The Best Surface Design Exhibit in the Adirondacks!

Okay, as far as I know, it's the only surface design exhibit. But no matter. There is a lot of beautiful fabric in the gallery, with information to tell you how it was done. It is my personal mission to explore fabric and mixed media art in my community, with an educational component, and this exhibit has been loads of fun! Many "Wow!s" and "I want to try that!s".

Since mid-October, my gallery has been filled with the color and texture of unique, hand-dyed, printed art fabrics. Have you heard the term "shibori-dyed" but aren't quite sure what that means? See Susan Hahn's mini exhibit of "how it's made" shibori samples and her finished artwork.

Shibori samples by Susan Hahn

For lots of images of screen printed, direct dyed, snow dyed, eco printed, stamped, batiked, shibori dyed fabrics (among others) and more information, check out the page above "In the Pink House Gallery." If you want to see it all, come on in soon - up through Sunday, November 22nd. But the information will stay on my gallery page, so enjoy!

Mixed Media en Plein Air

These two looked on while Susan and I did more printing at Oiseaux Studios South yesterday. Susan was sprucing them up for a doll exhibit. Gorgeous dolls that she made many years ago.

View of Oiseaux Studio

Putting acrylic paint on the plastic palette sheet.

Rolling paint on cotton sheeting over grids, raised letters, plant material, etc.

Leaf placed over previously rolled fabric, using a red roller with the leaf as a mask.

Our friend Angela focusing as she learns a new technique.

Fabric monoprinted with Golden acrylics mixed with art paste for more body. The color is much more subtle than with the straight acrylics.

Back to the rollers and straight acrylics, with ferns and beach debris for texture, under the fabric then on top as masks and monoprints. We didn't care that the fabric got a bit more stiff. In fact, Susan likes the way the paint lends longevity to the pieces when they're hung outside. Some of these will become flags on my new porch.

I learned so much from playing with these techniques, and we didn't even get to print with the styrofoam plates! But Susan and I made a commitment to make more flag-like work in our far-apart studios as a joint project. Loving the warm and sunshine but my studio is calling me ...

Lynne with Wax and Dye

My finished pieces on Lynne's frame.

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled through a blizzard and minus degree temperatures to make good on a long-planned visit to the studio of my friend Lynne Taylor. She paints, she woodworks, she sculpts, she dyes. She is an all round fantastic artist!

The Lovely Lynne

The focus of this play date was to have Lynne teach me how to paint on silk with fabric dyes, as she does when she makes her beautiful scarves. So, I helped her set up the fabric (several types of silk, also some rayon and cotton) on her large frame.

Then Lynne showed me how to paint on the fabrics with liquid Procion dyes. I loved watching the dye spread across the fibers differently on each of the fabrics. Next she got out her wax and related tools, and things got really interesting! A new way of thinking about surface design developed as I played with what dye and wax could do as partners. Some experiments worked better than others. My absolute favorite is this raw silk with several shades of turquoise. The texture of the silk was wonderful to work with - very nubby but soft. I want to wear this one.

I'm loving all this fabric play. Next: do something wonderful with them!

Cool Little Workshop - Part Two

 For our next session, Pat and I worked with some silk screens, masks, and stencils on the fabrics we monoprinted a few days before, as well as fresh treated fabric.

I made a simple bird stencil with freezer paper. It was underwhelming when I printed through the stencil but I continued using it to make ghost prints with the paper.

Pat had a couple of screens with a bit of day-old dye left on them, so we unexpectedly did some deconstructed screen printing too. The vertical lines and colors from the screens added a lot! We placed some some newspaper stripes (or "legs," as Pat calls them) and circles ("heads"???) on the fabric as masks. They stuck to the screens throughout out work, until we removed them. (They look pretty cool too with the screened dye. I'm using them in some kind of collage work later.)

Here is one of the screens with dried dye as we started with it, and below is a length of fabric with the lines, masks, and more dye spread on over all. (Yellow on the top; purple on the bottom.)

