Evidence of Ghosts

October 31, 2007

After bringing the scaffolding home from the studio, rigging an old sushi restaurant sign on top, and lighting it for two nights, the neighborhood was primed for the KaBOOki HauNted SuSHi BaR.

We got around 600+ kids and lots of curious adults. It was great fun to have them explain their costumes before they ordered from the sushi bar, and actually turned into a long line for most the evening. Lots of ninja, goth cheerleaders, spider men and women, and a few chickens and dinosaurs.

Not many people have a Hoshizaki sushi cooler to serve candy. For the kids who actually WANTED sushi, I had to explain the chef called in sick, and we only had candy and cookies.

After most of the trick-or-treaters left, a ghost visited our house. I got this photo as evidence, but later found out the ghost was actually a remote-control invention built on a wheelchair base. I guess craziness attracts craziness. But what do you expect from a girl in a retro kimono, ghoul face, and swiss cheese watch?

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KaBOOki: The HAunTed SusHI BaR

October 31, 2007

We’re getting the snakes out for Halloween this year. I made these a few years ago — not sure what inspired me to create 30 foot long snakes but I guess living with a sculptor makes me want to work BIG. They are stuffed with foam packing peanuts, so they sound a little crunchy.

This year’s Halloween theme is KaBOOki: the HAunTed SusHI BaR. On the menu: squirrmy wormmy sushi rolls, miserable miso soup, Frankenstein tofu, ghastly green tea, and whatever else I can cook up, hehe.

Just kidding, we have lots of candy for the kids. LOTS of candy — we’ll probably get 500+ kids if the weather is nice. More pix later!

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Last Minute Halloween Costumes

October 30, 2007

A couple of years ago, we were headed to New Orleans for a conference, and I wanted an easy-to-pack costume for Halloween night. I took a wig, costume jewelry and price tags, and that evening put the price tags on the jewelry and all my clothes. I thought I was a shop-lifter, but everyone else thought I was Winona Ryder because that was the year she was arrested for shop-lifting.

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Quilt National (section A) heads to Houston

October 27, 2007

Yesterday was the last day to see Quilt National 2007 in full at The Foundry Art Centre. Today the exhibition will be split into three parts and sent to different venues. The section with my quilt “It’s Only a Leaf” will be at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, October 29 - November 4.

This photo is at the opening of The Foundry opening last September. I look a little frazzled because I was running between events for my brother’s wedding and the show opening. The woman next to me wearing the “Art Saves Lives” pin is Jill Fisher who organizes this branch of the QN exhibition as a fund-raiser for the Women’s Support and Community Services of St. Louis.

And the two people in the frame behind my head are Adam and Eve, who have just realized they may be wearing poison ivy leaves.

Filed Under exhibitions, quilts | 6 Comments

Kobo at Higo

October 25, 2007

Kobo at Higo was my favorite stop on the last trip. Located in an old Japanese department store in the International District of Seattle, it’s named for the Japanese word kobo meaning “artist’s workspace.”

The Kobo gallery features an eclectic mix of changing exhibits of Japanese and Pacific Northwest fine craft (although I also saw some New York artist’s ceramics on the shelves), traditional Japanese merchandise artfully arranged, contemporary stuff like UglyDolls, and great kid’s books. They have a display of old Japanese folk toys, and when I peeked behind the partitions that said “employees only,” I could see all kinds of Japanese tins and merchandise left from old times.

The whole place filled me with a kind of quiet reflection on the history of the Japanese-American evacuation during WWII, and a nostalgia for my great-uncle’s pharmacy in old Japan town in San Jose. Adding to that feeling, around the corner is the Panama hotel, now tea shop, that features photos of Seattle’s Japan town of the 1940’s.

Just two blocks over is Kinokuniya bookstore in the Uwajimaya village — a great place to immerse yourself in Japanese art and craft books and all those funky Japanese stationery supplies.

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 2 Comments

Tagged again

October 23, 2007

I’ve been tagged again by Thelma and Jane. This happened to me earlier this summer, and I blew it off, so now I’m trying to make amends. Also I’m tagging Judy, Susan, Cynthia, Roz, Susie, Sandy, and Joanie they don’t seem to have been tagged yet, and they seem like good sports. Apparently you have to list 7 odd things about yourself, and pass it on to the next seven:

1. When I was a kid I used to obsessively draw and collect ladybugs.

2. I spent all day on this stupid ladybug. (Okay, there was also lots of blog surfing, reading Photoshop tutorials, and checking the mailbox for a show rejection I’m expecting. Oh yeah, and that emergency trip to Barnes and Noble to look at books, and then there was that hour that I spent trying to draw my brain…)

3. I don’t like donuts, except for the white powdered mini ones that are full of chemicals that I buy at gas station shops (I do squeeze them first to see if they are remotely fresh.)

