Bougainvillea and Palm Trees

It's easy to find inspiration when it's eighty degrees, summer drink at hand, watching lizards climb the walls as breezes blow through palm fronds. Left behind is the snow  which dusted the 300 foot driveway, icy roads, cold drafts combatted with endless sweaters. Well, for a while anyway. Makes me want to move, immediately.

Packed some goodies to play with, above. Tomorrow I sketch, hopefully by the pool as the little lizards scamper around for our benefit. I'll post my progress with this project as it unfolds. I'm exhausted with all the traveling. Time to catch some shut-eye and hopefully a dream or two of bougainvillea spilling over stucco walls.

Catching Dragons

 

It's been a busy week but I have spent some time in the studio and have designed and completed my donation piece for SAQA's Spotlight silent auction at the April convention in Santa Fe. It started above with a tracing which shows the outer edge and the inner mat edge. This is an excerpt from my original drawing of a dragon. It isn't always easy for me to think small. The total for these pieces has to be 6" x 8", miniscule by comparison to what I have been doing.

 

I charged in at the beginning of the week with the upper piece. The background of the dragon who is in flight, is the moon. I took my first impression as a literal one, using a hand dye pastel which was primarily white/grey. Working from there, I chose greens and oranges to flesh out the dragon. But I just felt something was missing. I am the color queen and it just did not ring true to my vision. So I changed it up with a yellow/orange/green hand dye and began fleshing out the dragon in purples, blues and hot pinks. Above you can see the contrast of the two pieces.

By Thursday night when I went to bed I had accomplished well over half of the work. As you can see above, the colors now have a vibrancy which is a hallmark of my artwork. I chose this segment of the original drawing because it was so hard to make out what it was. I do not often do anything non-representational. This piece is as close as I like to come to abstracted visuals. If you step back from the piece you may see many different things going on, not just the twists of a dragons tail, a bit of his wing and the moon. I love that the viewer can create his own story and maybe imagine the rest of the dragon.

 

CATCH A DRAGON'S TAIL

6" x 8"

January 2013

Commercial hand dyed fabric and batik fabric

Machine stitched

Here is the finished piece. Keep in mind only the owner will be able to see the whole piece if she wants to if removed from the frame. as it will be matted and 3/4 of an inch all around will be lost under the mat. 

I was so happy to have completed my piece for SAQA that I treated myself to a day at the salon. I NEVER go to a salon. I usually cut my own hair, do my own nails etc. But the rust in our well water was mucking with the whiteness of my hair and I thought I needed professional help. As we will be traveling to see Tony's mom in Florida soon, I splurged. My hair is now white again, my toes are salmon pink and I have a great styled cut. It was a good week in the studio and I am now focusing on the 12" x 12" piece I will be doing for the SAQA auction.

I will be bringing some playthings with me to Florida. I will have my iPad and hope to pick up wifi at the hotel so I can keep in touch. I will have a sketchpad, tissue, some pre-fused fabrics, pre-cut backing/batting pieces, scissors and some pins. With the help of the hotel iron and board, I hope to be able to put together a small piece or two and then finish them up on my machine when I get home. This will keep me designing with fabrics while I am away from the studio. I did this once before in New Mexico with great results. So while Tony is on the golf course, I will not only be sunning by the pool but having some fun with fabrics as well.

Tony got me a new toy for Christmas, an iPad. More technology for the techno-impaired old lady, evidenced by the smirk above. Took this picture with the iPad this afternoon to use it as my profile photo on my new linkedin account, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nancy-turbitt/63/785/780. I am so bad at this though that I could not figure out how to transfer the photo to blogspot or even at least to my pictures in my computer. Somehow the photo went directly to linkedin without first being saved to my photos in the iPad. I figured out a way to transfer the photos from the iPad to my pictures in the hp last week. I don't think it's the right way though. Well, I got creative with my profile picture as it's too late to call my daughter to find out how. I printed an enlargement of the profile pic, scanned it into my computer and voila, here it is. Bit grainy and there are a few issues with lines. Humph!

