The day after.  Now I need to think about laundry, and soup,  and sleep.  But last night was fun.   Elements in the Landscape  looks fantastic.  In fact, I heard that exact word a number of times.  Two other shows in smaller galleries also opened last night.  The Tippecanoe Arts Federation estimated that between 150 and 175 people would attend between the hours of 6 and 8pm.  People were still coming in after 8pm, to total almost 250 attendees.

Since the process of making these pieces is relatively complicated and a bit unorthodox, I wrote a detailed explanation of the process, the focus of the show, and what I’ve learned by doing it.  I call all of that The Blurbiage.  But many people read all the way through it and asked questions.  I had some very interesting discussions with some of them.

I found it interesting that there was a lot of variety in pieces people liked best.  I overheard some of it, and some people made a point of telling me which their favourite was.  One piece that I think is slightly ominous looking struck another viewer as “calming”.  A handsome man, The Chair of Wabash College, talked to me about “Trains Over the Wabash” and how, looking at the foreground and background it was hard to decide which was which, and then that began to feel like he was looking back and forth through time:  was it a river?  or the memory of a river?

By 8:45, everyone had either left or been kicked out, so myself, the Gentleman Caller, the Younger, and the Gentleman Caller’s sisters and a niece all went out to celebrate and wind down a bit with drinks and snacks.  We finally staggered home.

I will be taking proper studio shots of the work, but for now, here are some snapshots.

view to the right as you come through the door

view to the left as you come through the door

"Only I Still Remember The Rooms In This House

The Blurbiage. I didn't realise until the event that these free hanging fabric panels were hung directly in the draft of the A/C system... They waved like flags.

They say that as you begin to become fluent in a foreign language, you start to dream in that language.  Well, last night I dreamed in Photoshop.  I was wandering in some sort of narrative, in some sort of landscape.  There was unrest, some people in it were in trouble.  I got involved in the situation and understood what the problem was, and I was the person charged with dealing with the trouble.  Somehow, in that way of dreams, I knew I had to get back to my world, which, in that way of dreams, I did.  I wrote three verses, which were also, or really, spells.  Then I cut and pasted them into the narrative and landscape where they were needed. In the dream I had  to use Photoshop to accomplish the required action.  Don’t ask me how this works; for that I’d need to talk to Neal Stevenson.

Although the dream didn’t take place in either of these specific landscapes, they exist in the same world as part of that dream.

geese and fire

towers on the Wabash

Elements in the Landscape is taking shape.  Here’s a quickie snap of the most heavily stitched piece so far:

Eve and Prometheus

detail

And I’m watering the garden.  This growing season has gotten off to a rough start – long, cool, wet spring (delightful, great for peony season, but not so swell for tomatoes and such) followed by a slamming heat wave that killed some things off.  Even tomatoes, because they’d only  just been set out and the wee baby plants just fried in weather that they weren’t supposed to encounter til July, when they were bigger.  We’ve enjoyed herbs, even basil, for some weeks, but the first tomatoes are only just beginning to form.  But the cukes are exploding!  Yesterday I picked the first cucumbers.  I love cucumbers, and home-grown are the best – lots of flavour, and you can pick ‘em small.  Diced, they made a lovely addition to a potato and ham salad that was already pretty fabulous.

The thriving cucumber vines (and my shadow)

nascent cucumbers.... soooo many of them!

Wow…  The long summer evening here is LOVELY.  So I have abandoned my sewing machine and come out to the patio to snip threads.  Because, much as I would like to find a way to approve of all the dangling bits of thread festooned across the surface of the work, I really really can’t.

goose with stitching

Creating images for Elements in the Landscape has become a fascinating game:  I have different sets of nice, but fairly straightforward photographs — river scenes, abandoned built structures, fruits and berries, birds, and so on.  Flipping through them, playing with what will juxtapose well, monkeying with colour and transparency, and then refining a promising image feels a bit like playing with a deck of cards.

I remember summer afternoons when, as a kid, I would sit on the wood floor in the living room, curtains drawn and a fan blowing (no air conditioning), playing solitaire.  Shuffling the cards, stacking them, turning them over, slapping them down, seeing the patterns emerge.  It was a very sensory experience: visual, aural, tactile, in a house redolent with summer.  I have never ever felt the appeal of playing solitaire on the computer because it lacks all that, so it’s surprising to me that playing with images on the computer should evoke handling a deck of cards.

Mabey it’s more like playing with a tarot deck because not only are there patterns; out of the patterns a story begins to emerge.

This one made me think of Northfork, one of the two best movies of 2003.

Robins Dreaming of Houseboats

In her wonderful book, Home Is My Garden, Dorothy Hammond Innes writes about her husband, Ralph (Hammond Innes) inventing a very special Christmas punch, Mull-Innes:  “A good wine to start with , and the right additions of liqueur and brandy…The year he perfected it we had a friend staying in the house who was extremely interested in wine and had a fine cellar.  I went into the kitchen where they were tasting it, drawn by the gorgeous smell.  Our friend, putting down his glass, was saying: ‘It’s very smooth now, Ralph, almost perfection.  Do you think… if you  just showed it the brandy once more…?’ ”

Well, I often get to that point when making textile art (without the comfort of a glass of the stuff).  I’ve been stitching on one of my Elements in the Landscape pieces and am wondering… what if I just showed it the brandy, er.. the sewing machine, once more…?

Berries on the Wabash: original photographs, photoshopped, printed on silk, machine stitched. 20"x13"

Detail.

My Printer and I have been dating for a few months now.  Sometimes things go better, sometimes we hit a rough patch.  I’ve learned more about him; I try to understand.  I’ve learned how to best position the paper, or other substrate, for optimal feed.  I’ve learned that after setting up a new print size, to test it with a very pale grey-toned print on paper so’s not to waste ink, patience, and silk to learn that I have missed a fine point in communication with the lad.

I have now set up and tested the two sizes I need for the coming work, 21x 12 inches, and 11×24 inches.  I’ve also learned that while a paper print — even on ordinary copy paper — comes out fairly true to the colour on my monitor, printing out the same print on silk results in an extremely dulled down print that’s rather dark.  So for the final prints I kick up the digital image to a point just short of garish.  And remind myself that I will be stitching back into the print which changes the image anyway.

I hope that having worked hard to understand him on his terms, to learn the quirks of his anatomy, and even bought him presents (band name new cartridges at a gazillion dollars a pop), I will be able to rely on his brawn and prowess as I start producing prints.

Here are two images for test prints:

...but this one worked with the silk.

This looked fine on paper...

Photoshop is a fractious beast.  I thought I had one process down pat — Diffuse Glow.  It gives a cool, ghostly glow to images with the right balance of darks and lights.  Sooo…  I tried to use it tonight.  Ugh.  It had acquired an unhealthy, mouldy, luminescence — creeping crud under a black light.  Trial and error, trial and error… Frustration all ’round.

Finally I figured it out.  To work the way I had expected it to work you must set the little foreground/background boxes set on black and white.  Because of something I had done earlier, the foreground box was a teal-ish blue.

fluorescing creeping crud...

the silvery opulent ghostliness I was trying for

This one is a fascinating layering of images that I’m pretty excited about.  Misty fall day…

Found this flaming maple last early fall in Shades State Park