To start with:

At TextileArtist.org, there's an interview with Yumiko Reynolds about her figurative free-machine embroidery "thread on paper". Really beautiful stuff, and a brief synopsis of her evolution as an artist in paper. HERE


Elizabeth Barton has a post on the importance of focal point in our work, HERE 

Over at Left Bank Art Blog, Carl Belz has a look at Dozier Bell's drawings on mylar - in terms of the pictures, they mylar creates a wonderful photographic effect (it's hard to believe that they're not photographs); the writing itself is also wonderful as an example

 "Bell’s diminutive worlds are exceptional in not actively competing or being social at all. Anchored in nature and observing nature’s rhythms, acknowledging nature as source and solace without reliance on media intervention, her worlds are secure with their autonomy

You can find that review HERE

Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint writes an update on a genre that she didn't invent, but did name "Casualism" and further explains why it's a valid form of art. A sample:

The casualist impulse has yielded compositionally awkward work that may seem humble and self-deprecating, and may employ ‘hobbyist’ pre-fab materials like pre-stretched canvases and canvas board. ..... The most compelling casualist work has an anti-heroic, offhand feel and ostensibly shows little attention to craft or detail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, galleries and collectors have been slow to embrace this type of work because it seems too easy...But casualist tendencies suffuse the established art world... Matisse’s casualist leanings were transparent. Picasso’s were more muted, ..."

I quite recommend this article (and the one that preceded it that she links to in her article) - it's very interesting, and educational (!) to read about the birth of a new genre in art.

You can find that essay HERE 

And because you've been saying I've been including  too many links - that's it, today!

Oh, except for this link to me! lol

It's my new online "book". You can find that HERE

Have a great weekend!

Today's WIP is the wippiest of wips that ever wipped. :)



But first, here's "Erosion" all framed up. (I'm hoping that bottom right edge will "fall" otherwise, I'll have to take it back to the framer!)

Along the same lines, I am considering:

And next up, we've got  a couple of birds. I usually sketch directly on the fabric, after first giving it a go on my sketch patch; but this time I decided to try a different method.

I save all the backing paper from my fusible papers, using them to protect my iron  when I'm fusing. But I decided I might try using them as transfer papers as their semi-slick sides sort of lend themselves to such a process. (Or so my thinking went).



So I sketched them on the papers using a graphite woodless pencil, and then flipped them over, and used my eraser as a rubbing implement, which I rubbed all over the back of the paper. And as you can see, it worked very well!

Hope you had a great weekend!

It's Friday, so let's get to the links!

There's an interview with Heather Dubreuil at Textile Artist HERE. She is new to me, but I really love her work and the sort of watercolour effect she has managed to achieve: something I tried to do for years and sadly was never able to. lol  She's managed it beautifully. :)

Over at the Wooster Collective, they point us in the direction of Jacob Hasimoto's latest installation at the Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles, called "Yellow Giant and Gas Studies". I would LOVE to see this show live and walk through it. It must be amazing! Check that out HERE

At TextileArtist once more, there's an interview with Jacqueline Treloar, about her "Theatrical" textile art.  Her work is really quite amazing - she has a lot of breadth in her work, from narrative work, wearables, abstract wall hangings to ???? lol Mixed media 3D art, maybe? Whatever it is - it's wonderful! Check out the interview and the amazing photographs HERE

There's a new video series on you tube purporting to be the adventures of an "art dealer" named Baroness Von Kohn as she tries to sell work to "collectors". It's like America's Top Model meets art collecting, and Baroness Von Kohn is deliciously cray-cray.

I don't know if I could watch the whole series (she has two episodes out so far) - indeed, I haven't been able to make it through an entire episode (lol). But it's wacky fun. Tell me what you think! - you can find that HERE



With the release of his book "Your Everyday Art World", Lane Releya has been making the rounds. In this interview at The Brooklyn Rail, he discusses "the historical and future implications of DIY, contemporary post-studio practices and the M.F.A. as the 'rising art world institution". It's very interesting stuff and a meaty interview. You can check that out HERE

Over at Colossal, Heather Hanson combines dance and charcoal to make beautiful abstract large pieces (no, dance isn't her subject matter, she dances to create the art!).  You can find that HERE

Then we have Altoon Sultan again, this time, discussing "The Primacy of Things" - the removal of the artist from their own work. Her posts are always a wealth of learning for me - her writing is both instructive and...I don't know what word to use besides "deep" and in there is a depth to it... anyway - I often have to read her posts several times to understand what she's saying, but I love them. :)  Find this one HERE

And a new take on that ever-interesting argument, art vs. craft - this time Kathleen Loomis' take on it over at Ragged Cloth Cafe.  You can find that HERE

If you're ready for it, after the Sultan article, there's another scholarly article HERE by Mira Shor - reflecting on Paul Klee's work. Again, instructive, and a bit difficult if, like me, you're new to art-speak; but I think well worth it. The preface is about the destruction of the quite new (!) American Folk Art Museum, which I mourned (but not as deeply as she does!) to make room for an addition to MoMA - but she gets to Klee (in depth!) soon enough. I only knew him as a Bauhaus artist, so, once again, I learned a lot about he and his work in this article. You can find that HERE

When you need a break from all that reading, you can  pop over to Illustration Friday and look at the pretty pictures - in this case, the rather sweet work of mixed media artist, Johan Thornqvist's altered photographs, HERE

Then there's Aakash Nihalin's tape art for more pretty pictures: HERE

And a wonderful little video called "The Golden Age of Insect Aviation" over at Colossal, HERE. 

There. Does your brain feel better now? Mine does! So, let's have a look at Jonathan Kamholt's review of Rob Anderson's show at Miami University (winner of the William and Dorothy Yeck Young Painters Award) HERE - the brushstrokes in that gigantic baby are amazing.



