Everything is Canceled & Harry Potter Quilt

Clay Classes & Events Canceled

Spring is usually a busy time for art in Yakima and at YVC. At Yakima Valley College, we usually hold our annual pre-mother's day clay sale as well as the Student Exhibition at Larson Gallery in May. May is also the month for Larson Gallery's Tour of Artists' Homes and Chalet Place hosts June Art Fest in early June. This year I am still taking part in a Mount St. Helens exhibition at Oak Hollow Gallery, though people can't really go see it.

My daughter's spontaneous reaction to the pandemic.

This year, because of the pandemic and the stay at home order, my winter quarter final critiques for my clay classes were moved online, my spring 2020 clay classes were canceled shortly before the quarter began, and within the last couple of weeks, our last hopes for having a late spring clay sale have been dashed by the extension of the stay at home order. The student art exhibition at Larson Gallery hasn't happened and in late March, YVC made the decision to move nearly all classes online for summer and fall. 

The Deathly Hallows quilt square

While disappointing, all of the decisions to cancel classes and events are completely reasonable given the circumstances of the pandemic. Some of our programs have permission from the state to hold face -to-face class meetings this quarter, but students and faculty need to maintain strict social distancing protocols, wear PPE, and follow other safety precautions. Faculty are required to develop written plans, train the students on safety protocols, make sure everyone is following the new restrictions, check students for symptoms, and re-do the training and checks every day. 

My daughter's fox quilt from last year

I suspect that, even if the state allowed us to teach clay classes with social distancing protocols, it would have been difficult to meet those safety expectations. Yakima Valley College decided relatively early to move most classes online for fall. Based on what scientists seem to be saying about how the coronavirus spreads, it sounds like this decision was a wise one. I'm also glad to know this before students start signing up for fall classes later this month.

Our plans for the Trelawney's teacup

The Lucky Ones

As one of the lucky ones, who has a job that can move entirely online and whose family and friends have (probably) not contracted the virus, I have been thinking about the kinds of things that have made this time easier for me and my family. Unlike many of my colleagues, I have taught online for several years, and I've taught all of this quarter's classes online recently, so I am not in the position of having to learn to teach online or to move my classes online in a short time. I also spent significant time in August and September updating and adjusting all the dates for my online Art History series for the year, as I was anticipating that my union position and contract bargaining would make spring especially challenging and wanted to do as much as I could before spring.

Rita Skeeter as a beetle (my favorite one so far).

I am optimistic that one of the side effects of this time spent online is that my colleagues and maybe the YVC community in general, will have a better understanding of what teaching online entails. So few faculty taught online before the pandemic forced us all to go there that I think people simply didn't understand how much work online classes require. I am optimistic that this time will help put our collective energy behind supporting students and faculty in these classes.

Fluffy, the three-headed dog

My family is also lucky that our daughter is old enough that she can work on her own and that her grandparents are able to FaceTime with her regularly. We also benefit from having functional technology in the house and from living in a place where the internet is reliable. Her schoolwork has been pretty doable and, though she gets frustrated when I have hours of meetings and time on the computer for work, she is also able to find things to do that don't interrupt those meetings.

our original plan for the quilt, the size of our earliest pieces have changed significantly

Harry Potter Quilt

My daughter and I have been working on a pretty big sewing project for a little over a year and this time has probably allowed us to focus a bit more time and energy on it than we would have without the stay at home order. My daughter started doing 4H sewing few years ago. For her first project she made a "Fancy Forest" quilt, using a pattern from Elizabeth Hartman. Last year she made a large quilt using just the fox from this pattern. This year we are designing our own quilt with several pieces derived from the Fancy Forest designs. This year's quilt is Harry Potter themed.

"Fancy Forest" quilt pattern by Elizabeth Hartman

We drew up our designs for the quilt last spring based roughly on the spacing of the full Elizabeth Hartman quilt. Some of the shapes, like the top of Luna's lion hat and Fluffy, the three-headed dog, are based on Hartman's designs. We started our plans last spring and, feeling excited about the prospect of the entire project, we bought enough fabric to complete the entire quilt (and maybe a bit more besides).

Our first six pieces, The glasses are based on the technique used for the owl's eyes and the broomsticks and top of the lion are based on the hedgehog design.

At the time I remember thinking that maybe we were overdoing it, buying so much fabric at once. Our 4H group meets in Joann's Fabrics, and we could buy the fabric anytime. The project was going to take a long time and there wasn't any reason to get ahead of ourselves. We only attend 4H once a week and there were times this year when we missed several meetings in a row due to travel, after school commitments, and other conflicts.

some of our Harry Potter fabric stash purchased this past summer

Of course, now that we're stuck at home, haven't been to Joann's in nearly two months, and are able to spend closer to two or three nights a week on the project, I'm really glad we bought all that fabric early on. Since mid March we've finished 5-7 pieces of the quilt and today we cut all the fabric pieces for three more. We completed about 10 pieces in the previous 9 months. So our speed has greatly increased.

