Back to My Roots

When people don't know what to draw or paint, I usually ask, "What did you love when you were about 10 years old?" Then I tell them to start with that. Going back to what you loved as a child--be it coloring books, finger paint, Play-Doh, mud pies, dandelion bracelets or any other child-like artistic expression--is good for the soul.

Folding ATC doll for PaperTraders "Winner Take All" June 2017 art lottery

I have been through a difficult time in my business life lately, and it put a big strain on my emotional state. So, I took my own advice and backpedaled to my childhood for some art fun. My favorite childhood thing to play with? Paper dolls. For the folding ATC doll above, I used royalty-free reprints of vintage paper doll parts from The Graphics Fairy. The 2.5" x 3.5" base (ATC, or Artist Trading Card) is made of a piece of vintage magazine text that was painted and stamped. The limbs are put together with mini brads, which allows the pieces to be posed and even interchanged with other dolls.

The face is an original that I made using the method from Jane Davenport's Beautiful Faces DVD. I scanned it, reduced it, printed it on card stock, and cut it out. Here's my step-by-step blogpost on how I created the face.

For a folding ATC doll, the rule is that all the extra pieces must tuck behind the base card. Here's what the doll looks like folded up:

ATC doll folded up to 2.5" x 3.5"

Continuing my "back to my roots" art theme, I used an old McCalls pattern piece as a base for a journal collage. As a young girl, teen, and into my 30s, I made many of my own clothes. I still have my favorite patterns from the early 1970s!  After applying (with matte medium) an old pattern as a base on my journal pages, I added some pretty ribbon, printed teabags, a handmade soy batik fabric strip and a mini piece of fiber-art for this two page spread in my art journal.

Art journal left and right spread with old sewing pattern as a base.

The third part of my latest "back to my roots" artistic journey was rediscovering my inner textile designer. In my early 20s, I studied textile/surface design at FIT and worked as a print stylist in New York's Garment Center for nearly 10 years. I "retired" for motherhood, then went into graphic design and writing as a career.

About five or six years ago, I took part in a SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) project called "Visioning" and designed and printed my own line of fabric. Many of them are available on Spoonflower.com.

While recently cleaning my bins and boxes of papers and art supplies, I stumbled on some prints of vintage French textiles that I had ripped from an interior design magazine. I was startled at how similar they were to some of the fabrics from my own line. It really had me wondering about reincarnation. The designs are dated 1941, and I wasn't born yet, so who knows?

I used the magazine print on the right side of my journal, and added strips of my fabrics as borders at the sides and top. On the left side, I created a fabric collage of scraps of my own fabrics that struck me as similar.

On my worktable: vintage textile designs on right, collage of my designs on the left.

Reproduction of textile designs dated 1941

My original fabrics, printed on cotton, bear a striking similarity to the vintage 1941 designs.

Dreaming of Fashion

I am really thrilled that my mixed media art quilt, “Dreaming of Fashion”, was included in the August/September issue of Quilting Arts Magazine. http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/quiltingarts/default.aspx It is from their “What If?” challenge, where they asked readers to think of a moment that changed their life, or what they might have done differently, or how a chance meeting might have changed their life, and translate the idea into a 12” x 12” art quilt. At first I thought about making a piece about moving from the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains (where I grew up) to New York City when I was 21 and doing a piece illustrating a car with luggage piled high on top and a cityscape in the distance. Then I thought about that moment in time a little more, and felt kind of angry that I didn’t go after my art dream until I was 21. My parents constantly gave me the message about not going into art as a career, saying I’d never find a job, I’d starve and that I should go into a practical field, like teaching or nursing. And my guidance counselor, when I suggested a state college that had an art program, said “oh, you don’t want to go there! They have a big drug problem!” So, I compromised—majoring in elementary education and minoring in art at another state school. By the time I finished student teaching, I knew elementary education was not for me. A college housemate mentioned FIT to me, and I discovered that they had a special one-year program for people who already had college degrees. It was affordable, AND it had a 97% job placement rate at the time. So, I eventually followed my heart and found an art career in textile design. My "What If?" artists statement said: What if…my parents had encouraged me to be an artist, instead of saying, “No! What kind of job can you get with an art degree?” What if they had known that there were schools where you could study for a career in creative design fields they had never heard of? What if my guidance counselor had told me about schools like RISD, Parsons or Pratt? Would I have become a fashion designer? Architect? Interior designer? Toy designer? Doll designer? Would my life have been different? Dreaming of Fashion shows me as a kid standing in the ocean. I loved to swim and spent every summer day at the local pool—not the ocean, but the ocean image seemed more magical than a chlorinated pool. The oversized, peculiar hat is a reference to kids playing dress-up; My sister taught me how to use the sewing machine when I was 11, and I made my own clothes through high school and college, so the floating dress form and scissors show my dream of fashion design. The attachment of the hands with brads is a tribute to my love of making art-paperdolls. I stamped the OM symbol on the hat and in the water because I am often anxious and panicky, and try to calm myself with breathing and visualization. I started the piece in Photoshop, and printed it out on cotton, then over-painted it. Originally I used my face from a photo at 10 years old—back when my fashion love started—but it was too murky, so I printed my college graduation photo on cotton, cut it out, and hand-stitched it over the messy 10 year old face. For the dress, I used fabrics that I designed myself as part of Studio Art Quilters Association’s Visioning Project, http://www.saqa.com/ led by Lisa Chipentine, which I printed at Spoonflower. http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome The dress is a homage to late 1960s-early 1970s fashions that I might have made back when I learned to sew. The vintage images of a crazy hat and dress form were used with permission from The Graphics Fairy, a wonderful online resource for all kinds of unique images.http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/ I used 100% cotton, hand and machine quilting, along with acrylic paint, watersoluble oil pastels, chalk, felt, paper and decorative brads.