Tag Archives: Creativity

How Is An Artist Like A Maple Tree?

What a delightful week this has been!
With temps in the 60s, our snow piles are receding and the garden beds are reappearing. “Snow Moon” is now complete, just in time for me to turn the page on winter and to fully welcome spring.

My last post showed the first of 4 panels for “Snow Moon”. This and the two below are the other three.

First a bit of news. I spent the better part of two weeks in February writing an 800 word narrative about my practice, weaving together the threads of background, inspiration and process in a peek behind the curtain of what I do. Happily, it was accepted as an “In The Studio” post for the Surface Design Association blog and was published there last week. Please take a look.

Some figuring was necessary to be sure the moon read as a sphere despite the change in plane from the front of the house to the roof around the corner. I needed to create two circular stitched resist areas – one on each panel – adjusting each so when they came together the moon would read as one image

Moving on, this week’s post is all about sharing creative sparks.
I find fresh inspiration often accompanies the change of each season and, to that point, the last couple of weeks have set the stage for fresh ideas via an abundant line-up of online talks and exhibits, giving me much to think about and to be inspired by. Hopefully one or two of the links below will get your springtime creative juices flowing, much like the sap of our iconic Vermont maples.

Of all 4 panels, this is my favorite.

First off, the Vermont Studio Center arranged for Janie Cohen and Rachel Moore, executive directors of the Fleming Museum and the Helen Day Art Center respectively, to have a conversation (watch here) about how they are navigating the choppy waters of taking their institutions forward with the goal of becoming more racially just. Cohen also addresses this monumental task in the Seven Days article “Vermont Museum Leaders Reflect on the Past and Pandemic Present to Rethink the Future“. The whole article is important, but scroll to the section entitled The Museum of Truth and Reconciliation for her contribution.

Each panel is stretched over and basted to its corresponding house-shaped cut-out made of Peltex.

Last week was rich with separate real-time slide presentations/artist talks by Bisa Butler, Lissa Hunter, and Susan Brandeis, broadcast from Wisconsin, Maine and North Carolina. Each of these three inspiring artists sits on a different branch of the diverse textile-art tree. Take a trip through their websites to see their amazing work, or search Youtube where they all have talks/videos to view.

The sides are stitched together with a blanket stitch

It was a particular pleasure to listen and watch while one of my art heroes, Dorothy Caldwell, compared notes about practice and inspiration with her fellow artist and friend Claire Benn. Their conversation is also available on Youtube; watch it any time.

After long days of embroidery work, seeing the structure complete is always a treat

As Spring grabs hold of our spirits and senses, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is currently showing “Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joys of Nature“. It brings together two giants whose love of the natural world formed the basis for much of their work…perfect inspiration for this time of year! Listen to the accompanying lecture by Ann Dumas, consulting curator of European art, as she compares their work in detail, offering insights while guiding viewers through a tour of many of the pieces in the exhibition.

Snow Moon ©2021 Elizabeth Fram, Stitched-resist dye and embroidery on silk with foraged branches, 18.5H x 9″w x 7.5″D The feeling of being in the woods is enhanced by the branches, don’t you think?

Special thanks to a generous reader who alerted me to the opportunity to take a virtual walk-through of “Richard Diebenkorn, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1948-1992“ at the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. Click on the Viewing Room tab of the gallery’s website to be granted access. It’s high-definition viewing at your own pace, with the ability to zoom in on Diebenkorn’s inspiring work.

Living With Distance ©2021 Elizabeth Fram, Stitched-resist dye on silk with balsa wood and silk organza, 8.75″H x 6.5″W x 6.75″D I snuck this piece in around the making of “Snow Moon”. Although similar to “Isolation“, the inner house in this one is smaller with brighter colors, suggesting adaptation and acceptance.

And finally, you may remember that in 2017 I wrote about the thrill of seeing works by Diebenkorn and Matisse together at SF Moma. In that spirit, and as a chaser to your shot of Diebenkorn at the Berggruen, check out the documentary “Becoming Matisse” in which Matisse’s great-granddaughter Sophie, an artist herself, accompanies us through the stories, family photographs, and locales where Matisse lived and worked. It reveals the person behind the icon.

Mud Season will soon be behind us and, with more and more people becoming vaccinated, we will all soon be out and about. Yet I can’t begin to express how meaningful all these opportunities have been in the interim. It’s particularly encouraging to hear art professionals from all sectors of our field continually mention how the pandemic has precipitated change in their work and institutions, generating adaptations that have made these benefits available in ways that weren’t imaginable a year ago.
I surely hope this new era of accessibility will continue. Please leave a comment and/or link if you have an online experience to share.

