Deadlines

From "share alike. Cotton statesymbolsusa.org"

Well, April 1st has come and gone. I'm counting what I accomplished, not what remains to be done.

Going down the list:
Etsy store is stocked, have enough merchandise to add two or three items daily through Mother's Day! Yeah!

Posting on a regular basis to the blog. Ready to return to Tuesday's Designer. This weekly post features other folks and their work in fine crafts.

Clear in my mind about the difference between my profile and company pages on Facebook and LinkedIn. Process for posting articles and links to groups and pages set up and working.

Web site for fine art set up. I've overcome the issues with photographing my work. Much of this is just coming to peace with the limitations of digital photography and viewing digital images on the internet. For me this is neither science nor art, just painful.

Haven't written much about this, but four of the eight pieces in the "Triangular Trade" series are worked out in my mind. Every artist has his or her own process for creating art. My fine art builds off of mental images and ideas. Sometimes I work through new techniques on smaller pieces or artifacts. Once I'm clear on what I want to do, I begin my research, tossing out stuff I won't use, adding mentally to what will become a single image to be sketched, over and over, until the sketch captures the complete thought.

Tobacco Plant

This series is about labor, human beings, commodities, global movement, and precious metals. The four pieces that are settled speak about cotton, indigo, rice and tobacco. All commodities that human beings were enslaved for and brought to the Americas to grow. This group of folks and these commodities have special meaning to me, but the series could easily tell the age old story of many folks and many commodities moved around the world to provide cheap labor and expensive materials for the benefit of others.

Indigo Plant From "learnnc.com"

The pieces will be created from a repurposed, heavy Israeli cotton comforter. The eight pieces have been dyed six or seven times in a random folded pattern. The fabric has been discharged once, but it is not as light as I would like, so the next step is discharging again.

I've decided on a pale green background. The previous dying will be shadowed and create some texture. After dyeing for the background, the fabric will be silk screened in a repetitive pattern based on a series of motifs designed from images of each commodity or crop that I've been collecting. These patterns will be printed with a metallic ink - gold, bronze, copper or silver. Commodities and metals.

Rice Growing

The hanging of this series is an integral part of the work. Each piece will hang from a piece of wood. (I've saved the trunks of last year's Christmas trees, so the wood will be pine. O, the piney woods of Georgia. Where much cotton, rice and indigo were once grown.)  The fabric will attach to the wood from slender crocheted tubes of the same metals - gold, bronze, copper and silver, knotted into nooses at both top of the wood and through the fabric.

I want the work to be visually beautiful, in the way that so much of what is ugly and painful, is today glossed over, rewritten, and sometimes just plain old lied about.

There is no deadline for this work. I find that art can't be rushed, it speaks it's own language and moves in it's own time.

So much for me, how is it going for you?