Gathering to Create

       Going to NYC and Maine in the summer is not only a break, but a time to gather ideas. In son's NYC home, I took a photo of my painting relevant to the political season. At the museums I looked for jewelry in ancient Egypt and Rome. (Once I was in a museum when Paloma Picasso wanted to research some jewelry.) I went to the bead stores along 6th Avenue between the NYC Public Library at 5th Ave./42nd all the way to Macy's at 34th to replenish supplies. Before leaving town, we visited the Museum of the American Indian on the tip of Manhattan for more. Of course the paintings always inspire, and this time I focused on beads and Gaugin's still life paintings that nearly always have a person in them. Focus can be good. Click photos to enlarge.

Abandon Sin and Do Good 
oil on shaped canvas
72 3/4” x 32”

•          At home it is easy to drop in on my bead area to make a necklace or earrings in less than an hour or two. This month I made some more necklaces and wondered how to show my supplies in a post. I some times have trouble parting with a necklace which I did for some birthdays, so I should always make two. Joan in Maine gave me some fish earrings I wore swimming. Jean gave me a leaf necklace from Stray Cat; and I look forward to getting back to polymer clay to make my own leaves (see YouTube for how-to's). That is probably a better activity than baking pies and cookies that I lean toward and have no self-control near.
  
  
       Happily, we gathered up 3-year-old clever Harry at the Rhode Island Animal Rescue League! He fills our hearts with happiness.

Tools and findings for simple necklaces and earrings...Click to enlarge.

leaf necklace from StrayCat

Harry and Joe

Drive to Boston MSPCA

        

Summer crafting with paint, pipes and pearls

     For vacations in NYC and Maine, I ambitiously pack art equipment, art books, novels, magazines, sewing and bead projects. But on trips, I seldom paint and color. This time I did! One afternoon, before leaving the East Wind Inn in Maine, I took out a .05 pen, water-soluble colored pencils/crayons and sketched three scenes from the upper deck. Dissatisfied and wanting to surprise, I unpacked my mini-watercolor kit, put tape around where I would paint, and threw the colors down from fully packed brushes, little dilution. I shocked my bold and happy self. I think Joe was surprised I finally used what he totes! Sketching first emboldens.

iPad painting by David Hockney

    I have had fun studying three Apps for drawing and sketching. David Hockney uses Brushes. I use it as well. I recently downloaded Procreate Pro (Procreate is free) and Paper 53 (free, click on Sketches). Perhaps one should stick to one App to learn it well. I like exploring and thought these suggestions helpful. Tutorials for apps are at YouTube. We saw Hockney's big Yosemite Suite at the Pace Gallery last month in NYC. Inspiring!  The Apps are to a painter as a Kindle is to reader?

Click to enlarge photos.

    Before the trip, Joe made Emmitt, the granddog, a wheelchair. He found directions at DIY French Bulldog wheelchair. Unfortunately, Emmitt was too weak to use it.

     The night before the girls left for camp and we left for Maine, I quickly strung some beads using magnetic clasps. Erika ended up with Hannah's as well as her own. I have been trying to teach myself again the materials to use for stringing and how to do. Use it or lose it is true, since I have lapsed in my beading efforts.
 

    Creative Maine excites with galleries, museums and nature to explore. It is almost my birthday. I am hoping to play better :*) with my Fishuku www.goldfishguitars.com. We found this in the Mars Hill Galleries. CEO Timothy Harrington has a clever company with its fish-shaped ukuleles and guitars for children and adults.

Vanity of vanities...something to paint

   Summer is over and school began again. I was sorry to miss our long times in Maine, but you know how summers evaporate. I have started to think about what to paint this Fall. I signed up for what I thought would be a class in Dutch painting with a Vanitas twist. In the past, with a smile, I have included in my paintings a typical symbol for the transient nature of earthly pursuits and goods or a memento mori, a reminder of the certainty of death or the shortness of life. Note the skull in the martini glass at the bottom of my huge 33rd anniversary painting, Reverie on a Quilt (Ode to Joe).

    I wasn't sure how far I could take the Vanitas theme so I started researching paintings with Vanitas additions, usually found on the fronts of paintings. I read the 12 chapters of Ecclesiastes where you find "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," suggesting futility. I found it calming. In research on Google, I read that some in the 15th and 16th centuries had painted Vanitas paintings on the verso of portraits, not just the fronts! These might have skulls, books, candles, pipes, flowers, time pieces. I asked everyone if they knew of such paintings. They and I had never heard of such.

      Paula Pitman Brown wins the prize because she located Barthel Bruyn, the Elder for me and his 1524 Portrait of a Woman, the wife of Gerhard von Westerburg with the verso painting's comment suggesting death is the destiny of all.  Paula found references to the painting after Googling The Vanitas Still Lifes of Harmen Steenwyck: Metaphoric Realism by Kristine Koozin. Koozin wrote that CADUT MORS ULTIMA LINIA RERU is on the verso of the painting and it translates as "everything is destined to perish, death is the final goal of all." She continued, "The composition on the backside or verso as a whole is an excuse for the woman's portrait, as well as a reminder to her that the beauty of her image shown on the front side is only a transient state as indicated on the backside." Please visit the Kroller Muller museum (Otterlow, Holland) link to see this 26-year-old bride and the Vanitas painting as well. Portrait of Gertraude von Leutz – Kröller-Müllermuseum. The Encyclopedia of Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art edited by Helene E. Roberts is where I got my first clue of this interesting painting pursuit.

