One Hundred

My recent work with Claire Benn at the Crow Barn was inspiring and informative, as usual, and I returned home with lots of new techniques, and Claire’s voice in my head. The first week we were in “free fall” and worked with a scroll that she gave us. I detailed the process of free fall in a previous post. Here is the finished product for me from that week:

I’m happy with the movement of this piece, and I learned an awful lot about how to work with acrylics, which I both hate and love. I don’t like what it does to the hand of the fabric, making it feel like rubber, but my god it is so easy to work with–no batching, very little prep, etc. And of course, there’s the issue of having white, which you don’t have with dye or thickened dye or earth pigments.

The second week with Claire was more difficult for me, and there were moments of anger and sadness, even tears! This was the week we were supposed to “work with intent,” and I had lots of intent. I won’t go into all the ideas I had, but let’s just say there were too many, and none of them were really working out as I hoped the first couple of days. I remembered what the French poet Mallarme supposedly once said to the painter Degas when he complained that he didn’t understand why he couldn’t write successful poems since he had “so many ideas.” Mallarme reminded him that poems were written with words, not ideas. I realized that my eyes were bigger than my “hand” if you will, and that I simply didn’t yet have the technique I needed to accomplish what was in my head.

After much hand wringing and many failed attempts to bring about my ideas with thickened dye, I picked up a needle nose bottle, filled it with with black thickened dye and began scribbling on fabric. If nothing else, I thought, I’ll master the needle nose. It felt familiar, like a pen or pencil. After experimenting with the thickness of the dye, the pressure and slant of the needle nose, I wondered what would happen if I wrote across pleated fabric. I started folding the fabric in various ways, scribbling across it and opening it up to reveal broken words and phrases that looked, oddly enough, like runes. I tried this in various ways, most of them unsuccessful, but then:

This happened. And then this:

I was happy with these two, and when I did my final presentation to the group I noted that I felt confident I could bring this technique of needle nose work and pleating back to my studio and develop it more fully and perhaps with more complexity. Claire approved and gave me the order to make 100 of these. She had given the same assignment to Nancy Crow when she was learning how to monoprint. According to Claire, Nancy had been complaining she didn’t get this monoprinting and Claire reminded her of how long it had taken her (Nancy) to learn how to cut fabric without a ruler. “Make 100 of them,” Claire said. A few months later, again according to Claire, Nancy called to tell her she had made 100. She subsequently published a book of the best of these. Claire reckons I’ll wind up with 20 that are just ok, 20 that are wonderful, and, well, who knows about the rest.

And I’m happy to have found a technique that includes my love of fragmentation as well as an acknowledgement of my work as a writer.

So here are the first two of a hundred. Stay tuned.