July 16, 2005: Today's entry is a step back in time in
order to show my family and friends the excellent way the Needlework show
committee exhibited my work a few months back and my art work that is in Cher
Threinen-Pendarvis' recently published The Painter IX Wow! Book.
The book is specific to Corel Painter but is a lovely art collection as well,
and is available through Amazon at this
link (you can also read a brief review I wrote about the book on that page). I
held off showing these photographs until all the work has been published. One
reason I was asked to exhibit my work was in hopes it would inspire others to
think of new and different ways to use fabric.
These are three little hand-sewn and hand-decorated doll pins I constructed
for some of the committee members to wear during the exhibit. It took me about
six hours to make and paint these little pins!
The exhibit was set up in the courtroom at the recently
restored and historical Lampasas County Courthouse. Many people worked long
hours and very hard to make my work look good.
Here is the entrance to the part of the exhibit that held my work (some other
people's work can be seen in the area as well, but I will point out mine).
My work is set up behind this entrance to the bar. The black screen in the
middle is just one side of a three-sided screen on which my collages were
displayed. Visitors could walk around the display.
In the background above left is a display of my decorated fabrics with an
explanation of how they were done. The table in the middle is a display of the
newspaper article and the books in which my work is published. In the
foreground is a display of seven of my dolls.
These are the fabrics I decorated and one that has been printed
with a fractal and another that has been printed with a textured image. The
latter two are the blue one on the left and the red and green winged looking one
in the center. The text is a brief explanation of how the fabric gets from the
white piece above to the richly colored pieces shown.
This is a close-up of the middle table showing the article in the
Lampasas Dispatch Record, and on the left, the Art Doll Quarterly that published
one of my fracTalisman dolls, an explanation of what art dolls are, my
fracTalisman doll brochure in the lower center and Pamela Hastings' Art paper
doll book opened to the pages where she published pictures of two of my
three-dimensional art paper doll collages.
This is a close-up view of the dolls on the front table above.
This is the table at the right. It includes a primitive wrap doll and the
doll I call Crazy Alice. A copy of my poem "An Artist is Born" is presented in
the foreground.
Close-up of the dolls on the above pictured table. Crazy Alice is from a
series of dolls "People from my Past." She is a good example of the power of
doll making and how they can take on a meaning of their own sometimes as they
are being constructed. The concept came from an incident involving someone I
knew many years ago in which the person got tired of trimming the hedge in front
of her house and took an ax and chopped all the bushes down until they looked
like little sharpened pencil points sticking up out of the ground. This earned
her the nickname of crazy Alice among her neighbors. I chose a remnant of an
unfinished vintage crazy quilt my sister and I found in our great grandparents'
house when we cleaned it out. I used that for the front of Alice's body.
Her body was deliberately made out of proportion to her limbs to depict the
skewed perspective we sometimes can develop. I chose a green
leaf-decorated batik print for the back of the doll and her limbs, to symbolize
the plants that were decimated. I molded the head, put wild yarn hair on the
doll and cut out a picture of a hatchet and put it in the doll's hand. As I was
working on this doll, noticing the shredding and deteriorating fabric of the
crazy quilt piece and the confused, lost expression in the face, the doll became
a symbol to me of a deteriorating personality, a meaning totally different from
what I started out to depict and has nothing to do with the person I knew and
incident that inspired the doll. One characteristic of an art doll is that it
should elicit an emotional reaction in the viewer. Curiously, this doll is often
picked as a favorite by those who see my collection.
This doll was not in the exhibit. She is a wrapped doll that I made for a
friend. I wanted to show some of the detail that goes into the simplest doll. It
includes commercial and hand- decorated fabric, weaver's yarn, beads, wire, a
molded painted face and yarn hair. Behind the scene are many wrappings of
batting and thread before the decorative cloth and embellishments are added. I
love making this kind of doll. One never knows what they will end up looking
like. Making the dolls involves all the skill of making a painting, one must pay
attention to the elements and principles of good art, having dominance,
contrast, interesting shapes, repetition, etc. That is why the fascination with
making art objects continues no matter the form. The challenge is always there.
I forgot to take a picture of the fracTalisman art doll
that appears in the current (Summer-May 2005) Art Doll Quarterly journal! And I
have given her away. She is very special and has a story behind her. I have the
picture of her in the journal, but do not have permission to reproduce it here.
Photograph by Libby Bluntzer.
The above photograph shows some of my fracTalisman dolls and two of my art
dolls. I include it to mention that Cher Pendarvis showed the large ethnic art
doll with the feather and the little red fracTalisman doll on the left together
on their own page in her book with an explanation of how they were made. I used
Corel Painter while sketching and developing the patterns for the dolls and to
paint and print the face of the large doll and to print the fractal pattern of
the small doll. They are included in The Painter IX Wow! Book to show
another way the program can be used to create art objects.
Woman Reading
This is my digital oil painting that appears in Cher
Pendarvis' book on its own page in the picture gallery section, along with an
explanation of how I painted it. I am proud of this painting because it
represents one of the few times that I feel I reached my initial goal of
creating a painterly work. It is also special to me because it earned me a place
in Ms. Pendarvis' quality publication. I consider it a great honor to have been
included with the many talented international artists whose works appear in that
book.
Return to the Lair Archives
Last revised: July 30, 2005
