Author Archives: ehwfram

About ehwfram

I am an artist living in Vermont, inspired by the day-to-day details of life.

Snow Moon

This Saturday’s full moon (February 27th) will be 2021’s Snow Moon. It’s known as such because typically more snow falls during February than any other winter month…a designation I see as an attribute.

Planning for areas of snow in my next piece, it was necessary to keep those fabric sections free of dye. This is my first experience with “capping” (wrapping the areas meant to be protected in plastic)

I still get as excited about winter weather advisories foretelling heavy snowfall as I did when they held the promise of a day off from school. Now though, they signify a cozy day in the studio with multiple steaming cups of tea and the best possible natural light to work by.

So far, so good. The capping seemed to work pretty well. Note the “pleated” shibori area that abuts the plastic. It is purposely dyed a lighter color.

Admiring Carol O’Malia’s snowscapes at a local gallery several years ago, I was surprised when the gallery director mentioned that winter scenes are generally a harder-sell. I guess most people must favor warm and sunny settings, but my preference, if given a choice, is always a snow-covered landscape. The art cards I’ve saved and pinned to my studio wall through the years attest to that fact.

My snow gallery

I’m particularly fond of Japanese prints that depict snow scenes. So, with winter on the brain earlier this month, it was a happy discovery while poking through the Harvard Museums’ website on a completely different mission, to come across “The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to Mt. Fuji”. Just one in a series of video Art Talks, this guided tour of 3 paintings depicting Mt. Fuji centers its discussion on the mountain’s significance during the Edo period. Fascinating!

Eventually this will be part of a house that will be called “Snow Moon”. The moon is resist-stitched (kawari mokume shibori) just above the snowy horizon. (The blue dividing line is water-soluble ink that will disappear after I finish the embroidery that is yet to come. If you look closely, you can see the ink also outlines the roofline of the house.) This close-up doesn’t really show it, but the dye gets progressively deeper in color as it moves away from the moon (see previous picture). I dip-dyed the piece, moving farther from the moon area with each dip, in order to suggest its glow in the sky.

And, because nothing ever seems to happen in isolation, around that same time Carol Gillott of Paris Breakfasts wrote about an exhibit she’d seen last summer at Musée Guinet: Mont Fuji – Land of Snow. Her short post centers on snowy Japanese prints and the Prussian blue pigment which became integral to them after it was introduced to Japan by Commodore Perry in the eighteenth century. As always, she includes the added enticement of photos of Paris.

Getting ready to embroider, I have drawn trees for each section of the house, and chosen the thread colors that I’ll use for them and their shadows.

But if you’re looking for something a bit closer to home to satisfy (or convince you of) a love of art and snow, you’re in luck. Head up to the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro to enjoy their Open Air Gallery: Ski and Snowshoe Trail, which includes a wonderful variety of sculptures by Vermont artists on a 1.8 mile trail that begins at HCA and loops through the neighboring Wilson Farm.

Flags along the trail are a bright spot of color on an overcast Vermont day.

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Instagram of the Week

I guess you could say we’re all homebodies to some degree these days. Erika Stearly’s lush paintings celebrate the inside, making me appreciate my love of interiors even more than usual. I especially enjoy that she often shows a painting in 4 to 5 images along the way to completion.

Gesa Marie's Home in Munster No. 1010 by Erika Stearly

When We Emerge

My first piece of 2021 has returned from the photographer, signaling it is well and truly finished. Although it was a bit of an engineering puzzle compared to all my other little houses, who doesn’t welcome a good challenge at the start of a new year?

Since the coronavirus took hold, books have been a refuge for me; this piece is a nod to that fact. In addition, inspired by a set of Christmas matryoshka dolls that are part of our holiday decorations, I wanted to reference the joyful surprise of uncovering something unexpected and special within an outer shell.

This piece opens like a book to reveal a smaller house within that depicts a diverse crowd of people on that proverbial sunnier day we all anticipate so hopefully. It conveys that we will get through this dark period, and we’re doing it together.

The buttons, while not exactly a silver lining, are a reminder that beauty is 90% perspective and that positives often lie hidden within the gloom. Despite the challenges, my family and I have had much to be grateful for during this time. Not least among those advantages, I count on art-making because it has kept my mind and hands busy through all the uncertainty. It has been no small boon to be able to process the varied emotions of the past year via these little structures.

