Ispirato

I was interviewed recently for the Aussie Scrapbooking site. Gabbie asked me to send a photo of my studio - it didn’t matter if it was messy, she said. Yikes! Because my sister Vonnie was visiting at the time, I had to clear the craft stuff out of the guest bedroom and stack it temporarily in the studio. So here is the room at its worst.

Trouble is, even when the room is at its best, there is far too much stuff in there. It ain’t conducive to working creatively. In fact, I probably spend more time looking for stuff and trying to sort and tidy than I actually spend creating art.

I’ve learned a new term for an overabundance of art and craft stuff. It is ‘SABLE’ - ‘Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy’.

Now I want you to check out the sign on the window above my desk. This is my new artist’s creed.

It is good to have this posted at my workspace. It really does make me pause and think about how I am approaching a project.

My friends are complaining that my blog DESPERATELY needs updating. Okay, I’m sorry! I’ve been distracted.

At left is a picture of me with my big sister Vonnie who came over from Marshfield, Wisconsin to Melbourne to visit me. You first met Vonnie and her quilting buddy, Gwen, in this post nearly a year ago, about my trip to the US.

So Vonnie wanted to visit in late May and I told her she could come so long as she didn’t distract me from the job of finishing up issue 6 of Astarte’s Mega-Zine with its publication date of June 1st. She had no problem with that, in fact, she needed time here to finish a big quilt she had started for my queen size bed. So while I worked at the computer, Vonnie sat nearby working at my sewing machine. In fact, she made dinner for my family every night, too! The arrangement worked wonderfully and we both completed our big tasks at around the same time.

This quilt is amazing. Vonnie has a great eye for color and her stitching is great! (When I’ve attempted smaller patchwork projects I’m not so good at getting the seams to line up correctly.) I have so much respect for quilt makers. Each big quilt takes hours and hours to complete. Yowzah!

So, okay, we didn’t just stay at home stitching and laying out the mega-zine full time. Vonnie also came along to my Goddess Mythology class, my meditation class, and she helped me when I taught a felt jewelry class at the Embroiderers Guild of Victoria one Saturday afternoon. Plus she got to meet a few of my friends while here. That was special.

So here you can see my beautiful bed. The framed picture behind is an embroidery I did years ago of an angel flying toward the moon. Vonnie designed the cushions and pillowcases to match the colors of the picture and the plum feature wall. Very clever, and quite possibly the best gift George and I have ever received.

Finally I have taken the time to turn my conjoined twin mermaids, cut out of my copy of the collaborative book mentioned in this previous post into a paper doll. I have just added the arms holding onto mirrors.

The conjoined mermaids are now my 36th art doll in the 100 Art-Dolls-Challenge that Arrigo and I are undertaking at the MyArtSelf.com blog.

A few years ago I saw a cloth doll from a softies maker that was conjoined twin girls. I loved it. Adored it. It is one of those handmade items that your mind keeps going back to. I wish I’d bought it, in hindsite, but it was pretty expensive. I’ve wanted to do something similar ever since.

Symbolically, conjoined twins remind us of the polarities that operate in our own personalities. The mirrors held by these mermaids symbolize the adage “Know Thyself”. This doll reminds me to look closely at who I am - not just the aspects I like, but the shadow parts, too.

Well, my last post attracted a few comments, eh?! Here is a big thank you for your empathy!

I bear the moderator of that group no ill feelings, by the way. She has made her apology for the manner in which I was given the boot … and I think she did me a favor by making me sit up and pay attention.
No more collaborative projects for me, but I ain’t giving up papercrafts! At Paperific I bought some Stampin’ Up! stamps and have had a ball making cards. Example at left.

And there is a free project sheet with card making project ideas - you can download it for free from Go-Make-Art’s homepage.

This is a sorrowful tale of rejection and humiliation. Of sadness and shame. But if you read to the end you will find there’s a happy ending.

I was kicked out of a collaborative book group on the grounds that my two submissions had attracted “considerable negative feedback” from other members.

Ouch.

CHAPTER ONE

At left you can see my first submission to “The Crown Book”. There was no theme for this book, we just had to work on a specific shape. I took that to mean we could create a page in any style. So this is what I did with my page.

In a collaborative book swap you make multiple identical pages, then send them to the host, who re-assembles the pages into books that get re-distributed to all the participants.