The point at which we got too confused to continue working on the frogs

The pandemic isn't entirely the cause of the increase speed. We also have made significant improvements to our approach. When we started we didn't really use a pattern. We did a lot of guessing about angles and sides. This worked fairly well for the simple shapes, like the broomsticks and Luna's lion hat that consisted mainly of parallel shapes, but once we got into some angles, things got difficult. 

more confusion while we first tried to use the frog pattern

We got really turned around when we got to the chocolate frog and Trevor the toad. We started out trying to just guess at the angles. Finally after several people, including the 4H sewing leader and my mom, told us to make a full sized pattern, we did and we were able to complete the slightly wonky frogs.

Trevor the toad and a chocolate frog

After the frogs, we decided to start with a pattern. We used a full-scale paper pattern for Riddle's Diary, Dobby's sock, the Deathly Hallows, Scabbers, and Rita Skeeter (in her animagus beetle form).

Riddle's Diary with a basilisk fang and Dobby's/Harry's sock

Once we had completed about 15-17 (depending on how you count) of the pieces, we laid them all out to feel a sense of accomplishment. This is less than a quarter of what we plan to make for the entire quilt, but it feels good to look at them all laid out in a semblance of the final quilt.

Our quilt progress, collected

Halloween Art Party

I know, Halloween is a couple days gone by now, but it's been a busy week and I had to advertise the Central Washington Artists' Exhibition. Last weekend we had some friends over for a halloween art party. Last year we had a skull decorating party, which was part Halloween, part Dia de los Muertos, and part Rachel's on sabbatical and has been slip casting with her skull mold. 

Paper Jack'o lantern skeleton door greeter.

This year's party included collaborative mural drawing, with stickers for those who didn't want to draw. In preparation for the party, the kids drew a house, road and forest on a large sheet of paper. At the party kids could "help us haunt our house" by drawing ghosts and witches and spiders on the mural. They could also add ghost and pumpkin stickers to the mural. The kids seemed to enjoy it, though by the end of the day the mural paper was blowing off the wall. As I reminded the kids and parents, art (for kids) is about process, not product. The mural did not survive the weekend.

For some reason they kept adding pools of blood, on the road, on the house, etc.

Our monster slime supplies (and a candy spider).

We also had the kids make monster slime based on this recipe I found on Pinterest. It's like flubber or gak or other slimy goo that kids make. I think I made it in girl scouts years and years ago. Clear glue was really hard to find, so we tried blue Elmer's gel and that seemed to work ok. We let the kids add food coloring, so several batches were a horrible red color.

 

Kids mixing slime, clear slime with pumpkin and "boo" confetti

The kids mixed the slim and added Halloween confetti. They had fun and kept the mess pretty contained. Later, while the kids were playing and drawing, the adults enjoyed playing with the slime they'd left behind. The slime gradually flattens out if you leave it on the table, but then it can hold its shape when you pick it up, fold it or mold it.

"bloody": bat slime

Some of the kids also made spiders or cut out spiderwebs or sets of faces, skulls or cats in a circular pattern. There were also some skull drawings to color (because coloring calms adults, too).

Sucker spider and pipe cleaner spider

Glass & Nail Polish

At the end of January I ran a clay lesson with a group of second graders from Apple Valley Elementary. I did this lesson last year, too. I didn't take pictures while I was running the lesson, but the woman running the event said she'd send some and I'll post them once I get them.

the original glass necklace

At the end of the event one of the volunteers asked me about my necklace and then told me how it was made. Like most of my jewelry, the necklace was a gift from my mom. I never thought much about how it was made, I just assumed it was cast glass.

the pendant, front and back

According to the woman, it is just a piece of clear glass with nail polish painted on the back. And, looking more closely at the piece, I can see that she's probably correct.

some of our pendants

Naturally this became the family art project for the weekend. We bought some clear glass "stones" (the kind used for filling vases at weddings) and collected the various nail polishes we had in the house. We set up the project on an old cutting board in the room with the bad carpet and started painting. My daughter and I each painted about five glass pieces before we ran out of energy and color options. (Next time we might need more than just glitter and pink polish.)

cardboard attached to the back shows through the glass front (and some of the polish)

We quickly realized that we could replicate a paperweight's decoration on a small scale by attaching a sticker or a picture facing the glass. The stickers worked particularly well and were pretty simple to attach with a bit of clear polish on the face and more polish over the sticky back.