Monoprinted, deconstructed screen printed, freezer paper masks. The nice brown is from our sludge bucket!

My favorite. Am I channeling Pat???

For you, Beth! The hands-only red print transformed by spreading yellow dye on most of it with a putty knife.

Cool Little Workshop - Part One

This week I had the great good luck to work with Pat Pauly on some surface design techniques on fabric using thickened fiber reactive dyes.

Pat with some her fabric

Lesson 1 was monoprinting. We dropped blobs of dye on a plexiglass sheet then spread the dye around using gloved hands and fingers, plastic spatulas, spoon handles, and whatever looked interesting. Pieces of white fabric (about fat quarter size), pretreated with a soda ash solution (to encourage the dye to bond with the cotton fibers), were dropped onto the dye-cover plexi. Then we used our hands and a couple of different rollers to press the fabric onto the dye. My preference was the standard paint roller.

The pieces we made that day were left to batch without rinsing, so we could continue applying dye next time. One of the very best things I learned from Pat that day was the magic of applying more dye using just a spreader of any type to add color to the "background". This piece below in red was my first monoprinting attempt, using only my hands to spread the dye and then to print with my hand. Wait until you see what happened next!

Cris' monoprint - stage 1

Avoiding the Doldrums

 

This is what I see from my desk this morning in Night Rain Cabin, at an odd moment when the chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches are not at the suet feeder on that birch tree. Most of the giant snow pile is from the deep blanket of snow that slid off the roof in many Whoosh-Thumps over the past few warmish days

I have been away in some lovely warmer places when most of this snow fell, so I don't have the same exhausted outlook on this extreme winter here in the Adirondacks as many of my friends. But it has been a time of a darker outlook in past years because of the sunlight deprivation that gets intense for me by now.  This year I am holding up pretty well, partly because of our trips and partly because I have so many wonderful art projects and events that buoy me up. And I am so grateful for all of that.

On Friday, my friend Lynn and I went to the opening of the Cover Art Show over in Lake Placid. This annual show is sponsored by the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks, with the main objective of finding a piece of artwork to grace the cover of the arts directory for this region (which is getting heftier every year). As always, it was great party and an opportunity to see other artists and friends.

I entered a piece that I reworked from one of my fiber collages that I made over the summer. It is a little deconstructed digital photo of my cabin Hobbit House, with added fabric fragments and decorative stitching. Here is the original: 

Fernville Spring

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like this little piece, but originally it was mounted on a muted turquoise rayon background to coordinate with its ten sister pieces for a show. I decided that background wasn't what this one needed now. So I painted, stamped, and otherwise played on the background fabric to come up with this:

I popped it back into the original frame, renamed it Deconstructed Cabin, and entered it in the Cover Show. I was surprised and pleased to learn it received an Honorable Mention!

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA to attend Wen Redmond's workshop on printing with natural materials. Really fun and interesting! There is also a wonderful show up at the museum by members of the Studio Art Quilters Association called No Holds Barred. The range of styles, subject matter, and materials used by these talented artists was mind-boggling! See it if you possibly can! After lunch, Wen talked about and showed her art quilts, starting with early pieces. All wonderful, beautiful, and inspiring. 

Using Wen's directions from a 2007 issue of Quilting Arts magazine, I made two pieces that were accepted into the Adirondack Artists' Guild recent juried show. Because these works are constructed with a photo printed on the top sheer layer and an opaque layer of the same photo underneath, separated by the depth of the stretcher bars, they look 3-dimensional (or "holographic" as Wen describes them). I love this technique - lots of potential for future work.

Low Tide Treasure

Winter Ferns

The photo below shows how the Winter Ferns piece was assembled. The lower opaque layer was glued to the back of the sheer layer which was attached to the stretcher bars by the border fabric.

So, on to the next project - finishing work for my April show Out of Season. Lots to do. More about that next time!