Rob Anderson’s show coincides with his winning the Miami University Young Painters Competition for the $10,000 William and Dorothy Yeck Award for 2013. http://aeqai.com/main/2014/01/glass-houses-rob-andersons-a-place-in-time-at-the-hiestand-gallery-miami-university/

Then, over at Financial Times, Jackie Wullshlager has a review of Lucy Jones's show "Looking Out Looking In" - and a slideshow depicting Ms. Jones' wonderful use of colour. You can find that HERE

This Isn't Happiness has photos of  Martin Vlach's surreal photographs, HERE

and as his work that reminded me a bit of the work of Parke-Harrison (a favourite photography duo) I thought I'd share some of their work too - you can find that HERE. 

The link is to a section of their work on The Architect's Brother series, which is when I was introduced to their work (it was 1996 I think, when I went to a talk given by Robert at University of Toronto), and still my personal favourite, but check out the whole site while you're there.  

As an aside - Parke-Harrison's work not only introduced me to the idea of photography as an "art" form (up until then, I thought photography was something anyone could do if they just learned how, and never thought of it as "art"); and in fact, taught me to appreciate art as a whole. 

I had always appreciated art as a sort of cultural artifact, and understood and appreciated it from a social/cultural perspective; but never really valued it in and of itself, except as an abstract concept - "We should be exposed to art the same way we should have access to good music, and education, and healthy, natural food" - in other words, as part of the same social contract that middle class people make in exchange for being good citizens, if you know what I mean. 

But Parke-Harrision opened my heart, AND my brain, made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and I could quite literally feel my brain expanding as I looked at these MASSIVE photographs (the ones I saw were large enough that you could step into them and be quite dwarfed by subjects); it was almost literally an immersive experience. 

BLAH BLAH BLAH. lol

And if you can take anymore, check out Robert Genn's stories of YELLOW and BLUE.  Some interesting histories there, written in his inimitable accessible style.


Phew!

I hope you have a super weekend!  See you on Monday. :)

You may remember that back in November, I decided to begin a year-long stitching project, called "Ephemera", that would do nothing more than hold whatever stitches I felt like making that week, along with a sentence or phrase overheard in that week.


I can`t believe that it's already been a full quarter, but so it has!

As I "warned" you on Wednesday, I've got lots and lots of really great links this week (I broke my baby toe and metatarsal last Thursday so I had a couple of days in bed) - so I'm just gonna jump right in with them!

Li Hongbo’s stunning, stretchable, paper sculptures, inspired by both traditional folk art and his time as a student learning to sculpt, challenge our perceptions. With a technique influenced by his fascination with traditional Chinese decorations known as paper gourds—made from glued layers of paper—Li Hongbo applies a honeycomb-like structure to form remarkably flexible sculptures.

The Intersections project takes the seminal experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity such as a Mosque and translates the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan. The wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference. I have given substance to this mutualism with the installation project exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic. This installation project relies on the purity and inner symmetry of geometric design, the interpretation of the cast shadows and the viewer’s presence with in a public space.

I was a lazy girl the past couple of days and did absolutely nothing! lol

So I thought I'd catch you up on the lunchtime projects - above is the week before last's offering (Week 8) which has a spelling mistake so I'll either have to take out the stitching, or leave it as is - it's supposed to ephemera after all, and exhibit the flotsam and jetsam of life, so I'm kind of leaning towards leaving the spelling mistake.



And here is Week 9 - unfinished, which is good for a WIP Wednesday, except *ahem*, I'm meant to be working on Week 10 this week. So I guess I'd better hop to it!  (That, among other things, lol, because I've been chatting and having fun with my work chum instead of working too!)

I'll see on Friday with the links - I'm really looking forward to sharing them with you this week - some really interesting stuff! Are you enjoying my Friday links posts?

See you then!

There's a lot to cover today, so let's just jump right in!

Textile Artist has done a review of "The Fine Art of Crochet" HERE



Illustration Friday has done a tutorial on how to use the colour wheel HERE and also offers nine ways to run a smart creative business HERE

Altoon Sultan blogs about her transition from landscapes to smaller, abstract works HERE
(If you click on no other link, I HIGHLY recommend you click on this one.  Really interesting stuff about the "burden of content".)

Contemporary Art Daily has done an review of the work of Michaela Meise HERE "If there is a common ground to the exhibited objects – a book, furniture, ceramics – it would be the notion of the grotesque" (The "grotesque" as a literary device was something I was very interested in when I was at uni, so its use in art is also interesting to me.)

And in a meta moment, I'm linking to Art Propelled's link post of some her favourite textile artists HERE
Textile Artist has done an interview with Raija Jokinen, a really interesting figurative textile artist HERE

Over at Thought Form, they've done a well-written review of  Marianne Gagnier's paintings HERE

Arts in Bushwick does a review of an outsider artists group show called "Outside In" (on display at Life on Mars Gallery in Brooklyn through March 1st). You can read about that HERE (wish I could go and see it!)

And finally, Clive Hicks-Jensen has a guest artist post by Peter Slight, who says:

In this recent post Clive talked about the importance of negative space and placement within an image. In the comments I mentioned the illustrator George Him who I feel displays a mastery of these skills. 

and then goes on to further discuss and illustrate that HERE. Good use of negative space is something we could all learn from!

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And totally off-topic, but since you all know how much I love fairies, I couldn't resist adding this :  Icelanders are protesting the building of a road because it will disturb the elves.

No seriously! A study in 1998 showed that 54.4% of people in Iceland believe in Fairies, and another paper in 2000 showed the same belief in elves.  I should move to Iceland! Yes/no? ;)

Have a great weekend!

A little hand stitching...



 a little paint...
It's coming along. :)