       I still don't know what I will paint this Fall, but I have written my blog a few days early and entered some painting shows. Carpe Beadem will be in two shows. It is fun, however stressful,  to paint again. Thanks for stopping by! Note to myself:  Check out the tradition of grisaille paintings on the reverse of altarpiece wings and still-life objects in niches in the miniaturist style of Jan van Eyck's 15th C paintings.

Goodbye, Maine

More Journaling: three new quilts

     Summer passed too fast; and I was not very productive. So I decided to make three journal quilts in a weekend. My Journal Quilt Connection had invited the president of our guild to visit; and I hated not to do my part to contribute.

      I always look for a subject that is memorable or I don't want to forget. These journal quilts are supposed to be sketches, hopefully with an edge. On the back of last week's blog's self-portrait (September 3), I added an embroidered hypodermic needle (lots of lidocaine that day) and clock (8 to 5 off and on in surgery); and I will surely add more details to the quilts I am showing this week:

      Coming up is the 25th anniversary of my group at the museum. Almost thirty of us will meet to lunch in Boston this coming week. I found a fabric with paintings (a mix of artists on the front and Seurat on the back). On the reverse, I added a duplicate fabric for a pocket into which I will insert a DVD of all our earlier reunions along with a music fragment of "I'll Be Seeing You." I used a clock again to remind how fast time passes when you are having fun. A glue-gun helped attach beads to the clock to form XXV (25 years). Then I got busy designing a menu.
 

      One day Joe and I found we could leave Boston at noon, get to Portland ME to see a show at the art museum, stop in Ogunquit at the Oarweed for lobster on the water and return to Boston early in the evening. With Joe's teaching a law class (he never stops laboring), I fear I will lose my September or fall trip to Maine and the many art destinations there. I got those pretty fabrics at the City Quilter in NYC and had been wanting to use them.  The easel is made of bias tape.

Click to enlarge all photos

     And speaking of Joe's non-retirement, he has been gathering little $3.50 pots of cactus at Home Depot that grow to form a little house of horrors. He says cactus is the one plant he can't kill. This quilt commemorates two. A very little one started growing a long, long stem and we didn't know what it was or if we should cut it off. Recently it sprouted lots of little white flowers at the far end. I gave Joe the strange 4 long finger variety. It was his birthday and I needed a present. I saw this bizarre cactus in a window of a Chelsea NYC florist. The four long spikes have grown to four extremely long arms that are loping and encircling all the other cactus...as I suggested...a Little Shop of Horrors.

 More quilting and details could be added to each.

Painting in the studio: Landscape memories

     On my 50th birthday, this former English and history teacher went to art school for her 7th life. I painted dawn to dusk daily. Many of my paintings are at my website LindaHicksweb.com. Lately, however, I have been quilting and working in a variety of crafts encouraged by involvement with grandchildren.

     Down in my basement studio, I pulled out some little 4" x 4" canvases and my Winsor Newton Griffin fast-drying alkyd paints. In about 1 1/2 hours I painted three little vignettes from our recent trip to Maine.

      It may look like it, but I just sloshed around the oils with a little turpentine and bits of medium. I then painted skies, trees and grounds while thinking of Maine and some sketches of sites I had seen while on the road. I want to do several more memories until I run out of compositions or moods and then I can quilt them for handwork on road trips.

    Joe wanted me to do a small portrait of grandson. I felt I had just begun; but he told me to stop...it was finished. Hope David doesn't mind looking jaundiced! I am loving being back in the studio while I read The Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucien Freud

Catch-up Cards: more fabric postcards

    After making pumpkin muffins for the grandchildren who dropped off grand dog for boarding, I pulled out my fabrics to catch-up on some surprise correspondence. I wanted to send Charlie Brown raking leaves to the relatives to remind them they left here too soon. The leaves are finally turning colors and dropping. (We sometimes feel like Charlie in that all the leaves on the block blow to our house.)

Fronts, backs and batting or felt are cut to 4 1/2" x 6 1/2."

      While I had the stash out, I wanted to thank our hostess for our Maine send-off dinner. A second lobster fabric card would go to old Maine friends who hosted us there 40 years ago whom I thought we might have bumped into at the Owl's Head Museum auto show.

Finished postcards are 4" x 6." (Click to enlarge)

     After I have surprised everyone I know with a single fabric postcard, I am going to have to learn some new tricks or come up with more amazing cards! I was humbled in this task when I realized you could Google any subject and add "blog" as in "fabric postcard blog" or "quilted postcard blog"  to turn up astonishing viewings and tutorials. I also learned that there are sites to have a blog critiqued.

    Now to address, write (with gel pen) and take to the PO to be hand-cancelled.
  

Vacation Vagaries

   Back in the late 60's or 70's when people were leaving the cities or rat race as it was sometimes called and moving to the country, we left the country to move to the cities. This past week when Joe and I and Farley were trying to go to the city for a vacation, packing twice for the Big Apple, for various reasons we felt we had to change our minds to return to nature. To be so different, both Joe and I are vascillators. We hate to plan ahead and to be bound. We like caprice, whimsy, turning on a dime. We oscillate, fluctuate and shilly-shally; and that is what this journal quilt is about and it shows a lack of planning but that is part of the story. Also, I am determined to post one once a week and I am a day late, hence an even greater than usual lack of perfection. We did a little museuming at the MFA to purchase catalogs for the NYC show we would miss, but got to the ocean, the river and walked the ponds. I hope the diary sketch expresses this.