Sometimes I wonder where the whole world is spinning to. MY HEAD sure is spinning. I'm not sure why we need all this technology, but it seems that we all do. I have a new app for drawing and designing which is why I wanted the iPad in the first place. It is helping me block colors out over a drawing which will help me in choosing colors for a quilt.  Learning to draw on a computer is an art in itself. I suppose I will get better at it with a lot of practice.

So with all this playing on the iPad, I have jumped into social media in a big way. I have had a facebook account for over two years now, but as of today I have added Twitter(@nancy_turbitt) and Linkedin. You can find me all over the place now. Why exactly anyone would want to is still a mystery to me but I am being followed. Tomorrow I think I will just sew. Seems boring with all this media frenzy, I know, but I'm still just happiest sitting at my sewing machine.    

New Resolutions

Thankfully the holiday season is over. And I have been spending time in my studio. I'm trying to take stock of where I am and where I am going, as one often does in the beginning of a new year. So in the moments when I just can't see anymore lines of thread and I just can't do anymore on "Mermaids", I move over to another spot in the studio and am compiling a scrapbook/diary of my drawings which have been intended for becoming quilts. In the writing I am forcing myself to see which ones have potential and which ones will never be completed or expanded upon in any way. 

Above are my pages on my work for "Peter's World", which I started a while ago but left as I ran into snags. At the time I was hand stitching, which I never do anymore. In the lower left you can see my first attempt at piecing and above is the drawing of Peter. In my writing about this piece; what it has meant to me and how my thoughts have changed about how to implement it, I have decided to put it on my list of drawings that I must revisit. I now, years later, have a better idea of how to go about making this come to life. And so it is going on the list of pieces that must get done and not forgotten. 

I am such a strange bird that sometimes I wonder how I am viewed by other artists. Most of my life has been about finding balance. This has always been an important concept for me. I have striven to try to find balance in life but have not always succeeded. My artistic self has often suffered being at the low end of the scale. But I think part of the struggle to even off the scales is in realizing that in the span of a life, sometimes things come later and not sooner. It's a balance of it's own. And so as I now am considering what seems to be the beginning of my retirement from working outside the home and the relaxing of my duties as Mom, I can tip the artistic scales to high. I have done over 50 drawings specifically intended as major pieces. Only a handful have been completed. I intend to change this statistic. As New Years resolutions go, this is a big one and I have been trying to force it's beginning for a few years now. But finally, I think the time is right.  

Wildly Wonderful

As a continuance of my previous post:

And my art? That will always be the wildly wonderful. A three month breather from stress and work was just what I needed to slide back into my little purple chair in front of the Bernina. A break to the wrist of your predominant arm is a scary thing when you use your hands for your art. About a month and a half after the break, I became strong enough to sew again. But it wasn't just all about the sewing. It was like coming to life again in the bright sun after being stuck in a fog for a very long time.

Buttons, lots of them! Tony and I took a small trip in August to our favorite vacation spot on Cape Cod for a couple of days. The Wellfleet drive-in theater is known for it's flea market on Sundays and there was this very large jar of buttons calling my name. You can see a few bakolite ones that were in it, probably by mistake, as a man sold it to me cheaply without his wife around. I love using buttons on my quilts, so this was a no-brainer. I started sorting by color in between exercising my wrist. Then we went to Brimfield in early September. More buttons. One large jar and a huge cookie tin full for only $20. So I must say a large part of my time at home was spent sorting buttons by color, cleaning them, and cutting old thread off of them then putting them into separate jars. This process started warming me up to get the creative juices flowing again.

I started looking around on line again. I had stopped just about everything having to do with creativity sometime around last year's holiday season. Checking out other people's progress with their art was making me feel a bit of a failure instead of spurning me on to work harder as it has before. My first stop was the SAQA website. I had missed the auction. Felt bad about that as I would have like to send in a piece to sell and contribute. But I was just in time to find out about SAQA's next convention which is in one of my favorite places in all of the US, Santa Fe, NM.