4. I like to look at Japanese craft books, although I can’t read them.

5. Sometimes, okay a lot of times, I accidentally swallow my gum. My husband says it’s building up inside my stomach, and someday I’ll explode.

6. I am just relearning how to use Layers in Photoshop because somehow I forgot everything I knew.

7. My brain is like a funnel. It takes a lot in, but there seems to be a leak.

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Moleskine Tour (detour)

October 20, 2007

When I travel I carry a little Moleskine sketchbook –these are sketches of some Cameroon masks I saw in the Portland Musuem of Art last year. Invariably, mine gets stuffed with scratchy notes, phone numbers, to-do lists….

Not these folk though. These YouTube video tours of artist’s Moleskines is one of the coolest things I’ve found on the internet in a long time, and if you’re a fan of sketchbooking, journaling, or scrapbooking, you’ll probably like them too. Here’s a tour of my favorites. Most are 2-3 minutes, and I just learned you can click the right-hand box under the video to make it full screen if you want.

Paul Davis (illustrator) notebook: Lots of colorful portraits of people with Picassoesque noses, plus clever collages.

Paula Scher (graphic designer) notebook: Alpha-doodles with lots of fancy and funky fonts. Paula’s sketchbook intrigued me, so I looked up her website and found her map paintings to be wonderful.

Celia Squire (artist/London) notebook: Nostalgic-style ink drawings of this storyboard artist fill the pages.

Stefano Faravelli (artist/Turin) notebook: A beautiful travel-style journal that folds out out into one long composition.

Remy Bardin (student/Santiago) notebook - “One year in Chile”: This one moves more slowly, but then the guy worked a whole year on it, so five minutes doesn’t seem too long after all. Some interesting fold-outs, unexpected changes in style, and orginal music.

Douglas + Francoise Kirland (photographer + curator) notebook: This one reads like a personal album, but the photos are always collaged in a interesting manner.

Dave Egger (writer) notebook: A writer’s cryptic drawings with titles.

Antonia Jorge Goncalves (artist/Lisboa) notebook: The nose book — he drew many people, then cut the pages of the book in the shape of their nose.

Joachim Robert (artist/Paris) notebook: Drawings, collage, cartoons, and a bit of painting.

Wilson and Restrepo (artists/London) notebook: Mostly wax pastel drawings. Abstract and surface design artists will like this one. Some messy fingers at the end.

Detour the Moleskine London Exhibition: I’ve always been a fan of art books, but could never see a way they could be shared. This short video shows an exhibition, and we can derive how it’s spawned these videos. I smell a clever Moleskine marketing campaign, but doesn’t matter — I’m ready to jump on board!

p.s. Just found Birget Brenner’s notebook made with thread.

Filed Under drawings, media, other artists | 10 Comments

Tacoma Museum of Glass

October 18, 2007

These are the Crystal Towers on the Bridge of Glass, which was designed by Dale Chihuly and architect Arthur Andersson to connect downtown Tacoma to the Museum of Glass. Inside this dramatic tower that looks like the space shuttle crashed into the earth is the hot glass studio.

On the other side of the museum, the gallery held the exhibit Mining Glass, featuring eight artists who did installations using glass, including Kiki Smith. Here’s an interesting article about her use of craft to achieve fine art by Chuck Close for Time.

I couldn’t take photos in the exhibit, so instead I wrote quotes from the artists in my journal. Since some of them were diametrically opposed to how I think and work, I thought they were worth some reflection.

“It’s useful to think that you choose materials just way you’d choose words.” Kiki Smith

“I want the meaning to be embedded so to speak, in the material that I’m using. I choose the material as an expansion of a concept or sometimes in opposition to it.” Mona Hatoum

“Once I realize a connection between concepts, then it’s a matter of finding a visual form that fits the idea…that image then gets stripped down so that there’s just the merest suggestion of it.” Teresita Fernandez

Filed Under journeys, other artists | 11 Comments

Olympic Sculpture Park

October 16, 2007

Sunday was a beautiful day in Seattle. The last sunny day, my friend Susan told me, for the next nine months, so a great day to tour the new Olympic Sculpture Park. It’s a zigzaggy park that switches back and forth, up and down over reclaimed brown fields surrounding the railroad that runs along Elliot Bay.

Here’s one of Calder’s stabiles (as opposed to his mobiles.) Look at the little bird perched on the very tip of the piece, which happens to be titled Eagle.