When We Emerge, back view ©2021 Elizabeth Fram This shot of the back of the piece shows that the threads used to sew the buttons to the inside were carried through and left hanging on the outside, suggesting the prickly nature of the past year, and to some degree, the virus itself.

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Book Report

I’ve set a goal of reading at least one non-fiction art/business book each month this year. Written in 2006 by architecture critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece – On the Art of Life and Vice Versa was my choice for January. Kimmelman draws a connection between art and daily life as experienced by all of us as regular folks — not as a phenomenon meant only for the elite. While discussing such subjects as creating one’s own world*, collecting, following a routine, and appreciating the beauty and exceptional qualities to be found in the ordinary, he makes the point that it’s not a stretch to imagine that our days are often steeped in artistic endeavors and influences, even within our outwardly most humble actions. Fostering the ability to recognize what that idea means individually to each of us, and how that concept manifests itself, is a path toward enriching each day.

Generally fascinating, although I felt a few of the chapters could have been shorter, Kimmelman unpretentiously offers some thought-provoking and relatable musings about how the pleasures of art are within reach for everyone.

*Coincidentally, and in the same vein as Kimmelman’s ruminations, a new subscriber sent me a link to Ann Patchett’s moving essay These Precious Days which appeared last month in Harper’s Magazine. It’s not short, but it is oh-so-worth reading. It will move and uplift you, and I bet, like me, you will finish it feeling grateful that there are those who have the ability to translate even the direst of circumstances for our consumption, helping us to digest them and still find beauty.

Inspiration

I come across many wonderful artists on Instagram while I’m scrolling by myself. There are a few that make me want to exclaim “Wow! Look at this!” but I’m usually alone at the time, except for Quinn. Then I though of you. I’m going to try to remember to share the most exceptional of what I find at the end of future posts.

@Khaled_dawwa
Khaled Dawwa of Clay and Knife is a Syrian-born artist who has been based in France since 2014. A short post about him on Hi-Fructose, that incorporates images of his work and a bit of his backstory, states that he is “influenced by his own experiences (which include being)…injured in a 2013 bombing, then arrested, imprisoned, and now exiled.”
Powerful stuff.

Just Do It

Usually, I think of January as one of the more relaxed months of the year. But somehow that hasn’t turned out to be the case in 2021.

However, no complaints!
With the help of a planning workshop I took with Alyson Stanfield a couple of weeks ago, I’ve managed to keep the most important balls in the air, while also checking off a few chores that typically lurk around the edges of my list, yet somehow always get pushed to the next week, and then the next week, and so on.

Cleaning my drawing pens is one of those tasks that I should tend to more regularly, but just don’t. However, when the lines begin to skip frustratingly and the ink won’t flow despite the converter having just been refilled, I know the time has come.

I draw with Platinum Carbon Ink for its beautiful, rich black line. But the downside is it contains microscopic carbon particles that will gum up the works if one isn’t diligent about pen cleaning.

I have been reading that an inexpensive ultrasonic cleaner (a home version of what jewelers use) is great for loosening the flecks of dried ink that tend to build up in hard to reach places. So far, patiently letting all the components soak in numerous water baths over a period of hours, followed by a gentle brushing with an old toothbrush and a good flush from a slow-running tap, has done the trick. But I’m curious whether one of those cleaners might not be a speedier and more thorough option, which in the long run might encourage me to be more diligent.

Last week I finally took the time to dutifully clean all my pens and converters and I’m now reaping the rewards: smooth flowing lines that could seemingly go on for days. Like so many things, once you finally get a chore done you can’t help but wonder why in the world it took so long.

Too Good To Pass Up

At times books feel like lifeblood; never more so than now.
And while I’m not yet at the point of thinning out my library, I am making a real effort to not bring too many new books onboard…unless they’re digital.

Studio books – a drop in the bucket if you consider all the others scattered in every room of our home.

As an aside… I love digital books for a number of reasons. First, they take up no physical space so there are no worries about where to store them. This is particularly helpful for reference books — the big, heavy ones that aren’t often needed, but which one still wants to have readily available on the “shelf”.

Embroidery

Digital space-saving also makes it possible to bring a ridiculous amount of reading material along when traveling (remember traveling?) so there are myriad options to choose from on a long flight, during an unexpected delay, or on a rainy day. I should have had my Kindle with me on this trip.

