But, if I want to be serious about art (and I do!), I’ll need skills and knowledge that I don’t have.  My training is in science, and my professional experience is in business/organizing software projects; I don’t have any background in art or art history, color theory, or any of the ancillary skills that I believe would be helpful in creating the kind of work I’m after.  I can develop those skills and get that education, no problem: my problem is figuring out what to study.  My education is woefully deficient in these areas – the school I went to didn’t have a single class in art (unless you count a how-to course on silkscreening), so not only do I not know anything, I don’t even have a good idea of what’s out there.

I don’t mean to denigrate my skills, by the way – I’ve worked hard to get a fundamental understanding of weaving, and I understand a fair amount about fiber arts in general.  But I don’t think that that alone will get me “over the top”.  So I am struggling to figure out what tools might be useful.

Obviously, this would be easier if I had a good idea of where I was going.  (In that respect, Kubota had it easy: he knew what he was after when he started his fifteen years of hard work and study.)  I don’t.  I believe this is something I will only find out as I learn and grow, and that’s the hard part: bumbling along while I figure out what suits me best as an artist.

I do know a few things.  I know that my medium will probably combine two or more of the fiber arts.  I know it will involve color, since I like using color.  It will be fine, detailed work, because that’s what I’m drawn to.  I’d like it to contain representational art, which makes much more “sense” to me than abstract art.  And it is most likely to involve weaving, dyeing, and/or some sort of surface design.

That’s pretty general, but it’s a starting place.  The most obvious deficiencies, if we’re talking about representational art, is that I can neither draw nor paint anything representational.  I can do simple things – I once spent an hour sketching a poison oak leaf, and the results were pretty good – but complex things like the human figure are beyond me.  So I have a choice between studying drawing and/or painting, or restricting myself to things that don’t involve freehand drawing.  I think I need to study drawing.

I also think I need to study color and light.  The book on Kubota’s work mentions that he was strongly influenced by Impressionist painters and their use of light.  I’ve seen Impressionist paintings and I haven’t the foggiest clue what the book meant by that.  I think I need to understand how color and light interact to form the “feel” of a piece.  So I’ll add that to my education list.

And, of course, I’ll need to understand weaving.  I do have ideas of what to pursue in that vein; obviously I can’t study everything, but there are a few areas that seriously interest me, and I’ll start there.

Outside of that, I don’t know what would be useful.  So I am curious: if you were me, where would you start?  And, any recommendations for a jumping-off point in drawing/painting, art history, and color theory?

plaster mold for my dress forms

I wish I had photos of the intermediate stages, but here’s what’s been happening the past few days:

1. Mike wraps me in wet plaster bandage.
2. Before it sets completely, cut up center front and center back.  Remove cast.
3. Let cast dry for a couple of days.
4. Using a tapestry needle and button/upholstery thread, sew the two halves of the cast together.
5. “Tape” together the sewn edges using more plaster bandage, first perpendicular to and then parallel to the cuts.
6. Seal up the armholes with more plaster bandage.
7. Through the neck and bottom openings, smear the entire inside cavity with paste wax (as a mold release agent).
8. Seal up the neck with more plaster bandage

And voila! the sculpture you see above.

Tomorrow I’ll start pouring the foam.  This is 3-pound foam, so one cubic foot weighs 3 pounds.  I have a two-gallon kit of foam, which should be plenty for two dress forms.  I probably won’t finish pouring foam until Saturday, though – you have to do the stuff in layers – and after that, I’ll remove it from the plaster mold (hopefully not damaging it too much in the process), sand/rasp down the dress form to the correct measurements, and mount it on the stand.  There are actually more steps, but I’m omitting them for the sake of brevity…I expect this project to take up a good chunk of the weekend.

Wedding-dress-wise, I’ve sewn together and finished all the seams of the second lining.  Tomorrow morning and/or Saturday, I’m going to sew on the pearls, and then on Sunday I’m going off to Sharon’s again, so we can work on dress and coat together.

Itchiku Kubota was a Japanese artist who used brush painting and various forms of resist dyeing on silk to create fabulously beautiful kimono.  (This is roughly like saying Van Gogh was a guy who used a brush with oil paints on canvas.)  I first became aware of his work when I was visiting a friend and happened to glance through a copy of Smithsonian, the Smithsonian Institute’s magazine.  In it was an article about Kubota, and photos of the most beautiful textile creation I had ever seen.  I took one look and said, “I have seen the face of God”.

Possibly a little over-dramatic, but I mean it: in that kimono, I saw the face of my Muse, and the kind of work I would spend the rest of my life striving to create.  Kubota’s work, at first glance, is a gloriously beautiful dyed piece.  But as you move closer up, you can see the incredible detail of his work: tiny shibori stitches, delicately brush-painted flowers, flowing shades of dye.  What I love about his work is that it is complex and detailed- you gain more by seeing it closer and closer, and one piece has enough to keep you occupied for a long time.

A Google image search produces quite a few of his works, but the particular one that convinced me I’d seen the face of God is this one:

"Burning Sun" kimono by Itchiku Kubota

The photo doesn’t do it justice, though: it was the closeup that made me gasp.  A better idea might be gotten by looking at this kimono:

another kimono by Itchiku Kubota

(click through for the larger version)

At any rate, Kubota for me signifies what I seek in my work: harmony of color, incredible detail, perfect workmanship, and a broad sweep of ambition: his Symphony of Light series was meant to be 80 kimonos, but he died after the completion of only 40.  His son and his atelier continue his work today.  (A single kimono is so intricate that it can easily take a year to complete.)

