A Good Nose for a Deal

One of my favorite book characters is an antiques dealer named Lovejoy, described as a “divvy”, someone who can tell instinctively when an antique is real. He gets a kind of vibe about a piece and has been known to sniff out a real Chippendale in a barn full of broken junk and fleamarket trash, fierce in his pursuit of those treasures lovingly crafted by masters of old.

I am an inveterate antiques hunter and committed fleamarket hound. My experience has been that many a treasure can be had by those willing to wade through boxes and bags on someone's front lawn or prowl through the back room of a dusty barn. I found my first Jenny Lind bed (also known as a spool bed) leaning against a stack of old doors in the farthest dim recesses of a Vermont shed. The owner couldn't believe that I would pay him $75 for it! But refinished and primly dressed in my finest handmade quilt, that little frame was a beauty-- so charmingly authentic. I may not be an actual divvy but I do have a nose for what might be hiding in the most unlikely place. I've sprinkled this narrative with some winners from past hunting.

One of the casualties of this so-called summer, caused by frequent deluges of biblical proportions, have been weekend outdoor fleamarkets and yard sales. Spurred by reports of fabulous finds by other blogger friends, when Sunday's weather predicted only the possibility of a thunderstorm, we hopped in the van and sped off to Waterbury, VT to a large outdoor venue. I've both bought and sold there and I usually discover at least one wonderful find special enough to make my visit worthwhile. But the place was practically deserted! Woe! The weather was finally hot and sunny and should have been teeming with buyers and fleas but except for one table of so-so vintage costume jewelry, it was mostly used cassette tapes, tools and limp produce. But something told me to take another look at the costume jewelry.

My persistence was rewarded with a funky little copper and bronze bracelet. It looked handcrafted and had a nice patina. The emblems were soldered but the rest was cold-connected. I got it for $7. The vendor told me it was a signed piece and sure enough, in a little oval on the back was “MB SF”.

Copper and Bronze Marjorie Baer bracelet

When I got home I found out that “MB” stood for Marjorie Baer, a San Francisco designer who has been making jewelry since the early 60s. Her work is very collectable and I found many examples of it on Ebay, going for lots more than I paid! So I'm very happy with my one find of the summer (so far).

I may not be a true divvy but I do have a good nose for a deal.

Be Kind to Your Muse

This past week I was madly scrambling to get two designs done for a magazine deadline. This was the first time I was going it alone to submit my work to a major beading venue and the necklaces had to be at the FedEx pickup box by Monday afternoon at 5:00 pm. Everything was going wrong—first, the US Postal Service “missent”(their official term for “lost”) my 2nd day air package, so I was lacking the supplies I needed to finish. The design that looked so good on paper failed dismally when it was translated into three dimensions. A technical problem was stymieing all attempts to make my seedbead strands hang properly. Design Hell! No time to step back and think about my poor pieces overnight—no time to tweak, re-do, enhance, embellish. "They're good enough" I had to say -- "just get 'em in the mail!"

Some lessons you can't learn too many times--“Be kind to your Muse” is one of these.

No matter what kind of urgent and immovable deadlines you may have, bludgeoning your poor Muse doesn't work! Ever! I thought I had learned that back in college, when I'd have a really great idea for a paper and then wait until the last bloody minute to write it. All-nighters never quite produce the result when you have to force your creativity to meet your deadline.

Polymer Clay Daily posted a quote by Tory Hughes a few days ago-- here's the part that applies: “Playing and creating are very close together.” To play is to dance with your Muse. Dragging your Muse onto the dance floor leads to effort and struggle and ultimately--failure. I don't mean to say that you should give up if an idea isn't working--keep on trying but give yourself time and be open to a different way of doing it. When I was a potter, the phrase going around the studio at school was “Let the clay tell you what it wants to be”. Let your Muse tell you if she wants to tango or to waltz. Or to sit this one out. Go ahead and push your materials in new directions and to new ideas but also let them show you the way.

Along the same lines, making do with less or other than what you intended to use can turn design dross into gold. When I designed mostly in fiber, I used this forced creativity principal all the time. I would find expensive or vintage materials, piece them into garments with less costly fabrics and come out with a much more creative and interesting result. But be warned--one very important factor in the successful application of this principal of being more creative with less is TIME. You can't rush this, you can't be doing your project last-minute or the stress factor is off the charts! Be kind to yourself AND to your Muse. You just can't rush good design! Let me say this again-- good design takes time! I have learned this the hard way and just lately in the above-mentioned projects.

In the end, the deadline passed and I decided that the pieces weren't up to my standard. Instead, I played with them some more and the Muse rewarded me with gold. I've submitted them elsewhere and I'll keep you posted on their progress. No matter what happens, I'm proud of my work now that my Muse and I are in step once again.