Shibori

Finally, I love that because of the back lighting, colored images are enhanced and come alive when viewed on an iPad. The ability to zoom in to see details is a wonderful advantage. I’m embarrassed to admit that more than once I’ve caught myself spreading out my thumb and index finger over an image on a paper page in an unconscious attempt to get a closer look.

Draw & Paint

But I digress.
The main point of this post is that this week, for the first time since I can’t remember when, I actually bought an in-the-flesh exhibition catalog. A Hyperallergic article about a show of Aminah Robinson’s (1940-2015) work, currently at the Columbus Museum of Art, sent me on a search to find out as much as I could about this prolific artist – previously unknown to me, but a cultural icon in her hometown of Columbus, OH.

I was blown away. The scope of Robinson’s work: painting, sculpture, textiles, book art, illustrations, mosaics, and on and on and on… is remarkable. So I ordered the catalog from the Museum (better to support them than the huge entity that will go unnamed) and now I’m just waiting for its arrival.

Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s House and Journals

So far it’s been a fruitful month for exploring the work of women artists. A few more I’ve been learning about:

Bisa Butler – Dynamic portraits in cloth that tell the story – the African American side – of the American life
Georgia Rowswell – A mixed-media artist whose environmentally conscious work celebrates the beauty of the Wyoming landscape. Her website alerted me to the documentary The True Cost, a stirring commentary on the human and environmental after-effects of fast fashion.
Suzan Frecon – Color is her driving force. Her approach, unlike Robinson’s, is that art should not need the embellishment of story; that it has the singular purpose of speaking for itself.

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And finally, Unmasked: Artful Responses to the Pandemic opens this coming Saturday at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, VT. It is a safe and in-person exhibition that reveals how the challenges of COVID-19 have impacted artists’ practices and output, while also demonstrating that art-making & creativity can offer a form of protection against the negative effects of the coronavirus.

Unmasked postcard

The selfies of friends (5 of which are included in this show), and the little houses I’ve been making this past year, have certainly proven to be a bulwark for me during this trying time.

6 “Bests” For 2021

As a final post for 2020, let me offer something short and sweet to either close-out the old year, or to begin the one (depending on when you’re reading this).

Our niece adopted a quarantine puppy! While I’m looking forward to the day when I will be able to meet Mavis in person, it was almost as much fun to work on a drawing of her as a Christmas present.

I’m a sucker for “best of” lists because they always prove to be a source of new inspiration in one way or another. So in that spirit, I’d like to share a bit of the wealth that has brightened the past year for me. I hope something in this grouping will catch your eye and lift up your 2021.

Best Podcast: Art Juice
Louise Fletcher and Alice Sheridan always seem to have something interesting to talk about, whether it’s on the business or practical side of art. I learned a lot from them in 2020 and always enjoy their down-to-earth and unassuming approach.

Runner Up: City Arts & Lectures
Their tag line says it best: “conversations with outstanding figures in literature, politics, criticism, science and the performing arts, offering the most diverse perspectives about ideas and values”.

At various stages along the way, I like to take pictures to map my progress. Sometimes I can catch missteps in a photo that I don’t see when just looking at the drawing in the flesh, which helps me to reign in any problems before a piece goes awry.

Best Art Blog: Susan Abbott’s Painting Notes Blog
Susan’s knack for writing about her own work while weaving in a healthy and palatable dose of art history offers insights that are always inspiring — a testament to her teaching ability. She doesn’t write all that regularly, but it’s a red-letter day when a new post appears because it is guaranteed to contain some nugget that I will continue to think about for days afterward.

Best Newsletter: Gaye Symington’s Morning Messages
I read Gaye’s almost-daily “newsletters” first thing each day to start my morning on a positive note. Her efforts are a gift. They are a reminder that despite all the bad news that will undoubtably surface as the day wears on, there is still much beauty and joy to celebrate, right in our own backyards. Gaye includes images and links that touch on art, the natural world, and the many folks who work hard at bringing light to the rest of us. Plus, she always closes with a poem.

Laying in marks like this is a lot like stitching. In many ways, working at one discipline feeds my practice of the other, making them mutually beneficial.

Best Books:
It’s hard to attach the label “best” to any one book, but here are my top 10 of the 50 I’ve read this year. Many are not new, and some I’ve touched on in previous posts — here, here, & here. But as I look back, I realize that these were the books that brought me the most solace and insight during this wild year.

