Last days at the Lillian Smith Center

My days are winding down.  I'm tired, as I always am when I've had several intense days to spend in my self-centered pursuit of what... creative expression?  That seems too lofty a description of what I do when in search of design ideas for my tapestries.  The varied processes I go through to finally, I hope, have an image worth spending months turning into a tapestry are for me best accomplished in intense bursts.  An artist residency gives me space and time for the bursts--I just hope the bursts will happen!

This time I do feel that I've had some insights for design ideas while I've been here.  Today I worked more on the two part piece I'd started on Wednesday:

This image is based on the stones of the cottage where I've stayed at each stay here.  I've looked at the wall many times.  I love the varied sizes and colors of the stones of the all the buildings at the center.  

I had a bit of left-over earth pigment and grays when I'd finished this.  So I pinned up three sheets of watercolor paper and quickly began to work with other views of the stones.  These need a bit more work, I think, but so that they'll be dry enough to put in the car tomorrow I'm leaving them as they are now.

Yesterday morning I took a different path for my walk.  I went along on a trail though the woods where I crossed a small creek on--yes, stones:

I also saw this wonderful stone covered in very flat ferns.  They look like they were just fossils-in-waiting:

Back to reality tomorrow!  It's been a lovely, lovely time here.

 

A Day of Diversion

A friend and I drove to Asheville today for the ribbon cutting at the new Southern Highland Craft Gallery in Biltmore Village.  It's in a historic building and this is a historic event for the Guild... the owning and opening of this gallery!  I've been one of the many Guild members through the past several years who've advocated for this step--the purchase of brick and mortar property in which to house if not all of the Guild's operations, at least some of them.  With the ribbon cutting today, the reception tomorrow and the "soft opening" that happened earlier in the summer, it's a reality!

Some photos from today's event follow.  I hope some of you might be able to visit the Guild's shops, either the new SHCG Gallery in Biltmore Village, Allanstand at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, the Guild Gallery on Tunnel Road in Asheville, the Arrowcraft Shop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the Cumberland Crafts Center, in Kentucky, or the Parkway Craft Center, at Blowing Rock, North Carolina.  The Southern Highland Craft Guild is a 900+ juried membership organization and I'm very proud to have been a member since 1979.  I was given a Life Membership in 2009 and that honor mean quite a lot to me.

Read more about the Guild's history here.

Here's Tom Bailey, the Guild's Executive Director, getting ready for the ribbon cutting!

And Yet More from Lillian Smith Center

Today I added earth pigment from the clay I'd dug up near the studio yesterday.  I worked on this painting for a couple of hours and then decided it was done for now.  I'll look at it again when I get home to see what more, if anything, I need to do to it before I consider it a potential tapestry design.  If I decide to weave it, then the challenge comes of interpreting as I weave.  And that's usually a several month-long process.  Since I don't dye my own yarns, I have the task of selecting the colors to blend into weft bundles to best create the effects I want, based on how I'm working from the painted design.

Early this afternoon I drove into town to the local hardware store; they have quite a few art supplies there and I always stop by when I'm either at Hambidge or at Lillian Smith Center.  Today I was checking to see if they happened to have un-stretched, gessoed canvas in rolls... which they didn't.  But they had a 50% off of their stretched canvasses.  So I got a couple to use as if they were one and started another rocks piece this afternoon.  

Here's the wall at the end of today.  I'd moved over the first piece so there would be room for the two 24" x 36" wide pieces that I'm working on together.  Lots more to do with it on Friday (I'll be gone tomorrow to attend the ribbon cutting at the Southern Highland Craft Guild's new shop in Biltmore Village, Asheville, NC).

In the late afternoons I usually sit on the porch of the cottage I'm staying in and make a drawing or two before sunset.  I've been drawing in this lovely book made by Alice Schlein that I got a couple of years ago... a tree book, so all the drawings I do in it have trees in them.

Here's yesterday's Peeler porch sketch:

And several from 2012 when I was here, looking at the same view (first, here's the view):

It was raining that day!

More from Lillian Smith Center

Today I took down the painting I've been working on since last week and stapled up a new blank canvas piece:

What follows are stages of developing this design.  I work loosely at first, sometimes not even knowing what may be the subject of the painting or drawing.

I use wide brushes to begin, housepainters brushes, in fact.  This "automatic drawing" method is one that I was introduced to by Steve Aimone in workshops I've taken with him.

Within 20 or 30 minutes there's something everywhere on the canvas.  Can't be afraid of the "blank" space when there isn't any, huh?

At this point I start to consider the potential for developing images.  Steve's workshops are geared toward nonobjective painting.  However, my own desires are for pictorial images in my work.  Yet I have been finding his process wonderfully loosening for beginning.

So... image for this new piece was selected from several of the photos I've been making of the stones around the Center.  I decided upon a detail from the chimney ruin at the Center.  The stacking of the large, medium and small stones in this chimney have fascinated me since I first came to the Center several years ago:

 

Lillian Smith's grave is at the left of the chimney:

As I begin to develop the painting further, I first make a drawing using a graphite stick using the photo as reference.  You can barely see the lines drawn over the paint:

Here I am painting... yes, staged with camera's timer but I wanted to show the scale of the work and the wall I've got the canvas stapled onto.  The apron is an important tool as are my painting shoes, ones that I've almost worn out but that are great for standing in most of the day.

Now the real work begins.  I paint for awhile, sit back and look at what's been done, paint for another while... back and forth for hours at a time.

Here's where I left it around 5 p.m.--

And this is what I'll be adding tomorrow:

Yep, that's Georgia red clay.  I'm using coffee filters to strain the mud, and then I'll mix acrylic matt medium with it.  Some of the rocks in the painting will get a wash of the clay tomorrow.

And... red door photo... haven't shown one yet.  But here's part of the red door and my shadow in this morning's early sunlight--it was a chilly morning and I have on a cap, coat, scarf and gloves as I wave at the red door!