Here are a few pieces that happened when I just let myself play. Thanks to Lorri Scott for her fabulous fibers!

Lascaux Necklace

Kalahari Necklace

Lazy Days of Summer

For folks in parts of the country where the weather is not characterized as “ten months of winter and two months of bad sledding” as it is in the fair state of Vermont, summer can possibly be described as “lazy”.

But warmer temps here mean a frenzy of activity, not only for farmers, housepainters and construction crews, but for the plants of the northeastern habitat. A riot of green-- both of forest and fields-- brought on by spring rains and relative warmth means that every little fern, weed, tree and wildflower is doing its best to fertilize, seed, blossom and fruit in the short, sunny days of July and August.

So as much as my summer designing palette would like to draw from the soft, ocean hues of aquamarine, and the beachy whites and sandy colors of the seashore, this year I'm drawn to hot, fecund colors that shout life and hectic activity!

Papeete necklace - available in my Etsy shop

So after trekking to my nearest Borders store last week to purchase Ronna Sarvas Weltman's new book “Ancient Modern” I sat down with my coffee looking for a few good ideas, my criteria for feeling justified in spending money on a new craft book. My dollars were amply justified-- it's got ideas and techniques to spare! There are many I could wax rhapsodic about but one of the very simplest got my attention this week-- marbeling with hot colors.

I love intense colors but don't normally use “hot” colors-- fuchsia, orange, yellow, red-- without blending to tone them down. Also, I find it difficult to work in neutrals or strict black and white themes, finding the extreme contrasts too modern for my style to stand alone. But as guests to the party of color, I love nice, contrasty graphic elements. I was so inspired by Ms. Weltman's color aesthetic that I decided to throw caution to the winds! Looking more closely at the method, the marbeling tempers the intensity of the colors by laying them closely together and partially blends them, so you still have the intensity but also new combinations. Also, the added white clay makes the colors appear brighter. Here's what I did with her palette. She points out that using a hot color next to more subdued ones can make an entire compostion sing.

Sands of Mars necklace

Stay tuned for more Ancient Modern influences in future posts. Thank you, Ronna, for a great book!

Re-Inventing the Wheel

Re-inventing the wheel-- it's amusing that this phrase should have such a negative connotation in our society because, as artists, that's what we're constantly doing-- re-inventing, changing, deconstructing, enhancing, making it our own.

Just like adding a bit more salt to a recipe, or a tad more lemon or a teensy smidge more cayenne, tweaking what you started out with is the essence of an artist's creative voice. Why would you EVER want to do it like someone else?? We are unique and our work reflects that very uniqueness in every way that we express ourselves, be it painting, dance, playing an instrument, singing, poetry-- the entire range of human expression.

My favorite TV addiction for the summer is the show So You Think You Can Dance, where 20 super-talented young dancers compete for national glory and professional recognition. The range of dance styles is impressive and every individual has their own unique way of expressing joy in movement. A far cry from my sister's ballet school recitals-- a straggly line of little girls in sequined tutus all struggling to keep their steps in sync with each other to the scratchy music of an off-stage record player. Not a lot of room for dance interpretation there!

Nor do most occupations in our lives as working people support innovation, hence the phrase and its implication. So we should celebrate that in our art we have found a space in the world where all fetters to our self-expression are thrown to the wind! We should tell ourselves, "Today I'm going to re-invent the heck out of that wheel and I guarantee what I come up with is going to be all mine!"

Last week I showed you the beads I was working on for the Art Bead Scene June challenge, interpreting a Kandinsky watercolor. Sometimes making the beads is the easy part. Although I had a pretty well-formed idea for using them in the finished piece, I developed a flat and had to get out the tire iron, the jack and then call AAA in my re-invention of that particular wheel! But after road-testing it (excuse the excess of automobile metaphors) around my own neck, I decided to re-design it for better balance and composition and I'm liking the final result.










Someone whose work I greatly admire for its unique quality of invention is that of Gris Bleu, a French clayer. I never visit her site that I am not completely enlivened by her playful interpretation of color and form. Nodding over my first cup of coffee this morning at 5:00 am, I was inspired by her newest beads and thought of a better idea to make my next set of Kandinsky beads easier to string. I highly recommend perusing her blog as a way to jog you out of any creative rut you might be in. Lots to see here and it's especially instructive to look through her blog archives to see the progression of her ideas and work.

Color Is The Keyboard

Last week I referenced Michelle Ward's blog and her Challenge to MIYO -- “Make It Your Own”. There is just so much gold in her post that I decided to expand on some of her ideas today, making them my own, as it were.

