Artist Perpetually in Progress

Website Revamp in Small Steps

Beth Robinson — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:44:06 +0000

If you visit my site you'll notice it looks different and there's a new section called "Gallery."

I've been wanting to completely revamp my website for a while now.

I finally gave up on that.

I am now aiming at incremental improvement.

The biggest step I wanted to take was putting a gallery of my art back on the site so that all the cool things I've created weren't buried in my blog but could be seen easily. I grouped some of my favorites into a gallery titled the First Four Years. I feel that there has been a significant break this summer, just a little over four years after I made my first completely original pieces of fiber art in late Spring of 2004. Whatever new work I do will likely be in some sort of series and get its own gallery.

The other thing I wanted to do was switch my site's appearance to Squarespace version 5. Squarespace is the online service that I use to host my site. The concept is similar to using Blogger or Wordpress.com but the abilities are much more extensive. A few months ago they completely rebuilt the site builder so that it's more intuitive and does some really cool things that were impossible before.

These two things I did, but I had wanted more. To switch to a custom appearance with a banner design that showcased some of my artwork. To have a few more galleries including sketchbooks and atcs. To finally construct a links section. To maybe even include some articles bringing together information on specific topics from previous blog entries.

Those parts didn't happen.

But I did take a couple steps forward and like the new look. It feels lighter and more airy to me.

Where am I going with my art?

Beth Robinson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:34:49 +0000

Still no art for various new reasons. (The most recent ripple spreads were actually done in August.) Still thinking.

I don't have anything driving me to my art right now except an itch to create. Yes, this is important, but when I move to fulfill it, I don't know where to go. I have to start asking myself questions. When that happens my brain kind of goes phbbbt at the desire to create with my hands and defaults to other lists of things to do and to the more intellectual projects that have specific goals. Goals speak louder than itches.

I want to make sure that I build into my life a means of expression different than my primarily verbal and analytical approach.

So I need goals if I want to get back into acting on thoughts of creating art. But what goals?

I decided that these are things I want to have on the about page of my website in October of next year, with appropriate links to projects completed or in progress.

My art is where my right brain plays. I work intuitively and abstractly in primarily tactile media such as stitch and collage. It is a counterweight to other parts of my life.
The overall impact of my larger works is planned to reflect how we each see only a portion of the truth.
I keep an additional creative outlet (insert specific) that travels easily.
I am building my skills at realism so I can better learn to see and so I can have a larger and stronger foundation on which to improvise.

So that leads me to two new questions.

How do I get from here to there?
How can I best blog to support my goals and share my journey?

Ripples Sketchbook Spreads 25-27

Beth Robinson — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:55:00 +0000

So I took a major departure in shape, but kept within my concept. What happens in ripples? Something expands from a particular point of origin. How else could I use that idea? We have two spiky, branching versions.

Then a failed circle movement trial. This REALLY didn't work. Then the growth of a snowflake.

These explorations into the undergrowth weren't satisfying me, so I went back to the core idea, except made it squares and diamonds. The first one was okay, so I did another with more irregular angular shapes.

This was an interesting digression, but I think I'll be going back to my circles now.

See the previous three spreads.

Not Much Art - Just a Short Ramble

Beth Robinson — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:43:22 +0000

I don't think I've made any art since before my last blog entry as my attention was fully absorbed with my Marketing class. Now I'm catching up on some household tasks that I've allowed to accumulate, such as selecting images to print from a three-month backlog of baby photos.

I've been thinking about art, though.

I have this tension in my mind between the art I want to make in an overarching way, that which feels meaningful and interesting, and the art I want to make on a daily business, that which is easy to reach for, but I don't always do so because it doesn't connect to a greater goal. And then I've been reading other books about the creative force in general and having a purpose or expression in mind, something I've often struggled with.

Today I took a day off, did a little resting, did a couple chores, and visited the new basketry exhibit at the Michener Art Museum. It was fantastic so see the variety of ways that the different artists intertwined and shaped their materials. There was a statue of a man made of twigs tied together with plastic ties - you know, those ones you pull tight and then have to cut off... There was a sweeping creation of bamboo, curling in on itself. There were baskets made trapped within other baskets.

I know I'll come to something that satisfies me. I know I'll choose something to create and carry it through, whether it's little or large, even though it won't quite be want I want my art to become in the future. It's just more difficult, nowadays, to find the focus and motivation to do so, when so much of my creative self is considering other matters than the work of my hands.

Ripples Sketchbook Spreads 22 to 24

Beth Robinson — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:41:33 +0000

As I moved forward in my moleskine I continued playing with color a bit, first going back to the elongated circles, which a friend thought looked like peacock feathers in the black and white version, and then trying a looser, sketchier style with the Art Stix, instead of the markers which I'd previously attempted. Neither enthused me.

So I took a little different path. I had been thinking about alphabets so I decided to try incorporating that idea into a page. I scattered the letters around and based the ripples coming out from them on the basic letter shape. Originally I had intended to extend the shapes all the way out, but partway through I decided it looked good where I was, but not quite finished. I filled in the area with light grey in colored pencil and that made the alphabet portion pop more.

Then I decided to follow up on William Lehman's idea of how the pattern reminded him of interlacing. This is only a very simple version, but interlacing and celtic knots have always boggled my mind as to how exactly you draw them. I drew the linking circles first, then filled the interiors in with rings. I have to think a lot more to develop this type of design and lose the "flow" feeling so will probably not continue with it.

In a couple different spreads I had made some of the lines uneven, so I took that idea further, by making them all wavy and adding more interest by changing the density of the line spacing. I like the scattered density effect but something about the entire pattern doesn't appeal to me. So I did a more organic version of the concept, with uneven edges and one expanding ripple reaching out with tendrils. It was fun, but didn't look like much until I added the color. Just coloring the amoeba wasn't quite right either, so I highlighted the other lines with just a hint of peach. This one turned out nicely.