I liked my page. And as there was no theme, I took the opportunity to say “be daring and different”. At the time I had just wound-up my art stamp business after years of making art samples using my stamps. At last I was free to create art anyway I liked - not just using the stamp images my company sold. I could sing with my own voice and get back to that child-like non-conformity. I felt really free and happy about this and I really like this simple happy girl (who, okay, happens to be me, but that wasn’t important) and the quote because it was so relevant to me at the time.

When the others in the collaborative book swap received their books in the mail, apparently they did not share in my enthusiasm for this page. I guess they later discussed it amongst themselves. But no one told me how they felt. I wish they had.

When I received my compiled crown book, I liked some of the pages from the other artists. I thought other pages were poorly executed or lacked solid design principles. Most of the pages had an image of a woman or girl cut from a vintage photo or a painting and glued to the background. Some had wings and crowns collaged on. Mainly there was an overuse of embellishments that detracted from the focal image. So I was disappointed in about a third of the pages. But I didn’t tell anyone. As the book had a spiral wire binding, I just removed the pages I didn’t like and threw them away. I felt a little guilty about doing that. And I decided that maybe this collaborative group I’d been invited to join, wasn’t actually my scene. Should I quit?

CHAPTER TWO

The group moderator sent out an email announcing a new collaborative book project, “The Mermaid’s Tale”. I love mermaids. I decided to give the group one more shot. We were sent eight die-cut pages in the shape of a mermaid/fish tail to use as pages. We needed to decorate them all the same, as before with the crown book. This time we had a sea theme, of course and were given a blue and green color scheme.

I wanted to use the tail shape creatively and came up with the idea of fitting a mermaid head into each side of the fin, then a shared torso and mermaid tail to create mermaids who were conjoined twins. I made the tail and the mermaids’ hair with textured impasto and painted them with Lumiere paints and I drew the faces and features with pen highlighted with chalks. It was quite a production to make eight pages, but I was pleased with the result. Then I added some text at the side which was supposed to look like the text you see in a box on a comic book page, but my pen was too thick and I wasn’t as thrilled about that as I’d been with the mermaids.

I shipped off my pages on schedule. After a delay, because others held up the process, I got my compiled book in the mail.
My page was on top. Yes, I loved the mermaids and still disliked that pen I used for the text. Then I looked at the other pages. Hmmm. There were elements I liked about some of them, but I’m sorry to say there wasn’t a single page in the whole book that I thought really worked as a piece of decorative art . Overall, this was more disappointing than the crown book. I am sure the women who participated in this swap have talent, but it wasn’t really showing on these pages. I wondered if the tail shape of the page had something to do with it.
And then it dawned on me: Each artist used a cut-out photo or painted image of a woman or mermaid. The members of this group weren’t really stretching themselves to create art in a unique, personal style. They were all cutting up other artists’ photos or art and pasting them into new compositions. It was as if they were all trying to use the same style. Was that a rule in this group, that I had somehow missed? You had to use collage?
AN ASIDE:

Now I love Lynn Whipple’s Ninnies and Claudine Helmuth’s Poppets. Teesha Moore and Lynne Perella - magic. These artists have each developed their own unique artistic styles, instantly recognisable. Yes, they all work in collage, using photos. I love their work. I respect what they do because they are the trend-setters. And their works tell stories. And every element on a page is selected and placed with care to compliment the whole effect.

And I don’t mean to put anyone off the more common, currently popular style of collage where you combine pictures of girls with butterfly wings and party hats. I’ve done it myself and it is fun. But if you want to stretch yourself, and if you want to “assert imaginative vision” push beyond. Don’t settle for being a “creature of the commonplace” or a “slave of the ordinary”.
CHAPTER THREE

I came home from my week in Ballarat to find two emails from the group moderator - first, a personal one to me: My work in the crown book and the mermaids tale book had attracted negative feedback and there was no other way to handle it but to remove me from the group.

Then there was the email she sent to the entire group: She was “applying a clean broom”, getting rid of those of us who were “below par”. The other members who worked within the rules had a right to play in a “safe environment”. So to ensure the valued members didn’t quit the group, she was removing those of us who were the worst, and giving warnings to the others who were merely mediocre.

Of course I was in the category of “out you go”.

Oh the shame. Oh the embarrassment.

