The mark is wider and I feel like I can draw a bit looser with the rectangular stick than with the usual colored pencil.

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.

I haven't been using many collage images lately because they frustrate me.  Part of me feels like my art should all be raw - using only my own images, and part of me recognizes that my best pieces don't use collage images.  But they're so much FUN.  I love the door and other bits and pieces that I've collected.

So when I saw an all-media 9x12 spiral bound journal in Barnes and Noble I thought I had it made. I could use it for a journal of collages and paintings and just practice, have fun, develop ideas, and, yes, use those collage images.  So I built up a page and had lots of fun.

And then I realized how awkward it was to add stitching to it.  Aaargh.  So now I have to decide if I should be doing my "journaling" on loose sheets, which I have a distressing tendency to trash if they don't turn out as I envisioned, or just not incorporate stitching, which reduces how much learning I can do on each piece. 

I did enjoy the freedom of knowing it didn't matter how the collage turned out, even though not having an end use is also irritating to my engineering side.  Every time I've journaled in the past I had plans for what I'd do with the pages, either because they were to be swapped or because I had secret thoughts of selling reproductions.

And the best part was that by building up around the collage images - I started with the door and the stone head over it - I came up with a bunch of other ideas that I could develop in a sketchbook and turn into a piece of artwork that used only my own imagery, if I was so inclined.

I just have to keep struggling with my own expectations for myself and my art...

When I've created compositions with strata-like layers I often don't vary the widths of the layers too much.  These two collages were created with the intent to push that aspect of the composition a little bit. I love the handmade papers and the variations in texture I can get with them alone, before I even add the stitching.

As I considered what to do with the painted sheet I realized that it looked something like a landscape with a red sky.  I had used cretan stitch to good effect in a previous landscape and thought it would work well here.  I only wanted to use one stitch, since, at least for now, putting in a restriction seems to give me better results.  Instead I varied the colors and thicknesses of the silk threads I used. 

I mostly chose thread colors based on the paint underneath, but deliberately tried to be a little off so the stitching would show up.  At the bottom I put in some extra browns to emphasize the earth of the landscape.  I also tried to use cooler and lighter colors farther away to get some of the atmospheric perspective that also makes the brain register landscape.  One of the reasons I chose that darker, thicker brown in the bottom left was to extend the value range. I didn't think this out logically step by step as I was stitching.  The concepts would drift to the top of my brain as I was selecting the next bit to add and I'd use them in a more improvisational manner.

I love this piece.  I look at it and think I couldn't have done less or more to it and that this is the kind of effect I was hoping for when I started embroidering watercolors.  Now if I could just figure out why that is, so I can extrapolate into future works...