Category Archives: Work in Progress

All in a Week’s Work

This business of being an artist involves wearing many different hats. Making art, sure, but also marketing, networking, writing, packaging, shipping, inventory, shopping, research and development. I’ve had one of those weeks where I did a little bit of everything.

Monday was house and laundry and blogging and looking at art books day.

 

Tuesday included a trip to the Pacific Fabrics to ogle all the beautiful laces in their “Galleria” and pick out a few inexpensive ones for my continuing experiments with using absorbent materials for printing. At the studio I mixed up some print paste so that it would be ready for printing on Wednesday and placed a big order at Dharma Trading Co. There was also a site visit to Carkeek Park where I’m proposing an installation for this year’s installment of art there curated and sponsored by Center on Contemporary Art.

at Pacific Fabrics

 

Wednesday morning I packaged up and sent off my entry for the Member’s Show at the SDA Convention in San Antonio. Once I got the studio I found a very special gift from my studio-mates, Anna and Paul: antique baby clothes from Paul’s family! They are so beautiful. I asked A & P one more time if they were really okay with the clothes getting dyed as part of art making and they agreed. After all, like the gorgeous doilies I use, at least this gives these special pieces another chance to be alive in the world.

a detail of one of the baby dresses

a monotype

After admiring the baby clothes I did some monoprinting with the absorbent fabrics I bought. I also spent some time looking at art books and sketching ideas for new work.

Thursday I washed out Wednesday’s printing then went to the studio to set up breakdown screens for printing on Friday. Friday is when my intern, Jesse comes, so I have to have work ready to go so that I take the best advantage of the extra help. Luckily, it’s been warm and sunny here so the breakdown screens would dry overnight. I used the baby clothes and the absorbent laces. In the afternoon I met with my friend Jessica. She recently left her job at the gallery and is going to help me with some research–just because she’s so nice and she wants to keep her mind active while she’s home with her baby. I am so lucky! In the evening I worked on my proposal for Carkeek.

setting up breakdown screens

the dress after I took it off the breakdown screen

Friday I jammed on getting the Carkeek proposal together and got it submitted by 10 am! Jesse called in sick, which actually was kind of a relief because it freed up my day. I’m excited to print but it will have to wait until next week. At the studio I peeled all the fabrics off the breakdown screens and then packaged up three pieces that I’m delivering to CQA tomorrow for their group show in Tieton. It was a beautiful day and Anna and I snuck out for lunch in the sun and she showed me their architectural drawings for their new studios.

And then there’s this blog post . . .

So, to summarize . . .

Monday: research

Tuesday: research, inventory, acquisitions, prep work, writing

Wednesday: packaging, shipping, research, acquisitions, research, planning, and some making

Thursday: laundry, prep work, networking, career planning, writing

Friday: writing, packaging, networking

It was a busy week!

screens all ready to print . . . next week

 

Experimenting with Textures

I’ve been using some textured fabrics and doilies on breakdown screens. It’s an extension of the work I’ve been doing with absorbent materials and what I taught in my class at Pratt a week or so ago. It’s a technique that continues to excite me and I feel like it’s a way into the theme of my next body of work.

Here are some images of the process and resulting fabrics.

Textured fabric is wrinkled up and allowed to dry on a silk screen coated with thickened dye.

The silk screen is ready to print after the fabric is removed.

After printing and washing: fabric printed with the breakdown screen, the textured fabric used to create the patterning, and fabric that was printed directly with the textured fabric.

One Small Piece

I’m working on a piece for the SDA Member Show at the San Antonio conference. I put together panels for three pieces and was going to finish all three and then pick the best one. Great idea but, with the cold I’m still recovering from and the fact that I’m leaving for a trip to Paris on Saturday (!!!), I decided one is just fine.

So I sat down at my sewing machine for the first time in over a month yesterday to do the stitching on the piece. Wow, was it a rough reentry! Some combination of the silk crepe fabric and the slippery rayon thread made for very uneven tension. That and the fact that the thread kept breaking made it a very frustrating experience. Once I moved on to the other panel of the piece it was smooth sailing which was reassuring. I haven’t lost my touch, after all.

the offending uneven tension

 

Working with the rayon threads can be so frustrating. I have some polyester thread made by Mettler which is great stuff but none of my local shops carry it anymore. It’s hard for me to pay the extra money to shop online. JoAnn’s carries all the Sulky rayon threads and I get them at 40% off when they’re on sale. They drive me crazy because they break so much but I love the luster they add.

The piece is just about done. Just the final stitching together and gluing it up to a canvas. I’m trying not to obsess about the uneven tension in my thread. I told my husband about it and he scoffed, “No one’s going to notice but you.” Hah! I’m entering it in a show of surface designers! If anyone’s going to notice, it will be this crowd.

