What goes around comes around....

A year ago, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer asked me to write a guest post for her blog on how I combine quilting and art journaling (you can read it here).  I wrote that moving from quilting to mixed media felt like the next logical step in my self-directed art education.  What I didn't realize then was that passions ebb and flow in cycles, and those cycles inform and move the subsequent ones.

I mentioned in my last blog post that I've been moving back to an obsession with fabric and quilting, with less emphasis on the mixed media and photography than I've had in recent months.  But this time around, I sense a difference:  now I'm fascinated with composition and color, not just color alone.  This quilt-in-progress gives you an idea of what I mean:

Free-form piecing inspired by the work of Nancy Crow

I don't think I could have made a quilt like this before.  I wasn't able to see beyond the block, or grid, orientation that most quilts have -- but since I've taken classes in collage and have begun to work in mixed media, this is beginning to change.

One thing that I think is unique to patchwork, as compared with art journaling -- the fact that you can easily change your style just by changing fabrics and construction techniques!  These 6" blocks are also current projects of mine.  While I am artistically inspired by free-form, intuitive piecing, I'm equally fascinated by precision work, especially if it involves applique or hand-piecing.   

By staying open to whatever inspires me in the moment, I avoid boxing myself in to any one identity.  I can be a free spirit!  And that includes art journaling, too.  Lately I have also been feeling like drawing faces, so why not?

All work and no play......

I have decided to stop fighting it.

I have too many passions, and there just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything.  So rather than feeling frustrated because I can't spend every waking moment taking photographs.. or quilting... or making mixed media art.... I've decided to follow what Julie Fei-Fan Balzer calls the "shiny ball" -- that is, whatever intrigues me in the moment, without the burden of expectations.  My creative interests tend to move in cycles, and what I find fascinating is that when I come back to something after being away from it for awhile, the other creative things I've been doing in the meantime add a dimension that was missing before.  You really lose nothing by being peripatetic!

The point of all this is that the great wheel is moving now, back in the direction of my more.... well, nerdy interests.  My brain is whirling as I wrestle with a structure for a genealogical research database I am trying to create -- one that doesn't easily fit into existing commercial database models.  The frustration comes because I have just enough knowledge to know what I want and how to get it, but not quite enough to design it easily.

So, for a study break (and as my submission to Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday), I am offering more images from our trip to Thailand over Christmas.  These shots were taken at a rice mill near the town of Wiang Papao in the northern part of the country, and were textured with Kim's freebie texture, Happy Heart.

"Happy Heart" (soft light @49%, multiply @82%)

"Happy Heart" (soft light @100%, color burn @15%)

"Happy Heart" (soft light @70%, color burn @19%)

Try as I would, this image of drying rice just didn't look good with added textures!

 

The creative journey....part I

Lotus flower, Thailand
(processed with a layer of Kim Klassen's "Sweet Treat" and "Warm Grunge")

I always tell my children that it is not what happens to you in life that matters, but rather how you react to what happens to you that is important.  "Stuff" happens to people all the time and there is nothing magical about you that keeps the "bad" from happening sometimes.  The question is, will you allow it to cloud your life and your attitudes, or will you use the situation to change something in yourself.

My creative journey is so wrapped up in the circumstances of my life that it is hard to unravel the separate threads. I had a wonderful childhood and young adulthood.... I was happy, and things came easily to me:  academics, friendships, career, marriage and three wonderful children.  I expected that life would just continue along this positive trajectory.  And really, in a way, it has.... just not the way I thought it would.  For the most part, my life is picture perfect except for one rather significant thing: my oldest child, now a 22 year-old young man, has to deal with issues that significantly impact his ability to live an independent life.  The curve ball our family has been dealt in this life is not something that we recognized immediately or that came on suddenly -- rather, its severity has been revealed so gradually that, painful as it is, it has never come as a shock, but has settled down on us like a dull ache.  

One of my favorite journal pages...

The details of his story are my son's to share or not, but let's just say that the consequences of his illness have been the impetus for my own creative journey.  I have been "artsy" all my life, but the thought never even crossed my mind that I could be an artist.... after all, I didn't go to art school!  I knew that to ignore my son's illness -- or to wallow in despair about it -- were both useless exercises.  I had to turn to something to keep me busy and focused. I discovered quiltmaking when I was 40, and immediately fell in love with the way I could play with color without getting messy.  Not only that, but I could sew while still paying attention to my kids. 

This is the first quilt I made (for my son), back in 2000.  It was hand-pieced... I remember every stitch!

I soon realized that the quiet time spent making quilts was my spiritual solace, a time when I could reflect on my life and its lessons and to find beauty in fragments.  My needle and thread became the crucible in which despair became beauty, tempered by patience.  Quilting was a perfect expression of my need for endurance.  You can't achieve a finished quilt without putting in a lot of time!  As I moved on in the last few years to include mixed media art and photography, the sense of time as a vital element in my work became more and more evident.  I love using textures in photographs precisely because they introduce a fourth dimension -- time -- to an image, suggesting that it has withstood the ravages of time to exist today.  I am in this game with my son for the long haul, and that sense of time as a distiller of something exquisite is very important to me.

I am looking forward to 2012, and participating in the creative communities online.  By nurturing our creativity every day, we will envision a world that is better than the one we live in today -- and everyone knows that once we visualize something, it is on its way.