Redefined

What happened to my 2008 New Years resolutions?

1. Send my cat to an eating disorder clinic for her bulemia.

At the end of May, Katya spiraled into self-destruction and had to be treated by the vet for damage to her esophagus resulting from sticking her claw down her throat. We turned to professional help and ended up being featured on an episode of the TV show Intervention. At that time, Katya agreed to rehab. She spent eight weeks at the Idaho Center for Feline Regurgitation and seemed to be getting better, but she had a relapse in October that required another rehab stint. Since then, she has earned a coin for being barf-free for one month and has gained 6 ounces. We have hope that she will continue her recovery.

2. Write another blog entry that becomes as successful as Top Ten Reasons for Becoming an Artist. Maybe I should write one called Top Ten Reasons for NOT Becoming an Artist, but I don't think it would deter anyone from becoming one. Lack of money usually does that after a few years anyway.

A couple of my posts have become quite popular. They are How I make my fiber sculptures and How I make my quilts 3D.  Why I wrote those posts, I have no idea. After all, I'm just teaching other people how to be my competition. I really must have my head examined.

3. Finally get an entry accepted into Quilt National, damn it.

I thought I entered some of my best work into QN this year, consisting of Splashed, Dispensed and Laced. Unfortunately, I didn't get accepted into the show. I didn't get into Visions either. Damn it.

4. Transform my body into Carmen Electra's, but without her taste in husbands.

What can I say? Personal trainers take one look at me and run away in horror.

5. Add a couple of rooms to my studio, including a wet studio for painting and dyeing, plus a large, climate-controlled storage room for the finished work that's piling up. However, adding extra rooms might be a problem since my studio is in the basement. Maybe I could dig a secret tunnel through the wall using a sharpened spoon and carve out a few underground caverns.

To save some digging, I created a small tunnel over to the neighbor's basement and have secretly occupied their laundry room. My husband created a false wall to fool them into thinking that they only have two rooms down there, not three. Their clothes are getting a little stinky, though.

6. Take down all the traditional quilts displayed in my house. I made them almost 15 years ago, when I first started quilting. I think I can do better now. I've just been too lazy to make something to replace them.

Um, is it the end of the year yet? Do I still have time to do this?

7. Reconnect with all the people I should have sent replies to months and months ago. Yes, I dropped off the face of the earth, but that's no excuse not to send a friendly email every now and then from my current location, wherever that is.

I have a few people who I owe emails, but for the most part, I've caught up.

8. Get dressed earlier in the day.

Define "dressed".

9. Be  discovered by a Big Name gallery owner or museum curator. I want to be the hottest ticket on the block, right after Jeff Koons and Grandma Moses. Offers for solo shows will rain down upon my shoulders and I will need to hire several cute young men to assist me with my paperwork. My work will sell for millions of dollars.

Every bit of this happened exactly the way I planned and it was done by June. At that time, I revised this goal to include being Master of the Art World. I'm now up to five young male assistants and I'm not really sure how much paperwork several of them actually do.

10. Did I mention Carmen Elektra's figure? Change that to Halle Berry's. Same caveat about the husbands, though.

Did you know that "quilting" is also known as "reverse aerobics"?

Breaking my end-of-year curse

For the past several years, a strange pattern has developed in my art career. From January to about August, a lot of things seem to go right for me. I get accepted into juried exhibits, invited to be in invitationals, offered solo shows and so on. Then from the end of the summer until the end of December, it all dries up. I can't seem to find anybody to take my work, even though I've been burning incense and dancing the Exhibit Dance around roaring bonfires like all artists are supposed to do. I don't know why this pattern has been happening, but I think the curse has finally been broken.

Today, I received a phone call from the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. One of my works was accepted into their International Juried Show, which is probably the top all-media exhibit in the U.S. today. The juror, Adelina Vlas, who is the Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, chose 80 works from 1600 entries and Unmatched was one of them. Now I expect the two sides of my brain will begin fighting as to whether I should attend the opening or not. I have to admit that it's very tempting.

Conceptual craft

I have always had difficulty categorizing my work. In fact, when someone asks me what kind of art I create, I just hand them one of my brochures and let them make up their own mind. I find that so much easier than saying I'm a quilter because everyone has an image in mind of what a quilt is, namely a blanket with block designs like their grandmother made. Even if someone knows what an art quilt is, that doesn't help because what I create is so different from what other art quilters make. I finally started to call myself a conceptual artist, for lack of a better term. Sometimes I call myself a sculptor, but since I also make wall hung work, that doesn't always apply.

Recently, I've read about a new category of art that is called conceptual craft or conceptually-based craft. It is being made by artists who work in what are considered to be traditional craft mediums, but who create fine art with it instead. The concept is the important thing, not the functional or decorative qualities. So, is what I make fine art or or fine craft? As the prominent painter, Roger Shimomura, once said about my work, "There is a split second of non-recognition of what I'm looking at, which should be taken as a compliment given all the things I have looked at and evaluated in my life. You sit right on that dangerous border between art & craft and I respect that stance." So, I guess it's both and it's neither.

Miniature artwork

Here's a gratuitous picture of a new work that I've thrown in to make this post a little less boring. This whole piece is only 8" square and is destined for a traveling exhibit for SAQA's 20th anniversary. It is a non-juried exhibit and will travel for a while, then be given to the International Quilt Study Center for their collection. I don't need that particular line on my résumé because the IQSC already owns a quilt of mine, but I made this as a challenge to myself. I wanted to see if I could make a miniature artwork that was 2D and still reflected my style. When the organizers receive it, they will mat and frame it, so I didn't even need to finish the edges. I even have a second long, skinny quilt like the one I used here that I will make into an artwork for me to keep, although I will probably make the overall size 8" x 10" instead.