As you can see from the massive grin, my last visit there in May of 2004 was a happy one. I visited with a friend and her husband for 10 days and took in a lot of what New Mexico has to offer. Here I am standing in front of the statue on Museum Hill in Santa Fe. I took so many pictures with the lighting being so special there and the landscape, ruins, and architecture all so intriguing and different to this New Englander. Below is a photo of ruins from Pueblo Bonito. Shapes, shadows and lines are so interesting.

So without so much as the blink of an eye, I registered and paid for my spot at the next SAQA Convention. I have a room booked for 8 days and planned to rent a car so I can get around to more of the sights I missed in the last visit. Now with my job gone, I'm not sure how this is going to happen. A trip like this costs so much money. I may have to use money saved up in a 401K while working at the card store, or scrap the trip entirely. Just knowing that the convention was in NM was such a rush for me when I found out that my excitement level for all things art quilt rose exponentially. I took out a quilt started over a year ago that was based on a photo taken in Santa Fe and began working on it again. It will be the next post I make here as I am working to finish it. 

As I became increasingly stronger through the efforts of my Physical Therapist, Vickie, I felt an urge to express it, and she had shown an interest in what I do in the studio, so:

ANGEL
8" X 10 1/2"
September 2012
Machine stitched in commercial dyed cotton, buttons.
Collection of Victoria Moitoso

And I couldn't do this just for her when it was the surgeon, Dr. Lee, who put me back together in the first place, and both of these health professionals work in the same office:

MASTER OF HANDS

10 3/4" x 14 1/2"

October, 2012

Machine stitched in commercial dyed cotton and silk 

with ceramic beads, buttons and found objects.

Collection of Dr. Lawrence Lee

These two pieces were the first work in the studio I had done in months. While not my best endeavors, they were a key part of my getting excited again in the studio.

On a bit of a roll I decided to finish off a small quilt I started a while back which was inspired by my cousin's love of bee keeping. Judi was having a birthday and her daughter planned a surprise party for her. I just had to finish it and give it to her:

BEE KEEPER
13 3/4" X 13 3/4"
Finished October, 2012
Machine and hand stitched in commercial dyed cotton and organza with buttons.
Collection of Judi Membrino Madulka

So these few baby steps have helped me to find my way back into the studio. In a few weeks I will have much more time to work on my art. I am hoping for a good balance of work in the studio, work with my husband, caring for our home and plenty of time to enjoy life. 

 
 

  

Powerful Forces

There it is on the left side of my photo - the broken right wrist. I slipped in cat vomit in the middle of the night three days after the fourth of July. They say, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I don't know if I believe that. But what I do know is that in my case, it was sort of a gift or blessing, from God or the universe or my angels. Whatever. It stopped me cold in my tracks and changed the course of my and my family's life. I believe that blessings can come in any form; wildly wonderful or sometimes painful. I got a little of both. In this post I will talk a bit about the painful. Let me explain.

For five years prior to the wrist event, I have been trying to climb high enough in my retail position to afford Tony (husband) and I a little bit of ease and security. I have had many "day" jobs in my life. With a college major in fine art procured in the 70's, jobs/careers were limited. I started out as an artist in the art department of a silk screen company. Then my kids came along and the computer took over where my old job used to be. When the kids were in school I found employment for a used kid's clothing store. It was the perfect fit for a young mother. Later, and after my divorce, I found myself caring for my Mother at home. It wasn't until she passed on that I had to take stock of where I was in life and what I had to offer. I thought of going back to school for culinary arts but it was expensive and the schedules conflicted with my being a single Mom. So I found myself turning to retail and started working in a family owned fabric store. It was a great fit, however, the economy and life happened. They went out of business. So I sort of backed in to a job at the card store part time and decided to ride it out and try to move up. I did. I finally became a merchandising manager full time with the benefits my husband and I really needed. However, having a job you need to have doesn't always equate with the needs of the employer.

I really am just an artist at heart, a good Mom with some life skills but no real training in either retail merchandising or management. I was never meant to be a corporate climber. As the economy started to tank, my position became harder and harder. With less payroll available, those in management were being expected to do everything, seamlessly, quickly, and without error. Some people call this multi-tasking. I call it a recipe for a heart attack. From the end of January last year until my spill in the cat puke, I have little recollection of anything at all. I was working so hard - long hours, little sleep and a lot of stress. My studio was like a dream of another life. But I was providing for us, and thankfully I had the health insurance to cover the more than $35,000 it cost to fix my bones. What would we have done without this insurance.

