slowly she turned

I’ve been thinking more about this aversion that I had to the patchwork squares, and how my first reaction was that I don’t like pink or shiny. When, actually, that is not true at all. Now I think that was a knee-jerk reaction – a tomboy response. (Here’s a link to one of my very favorite songs, one that describes me so well.)

It is true that I am not drawn to pastel colors. But I love a bold magenta, and the pink edges of clouds. I love the glow of silk, and reflections on water. All I have to do is look at my own tapestries.

I think it is that the color combinations are bugging me. And that can be remedied in many different ways.

So this has set my thoughts off in a different direction – gender, the expectations of others concerning women, what I expect of myself as far as my gender, and my rejection of the “girly-girl” culture for myself. I guess that I have seldom felt really feminine, yet I have always been attracted to men and masculinity. Never thought about it that much – I yam what I yam. This color bias and gender thing is interesting.

As I shared earlier, I am in Jude Hill’s Magic Diaries online class, which is full of the most amazing ideas and people. This is a Slow class. One of my new goals on this blog is to share my work – beginnings, mistakes, ideas – as well as the finished work or work that looks great. I guess that I am trying to make this point: being an artist does not mean being perfect.

So many people say that they aren’t artists. Well, that’s just not true. Art is how you express yourself. If you don’t express yourself, then you might not be an artist. But is there really anyone out there who does not communicate at all, even just within herself? Therefore, we are all artists. There are many who are harsh judges of their art, some who don’t judge at all, and the middle few.

Anyway, this intro is all about the beginnings, the wispy ideas swirling around this magic cloth. I got excited about the theme of an autobiographical, visual quilted/stitched cloth, maybe starting at the center and radiating out through my life, so it is not finished until I am. There will be lurking in this cloth a lot about change (the Slow Turn theme has always been about change as well as vaudeville) and growth, the “magic” being the change from one thing to another, the basic change of my self growing outward from my soul.

When I found the box of patchwork squares, I was excited. Until I spread them out on the bed. As I lifted each one from the box, I confronted the reality that it was not going to get better at the bottom. Truth be known, I like maybe one of these squares – the one near the top left. The rest of them are pretty ugly.

These are not my colors. I don’t like shiny. I don’t like pink. But if there is one good thing to come out of this, it causes me to reflect on what was going on at the time when I made these squares. I didn’t like pink or shiny then either. But I was trash-picking for cloth (some from the theater costume shop) and I was flat broke. I had a compulsion, and still do to some degree, to use things up, to not waste anything. So these combinations are pretty hideous. I think that I was so unhappy that I was churning out crap to give my hands something to do and my brain something to rest upon. I was also drunk most of the time and had a very low self esteem. I didn’t know how to be kind or true to myself.

So, in a way, these squares are the perfect reflection of who I was then. That’s valuable, but I still don’t want to look at these colors or be reminded of this unhappiness. I put this out to my classmates and got a lot of great ideas of how to incorporate or alter them. I want to share the beginning of this here. It’s possible that they will go back into storage or I’ll give them away but I have a feeling that they will make it into this cloth somewhere and be transformed, like magic, into a happier reflection of my life now.

Here’s something that I’m much happier about – I haven’t only been weaving strips of paper. I’ve been weaving strips of cloth too. This will be a base of whatever I do, and maybe the bases of other small pieces.

Right now Theo has claimed his rightful throne, which is on my lap when I’m sitting and in my face when I’m lying down. Guido, our 15 year old tomcat, is preoccupied with his tail. I expect that he will start chasing it at any minute now.

I didn’t do anything exciting today. We ran errands, and I made a leftover hash with black beans and jasmine rice and leftover turkey loaf and hot Italian sausage and tomatoes and sweet onions and one little banana pepper from my garden. Ah, I still love that walk through the garden to see what I can come up with even when there’s not a lot.

I’m thinking forward to my trip to Sunset Beach for a week with family. I want to put together several book covers and text blocks ready to bind, and warp my little copper loom in case I want to make a tapestry with found objects from the beach. That idea appeals to me a lot, even though the last time I tried it I didn’t enjoy it. Now I have loosened up quite a bit and won’t be adhering to many “rules” that I used to set for myself.

I looked at my Magic Diaries class online. I love the way Jude expresses her thoughts. She explores words and ideas and talks as she thinks, or she sure does seem to. She mulls over the word “magic” and what it brings to her mind – appearing and disappearing. Things that turn into other things. It is precisely the kind of dialogue that I have with myself when creating, but I don’t have that knack for expressing it to others.

She uses a lot of woven cloth strips in her work, and there is that appearing and disappearing as the strips cross each other. It is one of the things that I love about the paper weaving I’m playing with. The connections of the two strips transform the whole into another thing, or a big group of smaller things. I’ve always thought of the space of the loom as being a magic space. It’s hard to describe, but it seems to me that the cloth comes to life out of those connections, not the fibers that go in and out, even though I know that the fibers are what make the connections.

I got out some patchwork squares that I put together thirty years ago when I was a theater major working in the costume shop. I abandoned them when I realized that they were all of different kinds of fabric and not the same size squares and would be impossible to wash without some fabrics being ruined or shrinking. I don’t really care about that now. This cloth will be for me. I sort of like the idea of combining something that I made so long ago when I was really a different person with something I make now, reflecting some of that change, claiming the parts of me and my history that I don’t like and loving them.

I’ll take photos and share from time to time, but this project will be personal, will be for me. And I might decide to do something completely different, but I like this idea at the moment.