- - Circe by Madeline Miller
  - Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
  - Afterlife by Julia Alvarez
  - Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
  - Keep Going by Austin Kleon
  - Breath by James Nestor
  - Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
  - Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
  - A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar
  - And BONUS: Material: Making and the Art of Transformation – How Working with Our Hands Makes us Human by Nick Kary (thanks Pam!) This was my last book of the year and a lovely way to close things out. It is a beautifully written meditation on making, tools, and materials, with a measure of history thrown in.

And finally,
Best New (to me) Concept: The “Not-To-Do List”
I happened upon this idea last month when reading an old, old post by Lisa Call. It’s a worthwhile twist to consider while planning your goals and solutions for 2021…whatever they may be.

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

A Gift Across Time

December tends to get away from me.
I’ve learned to make peace with the fact that studio time will be limited considering all the extras that go hand-in-hand with this particular month. But I still try to squeeze in time around the edges for making art .

On December 1st I began a new little house, wanting to get just one more under my belt before year’s end. I also figured it would be something of an ace up my sleeve for the busy weeks ahead, knowing there would be times when sitting quietly to stitch would get me into a calmer headspace.

Finished dye work

The sticking point with this particular piece has been the open areas where the silk didn’t absorb any dye because it couldn’t seep through the many-layered folds. Without time to do anything but forge ahead, I tried to position the blank areas so as to play off the steep incline of the roof. But that still wasn’t enough – the empty spaces seemed to hang in mid-air like a half-finished sentence.

Even with careful placement, the blank areas were overpowering

Thanks to a dog-walk epiphany after reading an article on Jane Perkins’ art, I decided to dig into a collection of white buttons that has followed me around for the past 35+ years. Their glossy texture and variety of sizes proved a means toward transforming the undyed emptiness into areas that could hold their own against, and in alliance with, the bold shibori patterns. Not unlike a Japanese garden, they provide a rest for the eye that includes an element of visual interest.

A healthy variety to choose from…

When I was first married, my mother gave me a baggie filled with white shirt buttons so that I would never be without when I needed a replacement for one of my husband’s work shirts. It was a sweet gesture and so “of an era”. And even though at the time the idea may have raised my feminist hackles a tiny bit, I recognized it then, and certainly now, as an offering that was a perfect expression of my mother’s hallmark thoughtfulness, practicality, and organizational skills.

And while I didn’t use many of the buttons for their intended purpose, I’ve kept the bag through all our many moves, and have continued to add to it ever since.

Icy Breath of Boreas, alternate view

Not only has this turned out to be a satisfactory solution for making this little piece whole, the process has also contributed to making me feel a bit more whole during a holiday season when for the first time ever, like so many other people, my husband and I can’t be with family. It brings me comfort to work with these little white discs of shell and plastic, to be blanketed in my mother’s thoughtfulness (this will be our 9th Christmas without her), and to think of this piece as a holiday gift she is sharing across time and space.

Icy Breath of Boreas, alternate view

Wishing you a peaceful holiday…

How December’s Patterns are Different, Yet The Same

Now that December has arrived, do you have an end-of-year strategy to close out 2020?
Mine tends to evolve each year, but the general pattern is to devote time over the next weeks to looking back in order to take stock of what worked, what didn’t, and to figure out a game plan for 2021.

I got a leg up on my December tasks due to some unexpected household maintenance last week that led to a deep clean and minor reorganization of my studio. While I do a decent job of keeping up with cleaning chores around our house, my studio is something of a different story. Ironically, it’s where I spend most of my waking hours, yet it’s the one area where I routinely ignore accumulating dust and clutter. However, I’m feeling pretty good about finally reaching the back corners with the vacuum this past weekend and clearing out a bunch of the unnecessary stuff that has been building up. For these few moments I can say: “clear space = clear mind”, but let’s be real — things will go back to normal in no time.

As I begin to revisit the past 11 months, 2020 has counterintuitively been a busy exhibition year in spite of COVID. Happily, that trend hasn’t let up; I will have work in two shows that will span the cusp of the old and new years. That means, in addition to my annual December close-out check list, I am attending to business as usual.