Unwrapping the Intangible

I am especially aware at this time of year that creativity doesn’t live only in the studio, it spreads into all corners of our lives. To name but a few examples, gardens, kitchens, music, etc. are a glorious extension of our fundamental appreciation for not only color and form, but for all the other senses as well — taste, sound, scent, and touch.

Trident Cafe ©2017 Elizabeth Fram, 8.25 x 5.75, Pen in Fabriano sketchbook. I have come to really enjoy sketching in restaurants. It’s a great way to pass the time while waiting for the food to arrive and to get my mind off how hungry I may be. Breakfast is the best because lighting is never an issue and then I can move on with whatever else may be on the agenda, happily knowing I have begun the day with a sketch under my belt.

And “artists” surely don’t have a corner on the market. Creativity is undeniably present in everyone we know. Many don’t make claim to any formal artistry per se, but beyond any doubt it is present – often in intangible form, in the way they move through and live in the world. Brilliance is shared, often without even realizing it.

This week I am thinking about and grateful for the many gifts others have given me in the way they see the world, making it a more beautiful, thought-provoking and richer place to be.

My wish for you this holiday season is these next days be exactly as you would like: festive and filled with the bustle of family and friends; reflective, restorative and quiet; or a mixture of the two.

But above all, may you have an eye for the beauty and moments that make your life brighter, beyond the holidays and throughout the rest of the year.
…And may you find all the art supplies you hoped for under the tree!

Never Too Late

We’re on ‘stay-cation’ this week — taking time to explore and enjoy our corner of Vermont during this particularly beautiful time of year. Studio time has been next to zero.

Mid-process stitching

A special thanks to my artist mother-in-law for getting me off the hook with the suggestion of this post’s subject: ageism doesn’t factor into being an artist. She’s been reading lately about Françoise Gilot, 95 and Carmen Herrera, 101, two artists who have proven that making art can be a life-long endeavor. The above links lead to wonderful interviews that will inspire you.

I’ve been doing a bit of research since she brought up the idea, and have been heartened by what I’ve found.

Check out Hilarie M. Sheets’ 2013 article for ARTnews, ‘You Become Better With Age’, for a discussion about many artists, past and present, who didn’t / haven’t allowed age to thwart their practice. Quotes from living artists emphasize that accumulated years often bring a sense of liberation and renewal, paving the way for new and significant discoveries while at times generating a measure of success that had previously been elusive.

Also, Ermine Saner writes for the Guardian about how age affects the practice of women artists.

The benefits don’t stop with professionals. Lata 65 of Lisbon, Portugal is a wonderfully uplifting example of older folks who are finding new ways of appreciating and making contemporary art while beautifying their neighborhoods with a spray can.

In our youth-obsessed world where technology rapidly makes jobs obsolete and athletes age out of careers in their mid-thirties, isn’t it reassuring to know that there is no shelf life on creativity?

Linking Memory with Creativity

I am feeling the growing pains of exploration in the studio lately, which has led me to wonder: what steers the work we make in specific directions, and in turn puts our individual stamp on it?

Last week I read Moonwalking With Einstein ~ The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. I picked it up off the library shelf because I was curious about how the author trained his mind to ultimately win the US Memory Championship, developing the ability to accomplish such feats as memorizing the order of an entire deck of cards in a record 1 minute and forty seconds. I figured I ought to be able to pick up at least a few helpful tips to get me through the day more efficiently.

But, beyond disclosing the intricate techniques of the world’s top “mental athletes”, the meat of this fascinating book is Foer’s narrative regarding memory itself, including both cutting-edge research and, as stated on the book flap, “a surprising cultural history of memory”.

Concerning creativity, he drills home the point that everything we see and do is viewed through the lens of memory, which ultimately shapes our perspective of the world around us. Of course that means it also flavors the art that we make. We may believe that a wonderful new line of thinking in approaching our work just “popped into our heads”, but it isn’t truly materializing from thin air. We have a lifetime of experiences to thank for any new path.

Think about what Foer writes: “The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on”. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, we pull from our memories in order to fuse new connections between old ideas, solidifying those new concepts in the work we make.

Foer further states, “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.”

It adds a whole new depth to any piece of art you make or view, don’t you think?