watercolors

Many moons ago, when I was just a young buck in grad school, I discovered the joys of watercolor. Having devoted the majority of my young adulthood to studying oil painting (I mean, is there any other medium if you're going to be a serious painter? Wink...) it felt somewhat naughty and subversive to put down the turpentine and fill a jar with water, pin some paper to the wall and set to work, letting the colors bleeeed. I didn't do anything super cool or smart with those watercolors - I just painted still lives - huge still lives - of all the dirt and crap that was sitting around my studio (I kept a very untidy studio.)

little details of those watercolors...

I don't know that I've ever really given the full story on this blog of how I made the switch from painting to sewing, but that's because there really isn't much to tell. I think like a lot of people that pursue a passion extremely hard, I just experienced burnout and needed a break. I also never stopped working with art and artists on a daily basis, albeit in a much different capacity, and so it has never been far from my mind. But the long and short of it is: Shortly after moving to Houston with Nick, I stopped painting. Around this same time I received a sewing machine for my birthday (for lack of any other birthday ideas, Nick suggested I ask my parents for a sewing machine - that man is clairvoyant sometimes, I swear...) and left it sitting in a box for a number of months. Finally my fingers started to itch for a creative outlet and I buckled down and learned how to thread my machine and sew my first few tentative stitches...

One of my earliest frustrations with sewing was with my fabric choices. Perhaps I'm exceptionally picky, but I was never happy with the prints readily available to me at the local fabric stores. I find it exceptionally frustrating when you have a mental image of your dream garment only to find that the fabric in your minds eye simply does not exist!! You guys have seen enough of my makes to know that I tend to favor loose, abstract prints with a hand drawn/painted quality. Prints that looks like I might have made them...

So from the very beginning I've had "learning to hand dye fabric" on my sewing bucket list. This summer I got really excited to see that The Art of Cloth Dyeing was being offered as a class on Craftsy.   I enrolled and began leisurely working my way through the classes, not really taking notes or doing any of the techniques shown, but just trying to get more information on how dyes work, what you need, steps, etc. My husband, Nick, kept raising his eyebrows at me because much of the samples shown in the class are what I might call "fancy tie-dye." While I think some of these immersion dyeing methods can yield really beautiful and unusual results - and I plan to try them out in the future - I was really watching this class with my own agenda in mind.

What I really wanted to do was direct application dyeing. So after waiting patiently for a few months until I had enough money to gather supplies, I finally put in an order with Dharma Trading Company (anyone watch Lost...?) for some bulk fabric, chemicals and a small selection of procion dyes.

This past weekend I hand painted my first length of fabric - three yards of some diaphanous silk habotai (habutai?) I had to work very quickly (thats the reason why all these pictures show me with my dust mask and gloves on) just barely touching my brush to the fabric and letting it bleed outward. The more layers I put on the looser my "hand" became and I began to have fun letting the colors mix and travel directly on the fabric. It reminded me very much of how much joy I used to find in those grad school watercolors, touching my brush to a surface...

xx

mmmmmmarfa

i've been sitting down trying to write this post about our trip countless times over the past couple of days but unfortunately i keep getting distracted! so here we go!

nick (my husband) and i are pretty dismal about documenting our lives. this is funny because i'm quick to snap pictures of a new sewing project and have filled an entire blog with photos of me posing like a weirdo in public places - but when it comes to documenting trips, or life around us we both seem to forget what a camera is for! i always chalk this up to the fact that i'd rather be experiencing the beautiful sunset, rather than staring at it from behind a lens - but in reality i just forget that these are the moments i'm supposed to be capturing.

so thats my excuse for my utter lack of relevant photos from this trip.

last monday we got in our car and drove 11 hours through the state of texas. 11 hours of driving and we're still in this damn, big state! it was pretty incredible watching the landscape change as we went. from the humid, green, almost tropical gulf coast to the hill country in the middle of the state, to grasslands and then desert mountains. i was actually surprised by the mountains. in my head i thought west texas was all flat.

i have to say - its really beautiful out there. marfa is a pretty interesting place. its where the movie giant was filmed, and more recently there will be blood (a favorite of mine). marfa itself is teeny tiny, like a lot of the west tx towns we drove through. one or two main roads. one stoplight sort of thing. quiet and lazy. but its become a bit of a magnet for the art community. for a town with such a small population i think i saw more hipsters there than i would during sunday brunch in williamsburg!