my daughter's necklace and a sticker pendant

Then we used some memory wire and beads we already had to make a round necklace without a clasp. My daughter's bead choices on the necklace were more adventurous than mine.

my necklace and a painted pendant

I tried to copy the twisting metal bail that attaches the original glass piece to the necklace but I didn't have an appropriate gauge of metal and I kept snapping off the end. I decided to create a looser loop to attach to most of the glass pieces. The loosely looped bail also slides onto the necklace easily.

another painted pendant

I'm not sure I'm going to go into production with these, but it was a fun, easy project for a winter afternoon. And fun and easy is about all I have time for this winter.

three painted pendants and two with attachments: the top one had cardboard behind nail polish, the sunburst is a sticker with pink polish behind 

Books: Being True to Oneself as an Artist

I was going to write about my plans for sabbatical this week, but then I was bouncing around the internet and happened to discover this lovely cartoon homage (the artist's website is Zen Pencils but I found the cartoon on Slate) based on a Bill Watterson graduation speech at Kenyon College (I totally visited Kenyon in high school because Bill Watterson went there--but then we crashed the car and I ended up at a small college in Iowa instead of Ohio.)

Finding the Zen Pencils cartoon is serendipitous; I've actually been thinking about Bill Watterson lately. Earlier this summer I read two books that, in my mind, at least, are natural partners with Watterson's book, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Art Speigelman's MetaMaus both reminded me of Watterson's book.

All three books offer fascinating views of artists doing their thing, their way, against the protests, concerns or confusion of critics and friends. And all three artists succeeded in doing their thing brilliantly because they ignored the outside voices and followed the direction of their own inner artist's voice.

I am only artificially familiar with Steve Martin's stand-up comedy, since my experience of his work has always been via Saturday Night Live reruns and movies. I'm also less familiar with the performing arts medium of comedy than I am with the visual arts medium of comics.  I chose to download Born Standing Up more or less at random. However, I found much more direct connection to the world of a working artist in this book than in Martin's An Object of Beauty, which is actually a novel set in and about the art world.

I was expecting a silly, funny book of jokes, I guess, but Born Standing Up surprised me by focusing seriously (and not-so-seriously) on the development of the author's own artistic voice as a comedian. In the autobiographical book, which begins before Martin commences his professional comedy work and continues until he steps away from stand-up, Martin illustrates the process of conceiving of, developing and sustaining an artist vision. He shows and discusses the fear, hard work, confusion, mistakes, successes and frustrations that are part of the process. I was continually making connections between my own experience as an artist and that of the author, though our media and content choices are vastly divergent. It's a funny book and I recommend it in general, but I highly recommend it for my artist friends and students who might see a connection to their own lives and expression.

I make the connection between Born Standing Up and the Zen Pencils / Watterson quote cartoon because I see both as addressing the fundamental question of how and why we might choose to live a life of art, or expression, or whatever, rather than follow the easier route of a more proscribed life and work that is acceptable and expected beforehand.

MetaMaus is subtitled A Look Inside A Modern Classic, Maus, so obviously one would expect some familiarity with the original. I'm not sure how old I was when I first read Maus, but I was old enough to have a general familiarity with the holocaust. Either because of my age or the age of the book when I read it (the first volume was published in 1986, the second in 1991) I wasn't particularly tuned in to the fact that a comic book featuring mice might have been a controversial medium in which to tell "A Survivor's Story." I do, however, remember being amazed at how the story was told. I remember being impressed with both the use of the comic's text and imagery as a medium, but also with the multi-layered storytelling.

Reading MetaMaus all these years later I was interested to learn how controversial some of his choices were. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman explains his visual and conceptual choices he made in building Maus clearly as artistic decisions that were central to the format, flow and content of the work. I'm not sure if these choices were entirely conscious at the time, but its clear that the Speigelman of MetaMaus has taken time to consider and reflect on his art and his intent.

MetaMaus, like Born Standing Up, is a book about being an artist, making hard choices, sticking to your idea even when its hard, even when years have gone by, even when the world has changed and even when other people don't "get it." Spiegelman's is a more subdued (though still beautiful and visually intriguing) book than Martin's, but the message for an artist reader is the same, the struggle and the necessity of doing things differently than the expectation is what makes art worthwhile.

All the time I was reading these two books, I kept thinking about the first book I remember reading that really talked to me about what it meant to be a professional artist. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book is full of reprints of wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, but what I really enjoyed reading and rereading was the commentary by the author. Watterson, in the book, discusses his visual choices, inspiration and intent in creating the comic strips. He also discusses some of the changing specifications of cartoons in newspapers and syndication (back before we had any conceptions of cartoons on the internet) and goes into his decision to cease writing the Calvin and Hobbes weekly comic strip.