Serra’s powerful Wake was designed using computers and a demilitarized machine that once made French nuclear submarines.

But my favorite of the day was artist/furniture-maker/architect Roy McMakin’s landscape installation called Love and Loss. It’s full of verbal and visual puns — L is the high bench, O is the table, S is the lower bench, another S is a stair-stepping sidewalk. Look closely, the painted bark on the tree makes the V in LoVe - a tree that seasonally blooms and loses leaves in nature’s cycles, much as our own lives have such cycles.

You can see all the sculptures in the park on a flash tour on the SAM site, which thoughtfully shows the full park overview and where each piece is located

Susan drove us around town in her bright red Mini, to Uwajimaya for fresh crabs and oysters, and to her house to eat them. Also to Kobo on Capital Hill. If you embrace wabi-sabi like Christine, check out their cool site. Today I’ll try to get to the other Kobo to see the exhibit of wax and ink drawings.

Filed Under journeys, other artists, sculpture | 2 Comments

Happy Landing in Seattle

October 14, 2007

After a happy landing in Seattle, (and it’s always happy thing to get off a plane early AND immediately see public art at the gateway –these little fish and leaves scattered across through the floors make herding runaway luggage almost fun) we found the hotel and then Wasabi Bistro in Seattle’s Belltown.

There’s nothing like fresh Japanese food with lots of wasbi and jalepeno to clean out the nasty feeling that too many airplane snacks leave. The food is art too — I can just imagine this conversation, “Artist, oh, what is your medium?”

“Carrot,” he said. Would make a great Bugs Bunny episode, don’t you think?

Russ is here for this public art conference. He’s working a new sculpture blog about it, so hurry up, Russ and give me the address so I can post it for everyone (and see it too!)

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Muse On-Line Writers Conference

October 13, 2007

Before I launch in Seattle stuff, I want to tell you about last week’s Muse On-line Writers Conference. It was a free conference that I found through an on-line writers group I recently joined.

For a week, people from all over participated in live chats and workshops with publishers, promoters, writers and illustrators, and a full discussion forum with the same. Since I registered late, I had lots of homework, reading handouts and research on websites — and believe it or not, I had never even been in a live chat room before (but it was fun once I got the hang of it.)

I didn’t realize it was going to be so good, or I would have told more people about it before. But I’ll be signing up for next year Oct. 13-19, 2008 — registration starts in January, so I’ll let you know then. And hopefully I’ll have some work done on my book ideas and be bouncing ideas off you before then!

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Traffic Jam

October 11, 2007

Yay, I finally got this monkey off my back! I don’t know why was so hard, being it’s a simple concept and similar to this quilt that just went together like butter, and I consider to be one of my best quilts, technically speaking. (maybe that’s why it got into FiberArts International 2007).

Maybe part of the problem was all the starts and stops. I started it for this TV taping, then had several interruptions. Or maybe because I had artistic doubts about my work during the process and decided to recklessly experiment.

Or maybe it’s the maze mentality. I wanted to put a maze pattern on it because of the traffic theme, and the project did become a series of starts, stops, and wrong turns.

If you’re wondering about the solution to my background problem, I used oil pastels to adjust the color. These are cheap school kid oil pastels by Colorific, but what I had on hand. This is not recommended for fabric.

In discussions on the QA list, I learned oils in oil pastels may eventually destroy the fabric. Maybe not for a few years, but in terms of 50-100 years which is how conservators think. Here’s a link to good explanation about Shiva Paintstiks that could be an alternative.

Meanwhile, I had a great time using the oil pastels on the background, using predominantly purples, but highlighting with a blue. I love this effect, so will have to try the Shiva paintstiks in the future. And I was thinking, since there are really only three main elements in the quilt, I could cut them out and sew them to a new background. Or better, I could just move onto new projects!

p.s. Here’s a couple more process shots - click to see bigger. Squaring up the quilt is always difficult for me. I leave lots of room to crop after I’m done quilting, and try to use a t-square or laser-level to chalk the lines. This quilt is only 3′x4′ so the t-square worked pretty well.

Here’s why I covered the background with pastels. I had quilted it with a light-colored thread, then when I stepped back, thought it had the unpleasant look of being covered with hair. Which is how I felt too. When things aren’t going right in an artwork, I feel like I have hair growing under my skin. Ever feel like that?

Filed Under media, process | 18 Comments

Unsewing

October 10, 2007

If this were a happily-ever-after blog, I would only show you the good stuff. But that was never my intent. My intent was to write a creative-process blog. So this is a picture of the creative process gone wrong and frustration.