It's June and the Art Bead Scene has posted another challenge to create a jewelry design using an art bead with a painting as the inspiration. I've been doing these Challenges since January and am amassing a nice body of work. I feel they are definitely more stimulating than anything I did in art school and I try to push myself by spending real quality time on the projects. This time it's Kandinsky's "Farbstudie Quadrate" (Color Study of Squares) and I'm doing a little research on the artist, his body of work and his artistic philosophy.

One of Michelle's points in her “Evolution of an Idea” is: Study -- figure out what it is that has gotten your attention? Color? Composition? Kandinsky, a Russian Expressionist and considered the first true abstract artist, went through several periods in his artistic life and I must say that I admire his 1911-1913 period the most for the ferocious energy of his brushstrokes and riot of colors.

"Angel of the Last Judgement" - 1911

But the task is to interpret this painting and as I suggested in my previous post, limiting your materials or, in this case-- your inspiration to just one work out of the dozens by any artist that you could choose – will force you to really look and start to appreciate what the artist was trying to express in that particular piece. So what got my attention about this watercolor study was the energy that Kandinsky creates by making the circles imperfect. They are in nice, square little boxes but they are not round, symmetrical orbs, they are edgy, torn, and random in color, size, and design. For Kandinsky, subject matter was irrelevant-- he thought the effect of the object interferred with that of the color, reducing its impact. Now I love circles but disintegrating circles are even better!

So for this project I decided to go with the idea of the deconstructed colored circles. I've explored the crackle technique I learned from the French blog Parole de Pate quite a bit in my work -- it's a technique that delivers color in an unpredictable way that I like. As with the mokume gane technique that's my favorite, you never know exactly what you'll get. It's like dancing with chance, an opportunity to break the bonds of technical perfection that too often become an end in themselves for polymer clay artists.

"Out of Africa" beads - in my Etsy shop

My spin--how I make it my own--for the crackle technique is to consistently reproduce the crackle effect with the colors I want, rather than simply using leftover canes and dried-out clay of random colors. I also make donuts with it, little cosmic rings of color. This is what I decided to go for with the Kandinsky circles. I think they ended up looking a bit like enamel work-- didn't expect that! Once I get the rest of these sanded and buffed, the necklace design is the next challenge!



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My scholarly source says that Kandinsky was not only a painter but an art theorist, and believed that color, stripped of its associations [with form] communicated something essential about the underlying laws of the Universe. He said, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings."

Necessity is a Mother

As an artist, I should celebrate that all my life I've had to make-do with whatever I had on hand as far as the art supplies and materials necessary to create. Invention is usually driven by necessity or the need to solve a problem. And the ability to problem-solve is possibly the greatest force for creativity in the artist's toolbox.

For instance, you don't have that really cool tie-dyed silk ribbon you saw on Etsy to string your pendant? So you rummage through your stash of fabric scraps, tear yourself a strip and dip-dye it with some alcohol inks from your clay supplies, make some interesting wire- and yarn-wraps around it and finish it off with a handforged silver charm or two. Voila! It's not only more creative but it's totally your own.

After reading a great blog post this week from Michelle Ward http://michelleward.typepad.com/how_cool_is_that/ on MIYO - “making it your own”, I realized that solving an artistic “problem” by limiting/re-thinking your resources is one of the best ways to do this. How many times have you polymer clay artists out there come up with an incredible effect after re-purposing some kitchen item you've scavenged as a texture tool? Or used to make a mold that you'll never see in an online store?


For me, this is the lure of the found object-- it's often cheap, it can change its personality to suit your needs, it has history, it's unusual and one-of-a-kind. What other art material can offer so much? I NEVER refer to found objects as junk or junque-- they're valid materials as much as oil paint or silk cord or silver beads.

Potential

Sometimes I visit my favorite “decay” photostreams on Flickr—Rot Squad or Rust Rules-- for a color/texture idea (I did tell you I was the Queen of Rust!) to jog me out of a design rut. Sometimes it's the creative promise in a big pile of brand-new Premo clay or a little forest of Ranger inks. Or bags and bags of silver beads from Jatayu, my current favorite go-to for silver components. It's the raw “potential” that gets me excited-- the “what-can-I make-with-this?” feeling, creative energy at its juicy best.

I love getting supplies in the mail-- which, living in rural Vermont, is usually the only way I can get specialized stuff. I always forget what I've ordered online so it's like Christmas in May when I grab my paring knife and slice into the packing tape. Yesterday my order from Whole Lotta Whimsy arrived with some new Ranger alcohol inks so I had to try them all out immediately. Color waits for no woman!

I'm still having fun with the ink/mica powders connection and came up with some work yesterday that has some potential. Not everything works out the first time but hey, if it did, it wouldn't be any fun and I would probably miss out on some interesting accidents!

"Quiet Spaces" necklace - available in my Etsy shop