See the previous three spreads.

Expanding on the Ripples Theme

Beth Robinson — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:06:56 +0000

My first watercolor based on the ripples motif. The entire composition is about 7"x10". I'd been wanting to see what would happen if I expanded my sketches into larger pieces and I had a bit of time the other night, so I gave it a try, basing it on my memory of the right hand side of spread 19.

I drew in the circles in the middle of the "river" first, so that I'd have a point of reference. Then I began to paint. I started with blue where I was expecting the "river" to be, but moved intutively from there. The difference in value on the two sides happened naturally at first, for example, and then I heightened the effect with additional paint.

After I let the first layer dry I began drawing. I put in the "river" boundaries with one fluid motion. I thought to play the pen work into the value differences of the watercolor by putting thin lines in the lighter section and thicker lines in the darker section.

The piece still looked incomplete after the drawing portion, so I went back in with the paints and highlighted the river with blue and the islands with yellow, pressing a paper towel into the wet paint to pick up some of the pigment and give the surface a little different texture.

I had fun and I'm happy with how it turned out. I need to keep working in the sketchbook if I want to meet my goal of filling it up, but I should probably continue looking for ways to pull the best compositions out into other works, especially ones where I can enhance the design with other media, like watercolor, stitching, or collage.

Ripples Sketchbook Spreads 19 to 21

Beth Robinson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:09:44 +0000

The first page was an attempt to take a looser approach with the pen. I was not pleased. It just looks sloppy to me. With the second page I returned to familiar ground in a different variation, some areas of circle spaced further apart and some with them closer together. The trick this time was the river boundary lines and then all of the dense circles had their center points on that boundary. This design appealed to me and seems like a finished composition.

I returned to color with the Prismacolor Art Stix - colored pencil in chunky stick format. These are similar to my previous work with markers, but more vivid. I involved area instead of just line on the left. It's fun, but there's too much going on. The page on the right looked a bit anemic next to all that color when it was just line, so I lightly shaded in one green circle set to serve as a focal point.

Then I wondered what would happen if you could see the ripples overlapping instead of having the lines cut off, so I went back to area, using a very light hand with the Stix. This is one of my favorite pages so far. The color scheme and final effect really appeal to me. I was inspired to return back to the colored markers and think the page on the right turned out nicely as well, although with a completely different feel to it.

See the previous three spreads.

Experiment on Perforated Paper

Beth Robinson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:18:10 +0000

This is as far as I will go on this piece, but the ideas will be transferred to another piece.

I hadn't stitched for a while and thought I'd play with perforated paper - cardstock-weight paper with holes punched in it at regular intervals. I decided to work within an ATC size piece, in this case a grid of 33 squares by 47 squares. The idea that came to mind was the branching patterns often found on oriental carpets, which I've sketched in the past. I also wanted to use a couple needlepoint stitches instead of just cross-stitches.

So I started the dark purple pattern, working back and forth in my mind so I'd have room for the counted elements and fit in the space available. I thought about a complementary corner pattern and border and filled in part of the background. I was enjoying myself.

Then I stopped and thought about it. Did I really want to finish this piece? Did I want to put all the time into finishing the pattern and stitching the background or I had I learned everything I was going to from it?

I decided to stop. The paper fully covered by stitching was nice, but it wasn't really my style. I really liked the pattern I developed, but the value differentiation and colors didn't really pop for me. I wondered what would happen if I painted the perforated paper and then added certain parts of the pattern. Could I collage on top of it or just with it? How would it look overlaid on a similar or contrasting color background?

I want to take another step and play some more.

Lady in Red and Green

Beth Robinson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:53:26 +0000

I expanded on the pattern on the dress of this lady cut from the collage sheets that come with Somerset Studio to create this piece, another 8"x10" on watercolor paper.

I chose the yellow paper to blend into the background of the dress and moved those two pieces around until I was pleased with the placement. I adhered them and used watercolor crayons to draw in the red and green triangles. I wet my brush to turn the scribbles into paint, then started poking holes for adding stitching.

I found out that the green blended in too much on top of the dress, which inspired the extra small red triangles, to make it obvious that the pattern overlapped the dress. I also needed to add the stitching on the blank paper or the whole thing looked too abrupt.

This was where I intended to stop, but the big white space in the upper right was just too overwhelming, so I took a grey pen and did some scribbled storytelling there. I like the look of the writing now that it's there.

Overall, though, I'm not thrilled with the piece. It's too involved to be minimal and yet not layered enough for my taste. It would look so much better on a complex cream background with different textures and colors peeping through. On the other hand, I fulfilled my objective of developing a work by extending a pattern from a collage image, so it was a worthwhile exercise.

Ripples Sketchbook Spreads 16 to 18

Beth Robinson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:59:53 +0000

I decided to try another page where the ripple pattern was contained within a shape. The butterfly worked really well, especially since I carefully chose where to put the origination points. Then I wondered what would happen if one ripple set off the other ripples as it expanded to touch the origination points. This page was my first try and I wasn't pleased with the effect.

For the second try I only expanded one origination point at a time, switching to a new one as the ripple I was working on touched it. The pattern turned out very different than the rest of the sketchbook and more appealing than the first version.

I visited the Michener Art Museum and took a closer look at one of the geometric based pieces of modern art. The patterns could have been used to fill the entire picture plane, but instead it made an irregular shape with less detail at the edges. I decided to try a version of that with the ripple pattern.

I thought the result was interesting enough that I tried two other variations, creating blank space in different parts of the picture to change the visual emphasis. I think I like the third one best, especially since it seems to have a three-dimensional effect to it.

See the previous three spreads.