I had been planning to quietly leave the group because the work coming from most others was of a low standard. And it turned out that the group thought MY standard of work was so low; so very, very low, that they wanted to GET RID OF ME, with trumpets and fanfare.

Can you imagine how painful that was?

I looked at my work with a critical eye. I was prepared to believe that it was true. Yes, it quite possibly was crap. Regardless of what I felt about the other group members’ work, my own work fell short of the mark. Maybe they took my crown book page for scrapbooking (crapbooking). Maybe the mermaid page was absolutely horrible. Maybe I sucked as a papercraft artist, always had done, and for years no one had ever had the guts to tell me.

I threw the Crown Book and the Mermaid’s Tale book into the rubbish bin. But not before I first removed my own pages. They might’ve been crap, but they were my crap and I liked them anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR (this is the happy ending bit)

When I got over my grief, I came to some important conclusions, that are now typed out and posted above my desk:

• I make art the way I want to make art … even if it is lousy art.
  
• My art shall be tied to my soul; not my ego.
  
• As I start to create, I set this intention: I work in my own artistic style.

I am grateful for this humbling experience because it forced me to look hard at how and why I make art. I was pretty stupid, not to notice that the other members were all working in a similar style. If I’d paid closer attention, I might have fallen into the trap of making imitative collage art … which would have been entertaining, yet would have distracted me from doing what I really want to do as an artist.

So here is a promise: I will never join a collaborative book project or swap again.

Never ever.

Last week I escaped the real world and attended a residential art retreat, Fibres Ballarat. There were 170 of us living-in at Ballarat Grammar plus a number of locals who lived-out. Classes ranged from basketry, felt hat making, felt jewellery, tin jewellery, etching, machine embroidery, machine embellishing, garment making, banner making and my class of choice: book binding.

 My tutor was Sandy Webster of the US. She has taught in Australia several times and came highly recommended. I was not disappointed! Fantastic, generous with information and attention - this is a great teacher and artist.

Our class project was a book with a cover that wrapped around it like a box . Tucked into the book pages are several smaller projects - mini-books, paper toys and interactive mechanisms. Very cool. That’s my book spine getting stitched at left.

We also took on personal projects and you can read about my ‘Inanna’ project at my other blog, myartself.com as it was a book in combination with paper art dolls.

I have been attending Fibre Forums like this one for several years now and it is like being reunited with my sisters. I’ve forged many friendships and we have a good time both in and out of our classes. There are social activities like the cocktail party which raises funds to provide scholarships to these events. Here I am on the far left - one of the Cocktail Queens. We make ‘em and serve ‘em. Our natty fascinators are pretty bra cups. Would you have guessed? That’s Nonie, Robyn (the amazing Chief Beverage Designer) and one of my oldest, dearest friends, Jane - who lives in Sydney and often comments on this blog!

We could’ve done with more make-up and fewer double chins in this photo. But heck, we’re all smiling and isn’t that really what matters most?

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Many of my blog readers will know that I run Australia’s greatest papercraft expo, Melbourne Paperific in October every year. For 2008 I decided to add a March Paperific to the calendar. It seemed like a good idea when I announced the dates five months ago, but with a shorter lead-up time to plan this big event, it was really quite nerve-racking. It had more than its fair-share of organizational hiccups and there were days when I just wanted to turn back the clock and say, “FORGET THE MARCH EXPO! I CHANGED MY MIND!”

Well, thank goodness I didn’t do that.

We have had a FANTASTIC expo at the Caulfield Racecourse with lots of happy customers and exhibitors. Very, very happy.
I also have the BEST front entrance staff, enabling me to break away and spend quality time catching up with people at the show, and even taking in a little papercraft shopping myself.

There is a buzz of excitement at a craft show that you just don’t find when you are in a craft shop. I think gathering so many creative people in one place just automatically raises the spiritual vibration. And people are more likely to engage in conversation with strangers at craft shows than in a normal shop. Did I mention the retail therapy? There’s unbeatable retail therapy, too.

We need to support our local craft shops all year ’round. And even the little shops have to admit that craft shows like Paperific are actually good booster injections for the whole craft industry.
Back in October I wrote this blog post about our one (and only) Paperific at the Pavilion in Docklands which had a lot of ‘venue issues’. It was better attended and cost less to put on, so was more financially rewarding for me. But the venue issues caused a bit of angst, especially for older customers who didn’t like to be crowded.