The frustration is not the traffic jam of cars, but the gnarly mess below the cars, something that’s called unsewing. I had done many samples with different threads for this area, but then halfway into the real thing, I realized my final choice was wrong. It wasn’t the effect I had hoped for, and ripping out machine stitching is a terrible slow thing that I try my best to avoid.

In the end, trying all these threads was like poking my finger into the bottom of every chocolate in the box, frustrated that I couldn’t find the right one. But then I realized, it’s because I wasn’t hungry for chocolate, what I wanted was a lemon sour.

Usually complimentary colors of thread work well, but this time, I found it was more interesting to use a color pulled from somewhere else in the quilt for a subtle contrast of colors for the maze-like pattern I was trying to create.

Emboldened by this new idea, I happily charged ahead to finish off the final part, the background. Now I have a new problem. ggrrrr

While this effect is interesting, it’s not in the best interests of the overall piece. Now the background stinks. So today I have new choices:

1. Rip it out
2. Live with it
3. Burn it
4. Paint it
5. Start the whole thing over from scratch (probably would take less time than ripping out the stitches)
6. Or something I thought of in my sleep and now am anxious to get to the studio to try

Filed Under process | 16 Comments

The Artist Persona

October 8, 2007

My husband says Picasso always stared bug-eyed into the camera, so I did a little looking and found that he did look bug-eyed when he was young and old. I guess this is how he perceived himself, or maybe how he wanted others to perceive him, judging from these painted self-portraits from 1907 and 1972. Some people craft their personality as carefully as they craft their art.

Many thanks for the comments on my last post. It’s always fun to see what people like and the reasoning behind your selections gave me lots of food for thought. Alyson asked a good question — the answer is Quilting Arts Magazine is working on an artist’s profile. I’m excited because the feature is usually several pages long with excellent photography. I sent them six quilts last week for photography and had an interview with Cate Prato (what a great name, wouldn’t you love a name that sounds like you’re a secret agent?)

Many comments were strong for the top moody photo, but the zebra-sunglasses were popular too. I read somewhere that Princess Diana often tilted her head down and looked up at the camera so her eyes looked huge — so for fun I tried this. Some of you commented that this combined with looking over the top of my reading glasses made the viewer feel like they were being let in on a secret, something I thought would compliment the humor of my picture-story quilts.

Based on early morning comments, I had already gone back to my folder of upteen-zillion photos, found this one and sent it. Maybe I should send a p.s. alternative and attach the first photo. I do like the zebra-glasses, but not sure they’re right for the article.

I know from editing video which is 30 frames a second, a person can look happy one second, sad the next, innocent or evil, intelligent or stupid. It’s all a question of which frame you grab. It can make a world of difference, and if someone else is doing the selection — you’re at their mercy.

update: I tried to send the second photo to the magazine, but it was too late, they had already placed the first photo into the layout (or they just liked the first photo better, but didn’t want to tell me) Anyway, they just sent the proof for the article, and it looks great, so I’m happy!

Filed Under media, technology | 10 Comments

The Moody Photographer

October 7, 2007

Last week I was supposed to send my head in a photo to a magazine for an article that will hopefully appear in December. But I dreaded going to a studio and getting a portrait done, and actually never got around to making an appointment.

So this weekend I set up some lights and a camera on a tripod, and used a shutter release cable to take my own photo. Luckily we just got the new digital Canon EOS-40D, and the camera is a lot smarter than me, because it takes pretty fabulous photos without asking me for advice. (click on a thumbnail for a larger image.)

Since it’s digital, I figured I could just shoot rapid fire like in those moviesque photo shoots, except that I didn’t have big fans blowing my hair and white floaty scarves around. I also didn’t have a great set, in fact my set looks just like my quilting studio. It took me about 200 photos just to get the lighting right. It’s also hard to get your head in the right place when you don’t know what the camera is seeing, and since I was using my Traffic Jam quilt as a backdrop, the butter dish kept ending up in the wrong place, like sticking out of my ear.

Now the problem is, which one do I send? I never know who I really am — I wanted to make a face like PaMdora and just couldn’t master it.

Filed Under technology | 20 Comments

keep looking »

Evidence of Ghosts

KaBOOki: The HAunTed SusHI BaR

Last Minute Halloween Costumes

Quilt National (section A) heads to Houston

Kobo at Higo

Tagged again

Moleskine Tour (detour)

Tacoma Museum of Glass

Olympic Sculpture Park

Happy Landing in Seattle

Muse On-Line Writers Conference

Traffic Jam

Unsewing

The Artist Persona

The Moody Photographer

PaMdora's Box

Follow PaMdora on Twitter

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