Then I recovered. Having had a summer to recoup the bones and do a lot of thinking, I began to realize just how impossible my situation had become. I was looking at job listings often, feeling incompetent and developing a hopeless dread. There is nothing out there for me, calling my name; nothing I have the skills or experience to do without training. I had to return to my job with the cards. Tony needed me to suck it up and go back, after all, he works so hard that I just had to contribute. Needless to say, when I got back to the job it was overwhelming. My head was spinning every day as I tried to keep up and I was making mistakes that I never had before. I had stepped back into their busiest season and my boss had no patience for my flaws. Two days ago she asked me for my resignation. As if divorce is not enough to have dealt with in my lifetime, I now have another deep-seeded feeling of failure. It's taken me two days just to stop crying, not because I loved this job, because I was depending on it to survive.  And depression is creeping in to stay for a while; I feel it like the tickle at the back of your throat that lasts all winter long.

So you may wonder why I said something about blessings at the start of this post. Well, hard as it may be, I think this may be one of God's lesson "blessings" and may have saved my life. The stress was killing me inch by inch and day by day, driving my blood pressure to dangerous heights. I would have dropped before I quit. Tony and I still have quite a bit of stress as we try to figure out how to make up for this serious cut to our budget, but I have every faith that with both of us working together, we will get what we need. We will tighten our belts, remove the unnecessary, reevaluate everything and come up with a new list of need vs. want. Tony has wanted to develop his business for quite some time now, (he is a jewelry repair and custom design artist,) but as his work IS his hands he has never had the time. I have always looked externally to find that paycheck and the benefits that we need. But now I am thinking that two heads are better than one. I am going to step into the business with Tony and try to fill the holes and help him expand his business. Hopefully this will bring us what we need to survive and it may help take the stress away from him as well.

Life is such a mystery. We are never to old to realize that change happens and usually happens for a reason. It's a hard change for us this time, the dust hasn't yet settled. There are bound to be more issues to deal with, difficult decisions to make and there may be sleepless nights of another sort, but at least, this seems to be the right path finally and not just one taken out of fear or lack. We just need to keep ourselves healthy and open and learn to roll with it. 

As heavy and dark as this post was, my next one will be much lighter. After all, life provides the good along with the difficult. My blog has suffered under my suffocating job. Perhaps now I will be more able to communicate my progress in my art, as there may actually be time to create progress in my art. Hope springs eternal!

  

Expanding

Some times things just pop into my head at the strangest times. I'm used to having lingering dreams about quilts I want to create. Sometimes I dream that they are already complete and hanging. I've already had a solo show in my dreams. It was bitchin'!

Yesterday I was just hanging out on my day off, minding my own business when along comes this image into my mind of a huge dragon. Boom, there it is. So I set about drawing it. It's nowhere near complete but after giving it a day I think this idea is a keeper. Fits in with my other illustrated figures; mermaids, medusa, fairy tale wolves and now a dragon. I'm seeing it big too, like the others - almost square but not, probably about 6.5' x 8'. I've just expanded to 4 solid quilts in the works; the beginning of my body of work. We all know that 10 is the magic number. It's a start. No, come to think of it, I'm right in the midst not the start. Feeling good about that.

Mermaids is coming along well. I'm plodding along like a snail but making progress. We flung ourselves into the fourth and busiest quarter at work. I'm setting out Christmas shelves daily, lifting heavy boxes, dragging wooden shelves all over the place. Coming home exhausted. But in the studio I'm plodding, at least an hour a day. I aim to stitch all the pieces on "Mermaids," draw out the quilting lines and then start putting together "Medusa." Once I have the three quilts all set up, I'll concentrate on the quilting. Hopefully this will keep my stitching similar from one to another of the quilts. Tomorrow I have a whole day to play in the studio. :)