No grumbles this weekend, though. Bigger, brighter aisles have meant people cope better on the crowded stands. Good soul stuff happening. Very, very happy at the expo.

Benedictine monk Bede, writing in the  8^th century, suggests the name “Easter” was adopted for the Christian holiday as it had been the name applied the spring equinox, which in turn had been named for the Saxon goddess Eostre.

Other authors, including Barbara G. Walker in “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets” suggest the name Eostre is a variation of goddess names from other parts of the world, including the goddess Astarte – one near and dear to my heart as the patron deity of “Astarte’s Mega-Zine” which I publish at Go-Make-Art.com. Walker surmises that Eostre – Astarte and the other variant Hathor, from Egypt, had connections with both the moon-hare and the egg, associated with fertility. If you have undertaken any study of ancient goddess cults you will know that there are many stories associated with the resurrecting man, birth and rebirth, the seasonal cycles and so on.

As an aside, my own name, “Stacey” is derived from the ancient Greek word for resurrection, so it stands to reason I would have more than a passing interest in the topic! Though not Greek myself, I actually married one and acquired the name “Apeitos” which translates as “stubborn”. A stubborn resurrection. I’m not sure what that means, but that’s me.

But getting back on topic, I find the study of ancient goddess religions and their parallels to modern religious beliefs quite fascinating. It is important to keep in mind that many of these connections are based on speculation, since little written material exists from the actual time these ancient religions were practiced. For example, it is so easy to say that the original Easter Bunny was the moon-hare companion of Eostre, when in fact this is all just supposition.

However, as an artist, the ancient myths are great fodder for visual imagery, rich with symbolism. I find that very appealing. Images of a goddess, the moon,  a hare, golden eggs start to dance in my head.

It is also fun to think about and interpret symbols, in the same way that one feels rewarded for solving a riddle or a puzzle.

Finally, myths and symbols help me to reflect on my own life; my place in the world. There are layers of meaning in myths and symbols and religious practices. Some relate to the movements of the planets, the cycles of nature, even quantum physics … and other layers pertain to psychology and spirituality.  When I recognize a connection between these layers I get one of those electric “Aha!” moments that can’t always be expressed in words. It just feels satisfying. It is a sort of comprehension that occurs at soul level, and goes beyond intellectual understanding.

I belong to the Victorian Feltmakers, Inc (in fact I recently became their president, so please bow and scrape, thank you) and member Eva McDonald brought in a HUGE box of black mugs at the end of last year hoping we could use them. Their one drawback - a business advertising slogan printed on them.

 Eva suggested we could hide the printing behind hand-felted mug-warmer bands. The bands serve a dual purpose. Brilliant!

Here is one I made using welt feltmaking techniques and embellished with a little machine embroidery. It has a velcro closure stitched on, but I think I’d use a button next time.

 This, and three other bands I made last weekend, will be displayed at our April meeting as samples for a Feltmakers Challenge. It is a dual purpose challenge. First, we want to inspire members to make felt. Second, we want to clear out those hundred mugs taking up space in the Vic Feltmakers storage cupboard!

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I am offering a quick class at Melbourne Paperific next month in a particularly clever book-making technique. So of course, I needed a couple of finished samples to show students. I decided to make a book featuring vintage photos of showgirls and postcard ladies in scandalous poses and tie in clever quotes by women.

As I layered and glued, I pondered: what is it about these saucy women that is so appealing to me? On the one hand, I am attracted to the fact that they are naughty and rebellious; acting out against the stuffy, status quo. On the other hand, I am amused that what was perceived as naughty and rebellious in the early 1900’s (like being photographed in your underwear) would raise hardly any eyebrows in the early 2000’s. It’s a paradox.

Let’s strip a few layers off this collage and look at a more basic layer of truth: I am attracted to these vintage pictures of saucy ladies because I want to be one of them. Yup, I want to be a gypsy; a free-spirited, smiling, sexy siren. I want to be a naughty girl … but (here’s the thing:)I want to be naughty by yesterday’s standard and not today’s standard. I want to be a vintage tart, not a modern-day porn queen.

I want to be ahead of my time. I want to be daring, and unconcerned about what the stuffed-shirts think.
And I want the wit of Mae West.