Cactus

More crossover -- I've been painting fabric to work on another cactus quilt and found myself last night making cactus beads.

Here's the fabric in progress: starting to paint, same area after the salt has been in place for an hour or so, and the entire (almost 2 yd) piece after it dried but before washing out.
What, you've never seen pink, blue and purple cactus? Here you go (yes, they are real!):

New Birds

I was shocked to learn that many people don't recognize the downward facing birds in my bird vessels. So I've been playing with some different, much simpler birds. Yesterday I borrowed the branch idea that Jennifer Geldard has been using in some of her "konstructs" and used it to accent one of these birds. The metallic greens and blues on the bird are hard to photograph. A hole runs horizontally through the branch at the top for a cord. I tried hanging one of my painted birdhouse beads in the middle, but it was just too big. I'm going to try some tiny birds to hang from the birdhouses though.

Craft Podcasts

I'm enjoying listening to CraftCast, a series of podcasts recorded by Allison Lee. I only found these recently, so I'm catching up on the 40+ casts published so far. I find myself anxiously waiting through reviews of craft products and music selections to hear the inspiring artist interviews.

Many of the artists are jewelers, not surprising since Allison is a jeweler herself. I've had websites from precious metal clay artists Kate McKinnon and Celie Fago and polymer clay artist Elise Winters bookmarked for years, and it's really fun to hear them talk about their work verbally rather than just see the visuals.

Even with the jewelry influence, there is a broader range of topics addressed including interviews with television craft personalities, writers, collage artists, knitters, scrapbookers and even, most recently, a cake artist. Yesterday I listened to the backcast of an interview with Photoshop collage artist Maggie Taylor, whose work I had seen online before. I was prompted to go order her new book, Landscape of Dreams.

Please let me know of other interesting podcasts out there. I find these are really great to listen to while working on my own art!

Idea books 2

After spending several hours this weekend searching for photos that I've taken for inspiration, I've decided I need to organize those into a new book. I'm going to start with recent photos, because those are digital files on my computer and so easy to access. But I'm going to eventually go back through the piles and boxes of cactus and other flora photos that I've done over the years (that's what I was searching for!).

Gaudi dragon from Park Guell in Barcelona:

Arched walkway from Palace Real in Madrid:
Stone walls in Pompeii:
Looking down on Sorrento, Italy:

Joren with lemons in Pompeii:

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Idea books

Sketchbooks and sample books are source materials for artists everywhere. I recently sorted through a huge stack of old sketchbooks and journals and discarded many (blasphemy to some I'm sure). It was interesting to see that some were full of uninteresting random doodling, while others had page after page of intriguing sketches. Why??

I've been working recently to try to improve my use of these support materials. Maybe it's all the scientific training that makes my journals read like experiment logbooks. There's something to be said for assessing what I've done and planning what I will do, but the language nature of that approach is not as exciting as the visual experiments. Often the contents devolve to brain dump, a record of where I was and what interesting things I saw.

Recently, I've been trying to take a more proactive view of my journals and view them as a jumping off point. If I saw an interesting site, can I focus in on one idea and work from it as part of the record? On my recent trip to Europe, I tried to make time to do sketching and collaging in the journal I took along (very difficult at the pace we kept). I prepared some pages with quick watercolor washes beforehand, and carried watercolor pencils and crayons, markers, scissors and glue, and a sacrificial magazine. My favorite page is the pen sketch of Casa Batllo in Barcelona, with added color from Aquarelle crayons.
Now I'm planning to try this approach with enamel painted beads. I'll prepare a base bead and anneal it, then paint a wash background with enamel and fire in the kiln, then add a freehand pen sketch on top and fire again. Finally, I'll tweak the color with more enamel.

On the flights home from Minneapolis, I worked on electroforming sketches. Here are a few of the ideas currently in progress.

Inspiration Energy

Do you find that time away always provides inspiration energy? The trick for me is actually converting all those ideas into a few clear directions to focus on. I find myself bouncing mentally from idea to idea and it's easy to not really maximize the bounce in the studio, but squander it on household chores or small endeavors in too many directions. So I'm trying to choose a few areas to laser beam that energy into. I've reviewed all my journal notes and sketches and tried to summarize what I learned from my first venture to the Gathering.

My most important take home lessons:

1) Progress. Expect progress, not perfection. I tell this to my son all the time, and now I'm repeating it to myself. I can see the progress when I look backward, and I can visualize the progress when I look forward, but there are no shortcuts. I just need to do what I set for myself to get to where I want to go.

2) Focus. Use the energy. Try the new ideas. Combine the ideas into something new and personal.

3) Voice. I got such great feedback from so many people that it's easy to feel swayed by what captured the eyes of those viewers. But I know from experience that it's most important to make work that I love. Take their comments to heart, but then focus on my own voice.

What I'm working on, in response to my experiences and the distillation of those concepts of progress, focus and voice:

1) Electroforming. I got strongest feedback from the e-formed beads and vessels I took with me. More of those sold than any other style of work I do. I also have a clearer idea that my scientific background gives me a different perspective on the process of electroforming. I have a long list of experiments to run and I'm contemplating writing a different kind of article to submit -- one that explains more scientifically how and why things happen as they do. Glass beadmakers are used to a lot of technical information and I think they will be much less fearful and much more creative with the technique if they know more. And I will learn too! Once an experimental scientist, always an experimental scientist!!

2) Website. Many people at the Gathering asked about my website. I carefully warned everyone that it's in its infancy at the moment, but will soon grow. I'm lucky to have a computer guru in the house (DH) who will write code for me, if I will tell him all the details of what I want to see. I'm finding that it's much trickier than it looks to specify every little thing. There are only a few pages up and you'd be amazed at how many hours of time have been invested. There should be more soon! And I haven't even thought about the Fiber side of the website. I decided it was easier to start with just one, and glass is what I've been working on most lately.

3) Exposure. I was asked to submit photos and possibly articles about my work. This is something I know I should do, but I haven't yet done anything more than show some of my work in the gallery at Lampwork, Etc. So now I have a list of targets and will get serious about self-publicity.

Of course, there are all those other ideas as well, but in the interest of focus, I will start with these three and try not to go too far astray.