The first of these shows is an online exhibit entitled Wild Things; it can be viewed now on the website of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod (MA). Online exhibitions aren’t new for the CCCC. They proudly claim their international calls for submissions and juried exhibitions as an integral part of their mission to support artists — complementing and extending their physical galleries on the Cape. It is an honor that my octopus piece, “Caught Red-Handed”, was selected to share company with such truly amazing work. If you are an animal lover, you will find this show particularly engaging in its range of media and styles.

Closer to home, I couldn’t be happier that five of my “selfie project” pieces were invited to be included in Unmasked: Artful Responses to the Pandemic. It will be an in-person exhibition, open from January 16 – March 28, 2021 at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, VT. It is very gratifying that these drawings are getting out into the wider world since they are such a strong marker of what this past year has been for me.

All of that said, none of this would be possible without the galleries and venues across the country that have forged ahead during this crazy year, finding creative ways to continue bringing art to the public while coping with COVID and its uncertainties. Their constancy stresses the point that things are different, yet the same. In expressing my gratitude on Instagram, I was quite touched by the Cultural Center of Cape Cod’s response: “Without artists we are merely walls”. Those sentiments drill home the truth that we are all in this together… and it surely feels good to be part of the team.

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And now for a special treat.
As a coda to this past summer’s Sheltering in Place project at the Highland Center for the Arts, exhibit curator/creator Hasso Ewing, her husband Bob Hannan, and son Seamus Hannan have created and produced a truly wonderful video which conveys the atmospheric magic the exhibit brought to viewers during an uncharted and anxious time. It is quite lovely and unique — please enjoy.

Four Ways To Add Color To Stick Season

I think it’s safe to say that the last gasp of summer is now behind us. That fact, paired with the latest COVID restrictions on social interactions here in Vermont, point to more time for reading and digging into creative outlets, online and otherwise.

November Trees

It’s a time when we can all use a bit more color in our day-to-day, so I thought I’d share a few of the things that have brightened my outlook:

I’ve been enjoying the American Craft Council’s weekly post “The Queue”. It’s a series of interviews with 2020 ACC Awards honorees, often including a short video of the artist. The ACC is a wonderful resource; I encourage you to spend some time exploring the Stories section of their website. The satirical sculptures of recently featured Bob Trotman caught my eye several years ago, so I was happy to become reacquainted with his work on a deeper level via “The Queue”. With a background in philosophy, not art, Trotman was originally most interested in studying the idea of the individual. But as he developed an art career, his concerns turned toward examining the machinations of society. As a result, his artistic commentary is largely aimed toward money and power in America.
Considering the unprecedented behavior we have been witnessing from our out-going president and his enablers, Trotman’s powerful voice is more resonate than ever.
Another resource that delicately walks the line between delightful and educational is Vermont painter Susan Abbott’s Painting Notes Blog. Always enriching without being didactic, Susan shares her extensive knowledge of art history from both a visual and personal angle. She shines a contemporary light upon the artists and works that have gone before us, and who have laid a path for us to follow. If you’re interested in book suggestions from Susan, look for her generous response to my question at the very end of the comments section of this post.
Beginning with the lock-down last spring, several major textile organizations joined forces to offer weekly “Textile Talks” — video presentations and panel discussions that surround a huge variety of subjects related to textile art.
All can be accessed via YouTube.
The recent “creative discussion” between color icon Kaffe Fassett and his niece Erin Lee Gafill covers their personal history as well as the habit they’ve developed of painting side-by-side. They’ve recently released a book of these parallel works called Color Duets. Anyone who knows and admires Fassett’s work and his long, illustrious career will enjoy the conversation. Particularly inspiring is the way Fassett straddles different media while maintaining the consistent thread (sorry for the pun) of color.
And finally, if you too are a student of color, you know it’s hard to beat a garden – flower or vegetable – for the lessons it can teach. Our beds may be all buttoned up for the winter, but even as the snow flies we can dream about next year’s glory…while learning a thing or two along the way. Two resources that will be scratching the color itch for me this winter are Darroch and Michael Putnam’s Flower Color Guide and the Floret Flowers website. There are plenty of lessons to be gleaned from each, but perhaps more importantly during these crazy, stressful days, they both offer pure, visual delight.

Flower Color Guide

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With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I can’t let the occasion pass without saying how grateful I am that you choose to join me here every other week, sharing your ideas and comments along the way. Please accept the suggestions above as a token of my gratitude. Be well and wear your mask. We’re all in this together.

