always thinking...

someone once told me I must be always thinking

I thought that an odd observation... don't we all?

over time I realized she what she meant was that I am always considering things, examining my ideas and thoughts and endeavouring to gain as much understanding about whatever has captured my interest as I possibly can

I suppose that's true - kind of that whole "examined life" way of thinking, at least when it comes to my creative work

lately I've made some big strides in figuring out what it is about what I make that is at a discord with what I want

and "discord" is exactly that

there is little if no discord in my work

I do like my work well enough but it does not follow that it is what I wanted it to be 

  it's the raw essence of things that is missing, and so I am on a quest to sort that out

I think I may have found my very own "missing link"

abstraction

I recently took a Fibre Arts Take Two produced course, "Inspired by Nature" with Tara Axford, with the intention of getting more into creating work inspired by my love of the natural world

what I actually came away with was a deep love for abstract work and all that meant

(the course does not dive deeply into the principles of abstraction - I have done that on my own, first as way of trying to understand it better and then simply because I am so fascinated by it)

it's been a slow burn though, my love for it, and in the meanwhile, I was doing things in the way I usually do

case in point, the pieces I submitted for our Inspired by Nature online exhibition

"Picture My World"

inspiration image with fabric colour study

using a cropped photo of fallen branches trapped in the ice along the shoreline of a local lake I first created a colour study in fabric... stitched "branches" held it all together

detail

concertina detail

in the course we did a lot of painting and gelli-printing

from the top:

gelli printing with a texture plate I made using branches I gathered from the ice, stitched detail is free-machine embroidery

gelli printing with French knots

gelli printing

fabric and paper collage with acrylic paint and ink

"ice" collage with trees

painted background papers with scraps of silk and commercial paper emulate the layers and textures of the ice with crinkled silk as a nod to the lines of the branches trapped in the layers

strips cut from the same painted paper as is in the concertina represent limbless trees standing sentinel along the shoreline

the course is over now and the work for the exhibition completed but I am not done with this subject yet

now that I have figured out what's missing in my work (at least in my opinion!) I am going to begin my quest for discord with a further abstraction of some of these ideas

I also want to loosen up a bit in my work and have been having a bit of a play with abstract painting, slathering paint on paper quickly, making a mess and seeing what comes of it

this came first

painted copy paper

and now I'm off to the Yukon tomorrow but I plan to keep up with my weekly blog posts so stay tuned...