we went out to marfa with the nonprofit i work for (and where my husband is a resident artist) it was maybe 10% a work trip and 90% vacation.  we stayed at the thunderbird hotel where i spent a good amount of time lazing by the pool reading the french lieutenant's woman. really, this is how i spent  most of my time in marfa (another reason for the lack of photos). and it was wonderful. in between pool lounging and lazily biking through the town to get falafel from the one and only food truck, we also paid our respects to the art gods.

the donald judd foundation and the chinati (or chinazi)  foundation (also by donald judd) are in marfa. we did a full tour of chinati (and were scolded on numerous occasions for being late, or drinking coffee, or taking too long to pee...) which is an old army base that judd bought up in the 60's or 70's and slowly renovated. it houses some pretty epic judd sculptures along with the work of some of his friends and other artists he felt were "worthy".

judd was never really a favorite artist of mine - but the metal works housed at chinati were really pretty damn good, and some of the best judd's i've ever seen. the work felt very appropriate for the buildings and the surrounding landscape, and i have to admit that he knew what he was doing by placing them there. some of the other works housed at chinati were not quite so well placed. or maybe i was just getting tired and "arted out" by the end of our 4 hour tour in the 108(F) degree heat. the dan flavins in particular required an extreme force of will to get through, and i think my entire group felt that by the end of the tour we had given more of ourselves to the soul sucking judd than he gave to us. like we made our sacrificial offering to the ghost of judd and somehow we would be exonerated by the art gods.

i'm joking of course.

sort of.

another highlight of the trip was our visit to the macdonald observatory on tuesday night where we attended an event celebrating the transit of venus. we had an excellent view of venus as she eclipsed the setting sun - the last time it will happen for another 150 years. did anyone else get a chance to check this out? you would have needed special glasses to see it with your naked eye - but nasa had a live feed of it too. it wasn't that exciting - just a tiny dot traveling over the surface of the sun, but i always get pretty geekily excited about that sort of stuff. driving out to the observatory also afforded us a glimpse at some of the surrounding land. the mountains and scrubby desert vegetation. and one of the most breathtaking sunsets i've ever witnessed.

we're planning on making the marfa trip a yearly excursion for the artist residency (maybe someday i'll tell you about what i do for a living - its pretty radical - in the 80's sense of the word) so hopefully next spring i'll be making the trek again. next time i (hopefully) won't have an oozing toe and will be able to do some hiking in the surrounding land. and of course i'll return to cleanse myself in the sacrificial waters of mid to late 20th century art...

this photo has absolutely nothing to do with marfa. but it was just too good to pass up!

things have been pretty quiet on the sewing front lately. i'm having trouble starting some of the bigger projects i had planned for this summer, and i keep getting distracted by all the inspiring things i'm seeing on everyone else's blog! might be time for me to buckle down and get focused...

in the meantime, i have a few "life" and non-sewing related posts i've been wanting to get up on this here blog, so i might turn my attention to those while i wait for my sewing intuition to kick back into gear!

hope you're all having a great june - its freaking hot down here!

xx

for your viewing pleasure: shoe + art

so since i already spilled the beans on my rachel comey obsession i thought i'd just ride this lovefest for a bit longer. while the clothes set my heart a-pitter-pattering, my devotion is really to the shoes.

a fellow comey lover once told me that rachel studied sculpture before she began designing clothes. this struck a major chord with me, and also made total sense. her designs are incredibly sculptural - with just the right combination of toughness, timelessness, elegance and awkwardness. perhaps not the combination most people would look for in a shoe, but for me they possess something just slightly off which makes me want to keep looking at them. if ever i could make a case for adding a bit of artistry to an outfit it is in ones choice of footwear. basically i'm saying, quit being a pansy and put some sculptures on your feet!

after a trip to the philadelphia museum of art this past summer (seriously one of my favorite musuems, and its not just my philly pride thats talking...) i came away with brancusi on the brain. constantine brancusi was never one of my favorite artists. its always amazing to me when you can look at something you've seen a million times, read about and studied, and yet all of a sudden its like you're seeing it with fresh eyes. this is what happened with brancusi. its like a light went on and something i had always glossed over came into focus. i just can't get over those forms (i know... nerd alert...)

perhaps its a bit of a stretch to make a connection between rachel comey shoes and brancusi sculptures - but i don't think so. the restrained palette, the references to classicism, the elegance and awkwardness...the stacking!

all rachel comey shoes via solestruck, brancusi images via the pma, here, and here.

xx