Linda ©2020 Elizabeth Fram, Ink, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, 11 x 8.8 inches. It’s always fun to see what each person chooses to include in the selfie they send me, because it’s a further window into who they are. Linda made the paper batik behind her and I think it’s an apt reflection of her bright spirit. All 13 pieces in my COVID-19 Selfie series can be seen together on my website.

One Very Simple Habit That Makes A Huge Difference

In Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals, one of the commonalities he uncovers is that many artists, past and present, factor(ed) a daily walk in their regular routine.

As hard as it can sometimes be to interrupt what I’m working on to answer Quinn’s insistent mid-day call to get out to stretch our legs, I’m always glad we went. Aside from the obvious: enjoying our beautiful surroundings and witnessing the never-static changes of the seasons, I’ve also found that many of my best ideas, solutions, and conceptual connections have surfaced as I hang onto the back end of the leash. No doubt that’s part of what Currey’s subjects experienced as well.

A knotted field of stitching on top of two layers of shibori patterning. The underlayer is raw silk, the one on top is translucent silk organza (which allows the lower pattern to show through).

In order to add another layer of texture to the piece I’ve been working on this week, while simultaneously suggesting the confining nature of a net (digging back to my Maine roots and lobster traps), I have been attaching short lengths of thread to an underlying foundation of stitches. Perhaps it was just a matter of getting more blood to the brain, but the proverbial lightbulb went on as we made our way up the hill on Tuesday. Beyond being a reference to netting, I recognized the dozens of knots I was tying as a metaphor for my general frame of mind while anxiously waiting for the election’s results.

Shorter threads knotted where the horizontal and vertical lines meet are reminiscent of netting.

Overall, does it really matter to the finished work that I made that connection? Maybe…maybe not, but it does serve to underline the emotional intent of this piece as an expression of this tense point in history.

Moving onward, we have a lot of work ahead of us in this country if we are going to find our way past the divide. As it always has, art will have a role to play in defining the current circumstances and in forging a way forward. However, artist or not, maybe getting out to take a walk is the simplest first step to finding solutions.

Detours

Part 1 – Firestorm

There’s often no telling how an idea will evolve.
A piece may start with a specific destination in mind, but logistical snags invariably crop up and I soon find myself on a different path. The serendipitous twists and turns that result take me to a place I hadn’t imagined, but one where I am ultimately quite happy to have landed.
What follows is the story of one example of this phenomenon unfolding.

As the top sketch shows, capturing an idea often takes just a few quick lines. But the evolution of that idea invariably becomes much more complicated as one moves through the process. My initial idea was to make a house that was completely enclosed / cut-off from everything around it.

News of the devastating wildfires out west, paired with having a son who has been navigating dreadful air quality at home in the Bay area, has gotten me to thinking what a malleable canvas these little houses can be for making a statement beyond COVID-19.

Reporting on personal wildfire stories has stressed the horror of being surrounded by fire as it rages all around. While I can’t begin to imagine such a scenario, I wanted to make a piece that in some way expressed that sense of being enclosed or trapped.

Resist stitches in place before the dye bath

My original plan was to make a small house that would sit in the center of a larger, house-shaped shell, and to use a translucent fabric for the outer house. Silk organza would allow one to see the house within, while also being a worthy medium for portraying the amorphous nature of fire which I planned to suggest with dye. Unfortunately, organza’s porosity, a characteristic I expected to work to my advantage, was also a downside. When undoing the resist stitches I’d sewn before the dye bath, I discovered that the dye had seeped right through many of them, leaving only a faint pattern. That fact, paired with relatively weak color, resulted in a rather anemic appearance.

This suggests fire, but not as forcefully as I’d imagined

However, there are always ways to work around an issue.
While dyeing the unstitched areas of the fabric, I discovered a way to create an effect reminiscent of the striations of flickering flames (as seen in the top section of the silk in the photo above). So I dyed more organza, employing that process with stronger color, figuring that layering the two lengths of fabric, one on top of the other, would achieve the effect I was looking for. It worked rather well.

With the fabrics layered together, the color and effect is much closer to what I envisioned.

Not wanting to compete with the impact of the fire-inspired cloth, I decided to leave the inner house a blank slate, covering it with un-dyed raw silk and stitching with neutral-colored thread. Spent daylily flower stalks gathered from my garden, varnished and sewn to the house, enhance the effect of the natural coloring while providing support.