I must have read this book (and reread it) when I was 15 or 16, roughly the same time I was realizing that I could conceivably "do art" for a living. I remember the discovery that I could be an artist, roughly around sophomore year, as revelatory--since I was surrounded by teachers and had started to assume that I had to be a teacher (yeah, yeah, I know I still ended up as a teacher, but I split time as an artist, too). Watterson's commentary helped me get an early insider's view of what it might mean to be an artist and what it might mean to stick to one's own vision when being pushed, very hard, to change or compromise the way in which that art was made.

I don't mean to get too sentimental here, but The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book is a beautiful book and it was meaningful to me. The others are simply well done, interesting books about being true to one's self and expressing something new and different. I recommend all you artists (and everyone else) go read one or more of these books. Also, if you haven't read Maus yet, get on that.

Mulberry Paper layers

A few weeks ago I spent some time working on mulberry paper layers on some older fired work. I have quite a few pieces I want to work on, but the process isn't very exciting, so I've been slow about getting it done.

lots of orange mulberry paper

I used the mulberry paper on a few functional boxes and some sculpture. In most cases I used the mulberry paper because I thought the large plain sections of the form were too boring and I wanted a contrast of textures, soft and hard, shiny and matte. In other cases, the underglaze was worn or damaged and I wanted to protect and recover the worn areas.

lidded box with movable yellow section

One lidded box that I created a year or two ago has a section contained in the lid that is movable. Unfortunately, the movement has worn the underglaze color and the blue color has worn off onto the yellow. I can't glaze this section without risking fusing the movable piece to the lid, so I decided to try covering both surfaces with mulberry paper.

opened box with yellow movable section

I am not finished with all the work I want to cover, but I wanted desperately to get into the studio, so I took a break from working on these pieces. 

partially applied decorative paper

I also finally tried something I had started thinking about last year. I put flocking on the end of a small green mulberry paper covered piece. The flocking went on just fine, though I accidentally bumped it after it was applied, leaving a dent in the surface. The flocking seems thin; I painted on Mod Podge and then just dusted the flocking over the top. I like the contrasting texture and may experiment with the method some more in the future. I think this material is probably best for small somewhat protected sections of forms that may not be bumped or scraped during shipping or transport to and from shows.

the texture of the blue glaze is visible through the think black flocking

Baby Gifts

Before I started working on stuff in the studio, I spent some time working on a gift for my brother and sister-in-law who are expecting a baby. As happens with most of my projects, I conceived of the idea and allowed it to become a significantly bigger project than I originally anticipated. I finally had to give myself a self-imposed deadline just to finish working on the project or I would draw it out indefinitely.

The main idea for the project was to make my sister-in-law a book as an alternative to the terrible pregnancy and early childhood advice books that I read when I was pregnant and after my daughter was born. Mostly my book is a silly alternative, warning her not to pay any attention to the stupid advice that shows up in those books.

The first page is a "what to do when you're reading 'What to Expect When You're Expecting'" kit. It includes scissor and a black marker to redact the stupid advice and a page to tape across her computer to remind her that the internet advice is also stupid and not worth seeking.

 I didn't want the book to be all negative, so I included some jokes and some real advice. I also included a game that hopefully will make her feel better. The directions are to mark an X everytime someone gives you stupid advice. I started the middle box with my own X, earned just because I'm giving advice myself.

My daughter also helped decorate the book. I discovered that after I drew the illustrations, they were visible from the reverse side of the paper and I hadn't really planned anything for this space, so we both decorated pages with simple baby illustrations and whatever my daughter felt like making.

Some of my advice was real and hard-earned (Take time off from work; don't try to teach an online class right after the baby is born). Some advice may be obvious to everyone but still I didn't realize the importance until too late (Carry food with you at all times. Even if they say there will be food. The dog might get it during the night and then there won't be anything for breakfast except frozen lasagna and a jar of olives and then you'll wish you packed a granola bar). And some advice is just stuff I stumbled upon at the last minute (baking cookies as you go into labor means you will have fresh baked cookies after you come home with the baby). 

Mostly I wanted to tell the prospective parents that we are thinking of them and wishing them luck and also that I don't mind if they call in the middle of the night because they need help. They live on the other side of the country, so, as much as I would like to, I can't offer to babysit anytime they wish.

I also finally broke down and started looking at Pinterest the other week, so in breaks while the glue was drying on the book, I decided to make the baby some S'mores themed onesies. I stole the idea for the campfire one from a felt version online, but the onesies came in a pack of two, so I created the graham cracker version to match.