Kubota’s work also represents dedication.  He spent nearly fifteen years researching and experimenting with dyes before producing his first kimono.  He started his atelier at age 44, but it wasn’t until he was 60 that he had his first show, with a relatively simple version of the kimono you see above.  He studied many different arts to produce his work.  It is that singleminded dedication, that commitment to follow the Muse, that I strive for in my work.  I will probably never achieve his mastery, but on my deathbed, I’ll still be trying.

The other thing that catches my eye about Kubota’s work is its level of detail.  If I have a single criticism of American fiber artistry, it is that it tends to lack detail.  It’s made for speed, in a land of bustling efficiency and instant gratification.  I don’t see the level of focus needed to achieve mastery; that Olympian-athlete attitude, patient and eager both at once, that creates true masterworks.  I wonder if my focus comes from my Asian heritage (which would be funny, since I don’t think of myself as particularly Asian).  The book on Kubota reads,

Kubota spent more than twenty years attempting to perfect his version of tsujigahana, and during that time he did not show his work publicly.  In 1980, he said, “Those years were a succession of experiments in dyeing, of failures and disappointments, with a new method conceived from the very next day and a new start made from scratch.”  This perseverance when confronted with repeated failure was one of Kubota’s strengths; it was reinforced by the fact that he learned his meticulous and time-consuming craft in the Japanese apprenticeship system.  As an apprentice, he would have developed patience while kinesthetically absorbing technique; neither the idea of efficiency nor the concept of “short cuts” exists in the world of traditional Japanese crafts.

My observation of Japanese crafts, such as origami and Japanese knitting, is that they have a level of intricacy and detail that is seldom found in American craft.  I’m not saying that it’s universally true: the origami work of Robert Lang and John Montroll is precise and beautiful, and there are certainly American knitters who do intricate knitting, tapestry weavers that work in fine detail.  But as a whole, American craft strikes me as larger-scale, lacking the detail and delicacy that I see in Asian art.  It has its strengths in other areas, but it is Asian art that most inspires me.  Kubota expresses the Muse with incredible power and delicacy, and it is his spirit and dedication that I aspire to in my work.

Well, the CAD Exchange just had its Feb 15 article exchange, and I was so excited on reading the first few articles that I immediately got up and wrote my contribution for August 15.  I posted it to the CAD mailing list, and then thought that some of you might be interested in it as well.

So here’s my article on using Photoshop to simulate colors in weaving.  It’s really more about simulating warps/wefts with gradual color changes, a la my Ocean Sunset shawl or Liquid Fire, but it might have some interesting applications to other structures/color changes.  I haven’t really explored this further, but perhaps I  should!

I should warn you that the article is about 3.5 MB, so it’s pretty big – but worth reading anyway, I hope!  It’s mostly color photos, which accounts for the file size.

At this point I’ve written enough articles and snippets that I’m seriously considering creating a “Publications” section of my website – seems like it would make things a lot easier to find!

No, I don’t have a plaster fetish.  (Really.)  Instead, we were preparing to cast a dress form using the instructions in the My Twin Dressform manual.  First you make a plaster cast of your torso and let it dry.  Then you fill the plaster cast with plastic resin foam, and presto! a Fantastic Plastic Person.

Since I was complaining recently that there needed to be three of me, I think I’m going to cast two Fantastic Plastic Tiens from the mold Mike and I just made.  The first one can go to work, the second can work on the dress, and I’ll just kick back and weave. 

No, seriously.  I will need to display both coat and dress, so I’m making two dress forms.  For display purposes, I’m going to cover them in black stretch velvet for maximum visual impact.  After that, when they become “working” forms, I’ll cover them in something less dramatic, like a rib knit.

Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful day.  I finished sewing down the back lace, and sewed down the pearls around the neck edge of the bodice.  I had exactly as many pearls as were needed to complete the neck edge – good thing I didn’t lose any more of them!  I will use the new pearls on the body of the sleeves, and on the back of the dress.  I don’t think the difference will be noticeable there.

I also finished hemming both sleeves, and started clipping the too-tight stitches out of the hem.  Tomorrow morning I’ll go at it in earnest, to see what can be saved.  Redoing one row of stitches will cost me about three hours, which is about 2/3 of a weekday’s work – annoying, but not nearly as disastrous as I was thinking earlier.  So hopefully I can get the hem fixed tomorrow.  That will free me to work on the second lining the rest of the week.

I am also starting to design the wedding invitations.  I had wanted to set them up with woven double-happiness symbols, but I’m running out of time for that (somehow time seems to be getting away from me lately!).  The dress probably won’t be done until the beginning of April, precisely when  the invitations should really go out.  I could probably warp up the loom at lightspeed once the dress is done, and bang out the invitations, but I’m not sure I feel like working under any more time pressure!  Once the dress is done, I plan to kick back and relax for at least a week.  (OK, well, maybe just a couple of days.  I’m not very good at doing nothing!)

At any rate, the rapid sweep of time means I need to start thinking about designing the invitations.  I figure I can do that in my spare time, when I’m sick of working on the dress.