The house constructed with the daylily stalks as stilts.

Once this stage was complete, I ran headlong into the problem of how to then create and support the organza casing that would surround it. I have a full page in my sketchbook with various brainstorming solutions, none of which ended up being right or feasible to execute. It became apparent that I was going to have to switch gears.

The “fire” would have to run up the sides of the structure rather than fully enveloping it. I was still undecided as to whether or not to support it so that it would hover above the roof and be held out from the sides as in my original plan, or lay it directly upon the roof, letting it fall naturally down the sides. If it hovered, the stalks’ prongs could be leveraged to support the fabric, but even if not, their physical resemblance to a flame still added significantly to the overall impact.

In the midst of deciding how to attach the fabric, I discovered that using both layers of dyed organza together (discussed above) was unworkable; the layers became just too thick and unwieldy. However, reverting to using the originally dyed piece alone worked beautifully. Layered upon itself as it was gathered and folded to fit the narrow roof space, the previously bemoaned lack of pattern and color suddenly came alive. Pressing folds into the silk to create a tactile pattern that is reminiscent of flames added to the overall effect.

Loosely pinning the fabric in place, one begins to get the impression of fire, the effect of which is emphasized by pleating and the jaggedly raw edges along the roofline.

Running my progress by the discerning eye of a trusted artist friend, she rightly commented that the house, left white, appeared “unscathed and disconnected” from a fire’s devastation. My decision to keep the house neutral was meant to suggest universality, but she was of course right — the piece appeared inappropriately light – even upbeat. The solution was charcoal.

Drawing with charcoal directly upon the raw silk, achieves the charred effect that is necessary for conveying fire’s impact.

In the end, I decided to leave the dyed organza resting directly on the roof rather than elevating it. The top edges of fabric have been left raw and uneven which not only suggests the upward movement of flame as it consumes a building but, with the bottom edges of the organza sweeping around the base of the piece, I could maintain the suggestion of the house being enveloped.

I’ve learned not to be surprised by the unexpected issues that present themselves as most of my pieces come to life, or the need to puzzle my way to a solution. It is the rare work, for me anyway, that runs a straight line from conception to completion. But to be honest, that is one of the perks of art-making — it’s what keeps each day fresh, interesting, and ultimately rewarding.

Part 2 – Isolation

The addendum to my blow-by-blow tale above is that going down a different path doesn’t preclude one from getting back to the original starting point. After finishing Firestorm, I was still anxious to find a way to make a piece that mimicked my original sketch. I thought of all sorts of options for how I might construct a wire structure to support an organza “envelope”, but in the end they were all a bust. Any wire I tried was too soft and flexible to hold its shape. What could I use that would maintain the stiff, straight lines I wanted?

Framework

It took my architect father less than a moment to offer a solution: coat hangers. We talked through the best way to form the frame and how to attach the various pieces to each other. In no time I had the structure I’d envisioned and after that everything came together very quickly.

Hard to believe because my thread drawer is brimming, but I had to dye some silk thread to get just the right color for this one. However, it was too dark to use to suspend the little house. But no worries, I had just what I needed in that notorious stash.

After making the inner house, I suspended it with clear thread so that it would appear to be floating. The next step was to make a house-shaped sleeve out of silk organza to tightly fit over the wire frame. I didn’t mind the idea of seeing seam allowances, in fact, that seemed preferable to me aesthetically. Joining the seams via the hand-stitching method used in Pojagi (Korean Quilting) was the best way to complete this step.

This is one of the more delicate ways to join two pieces of fabric; its effect is lovely

Now complete, the outer casing was stitched invisibly to the frame to keep it taught. The final piece appears exactly the way I had hoped. Whether describing the fraught emotions of being caught in a fire or isolated by the coronavirus, it strikes the note of removal and disconnect that I had originally intended.

Time and again, I’ve found that hitting stumbling blocks and being forced to rethink my approach allows for an idea to evolve into something greater than I might have come up with in one shot. The roundabout discoveries often provide a suitable proving ground for finding my way back to an idea that needed additional “simmering” before it could be realized. It makes the detours well-worth the time, and perhaps ultimately a sort of secret weapon.

Thanks so much for hanging in with me to the end of this very long post!
Ready for a visual palate cleanser? Check this out.