One of these days I really should learn how to fine-tune the tension on my machine. I have a book but I’m such a visual learner that it doesn’t make sense. I really just need someone to show me. Anybody local want to spend 15 minutes showing me? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee!

ready to finish up!

the inside of the piece that won't be seen once it's finished

Back to the Studio

Tomorrow is the last day of my show, Madrone, at Foster/White Gallery. It’s been well-received, I’ve gotten some very nice comments, and sold a few pieces. Very satisfactory overall.

But then here comes the inevitable question, “Now what?”

Luckily, I’ve got enough things to keep me busy until the next body of work develops. I’ve got some calls to enter, a grant to write, and a few shows coming up to track.

I’m going to attend the SDA Convention in San Antonio, Texas and there is a member’s show for that. The call is for 12 x 12 inch pieces. I already have a bunch of those but they are mounted on panels and the call specifies that all the pieces be mounted on canvas. So I need to make a new piece, after all.

I have all the patterns for my 12 x 12 pieces and I have a lot of nice fabric that didn’t get used in the last series. So, easy peasy, right? Well, actually, I found it’s much harder to start making one piece than a series of pieces. How to narrow it down? How to choose just one set of fabrics from all my beautiful stash. I found myself over-analyzing, poring over the fabrics, looking at them this way and that, taking photos and comparing. Just driving myself crazy with all the options, wanting the piece to be not just good, but really good.

Then I thought, why not just make more and then pick which one I like best? And after spending hours trying to make decisions about one piece, I had fabrics and patterns picked out for two more in about 40 minutes.

Who knew it would be easier to make three pieces than one! Plus, if I run short on time, I don’t even have to finish all of them.

 

The Final Push

I’m a week out from my show opening and still working. I’ve never been in this position before and I can’t recommend it. However, here I am with five pieces to finish by next week.

In January I edited out some designs because I didn’t think I could get them all done in time. Now that I’m so close I can see that the show is a little light, especially because three pieces became one triptych. That left me with only 13 wall pieces. So I decided to add two pieces back in and to make the three free-standing pieces that I had always planned to make for the show.

It’s worth it to keep the pressure on myself just a little longer to have the best possible show. After all, a solo show isn’t something that happens all the time. Can’t have a birth without some labor pains!

things are getting messy

Still Dyeing

I’m working on the last wall piece for this show and I’m still trying to get the color right! Yesterday I did some dyeing and over dyeing for one piece of the puzzle. Those results made me realized I need to go back and over dye the fabric for another panel. Two steps forward, one step back.

This Makes Sense

Yesterday I took advantage of my rested state to design some 3-d free-standing pieces for my show. I’ve wanted to make them since the beginning, but as everything has taken longer than I thought, they’ve been pushed back over and over again. I knew if I didn’t at least get the paper patterns done they wouldn’t get done at all.

I did cheat a little. I used some patterns that I started for other projects that never got finished. Having forms to start with made it much easier to jump in. I was able to tweak them here and there so that they fit with the rest of the Madrone series. I got all three designs patterned and cut out in the peltex in just one day. Now that they are in this stage of the process I can put them aside until I finish the rest of the wall pieces and still have confidence that I will be able to finish them for the show.

It was a relief to work on something that was easy, or at least relatively so. It was satisfying to go to something that I really know. And for the first time in a long time, it didn’t take longer than I thought it would.

New and improved design on the left

The Eye of the Cyclone

Yesterday I delivered three finished pieces for my show. They are the very last pieces that will go in the on-line catalog and it was a huge push to get them done.

Today I’ve given myself a much needed day off for the first time in about a month. Aaah.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to the studio to continue  work. I can still give the gallery pieces for the show, they just won’t be in the catalog. I’m going to try my best to get three more wall pieces and three free-standing pieces done.

Everything for this show has taken longer than I anticipated. It could be because I got spoiled by having interns and didn’t realize how much they were helping. Or it may be because this work is more complicated and more time consuming than what I’ve done before. It’s certainly not because I’ve been procrastinating or sitting around eating bon bons!

For now, I’m enjoying my respite, spending time with my family, and resting up before the final push. I feel ready to go back to work after my rest in the eye of the cyclone.

Just a Moment

I’ve fallen behind in posting here as usually happens when deadlines approach. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say or show, just that I’m using every spare moment to create new work. I woke up from a dream this morning that the gallery owner told me that I needed at least 20-30 more pieces for the show. I’m apparently even working in my sleep.

Here are some photos of the fabric selection process for the last set of pieces I originally designed. I’m still hoping to squeeze in three more pieces. Wish me luck! And if you want to keep up on my day to day workings “like” my page on Facebook, Cameron Anne Mason.

Back to the grindstone!

fitting the puzzle pieces together