Every moment of every day we are faced with choices. Most of the choices we have to make in a day are minor. What will I have for breakfast? Should I fill the car up with gas today or wait a day or two and hope the price drops? Most choices that we make we don’t even notice that we made them because they are just part of our everyday life. Bigger choices like which car to buy or should I consider looking for a better job or a bigger house can take a lot of time and consideration. Some people can make decisions quickly and others have to ponder and look closely at things from all sides before they make a decision.
Creating art is all about choices. What media do I want to use? What is the message I want to convey to my audience, or is the art just for me? When the work is underway the choices become even more critical. Is the piece working? What does that really mean? What ‘works’ for one artist may not ‘work’ for another. The choices we make when creating end up being very personal. They are a reflection of who we are, what our situation is at the moment or even a reaction to our current situation. I sometimes start out with an idea but by the time the piece is finished it is nothing like what I initially thought it would be. Things along the way influenced my choices. Work on a piece can come to a total stand still, sometimes for a very long time, because the choices aren’t clear. Then one day, sometimes a year or two or more after initial work began, the solution suddenly comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere. It actually did come from somewhere; it came from my life experiences that led me to a solution.
The work attached to this blog is one of those pieces.
The background piece of fabric was produced trying a new method in a workshop with Maggie Vanderweit in Haliburton several years ago. I liked the crackle effect but didn’t know what to do with it so it went in my stash. I have been doing a lot of doodle art for card making over the past number of years and decided to trying putting some of them on to fabric. I tried direct printing with some success. I then discovered a method of printing my drawings onto silk, then ironing them onto to fabric using a fabric bonding agent. This made the fabric transparent and gave an interesting effect. I attached a moose and a bear to the fabric and quilted it but was never happy with the composition.
This past year I took a class from Ana Buzzalino on line. Ana’s class was all about collage incorporating fabric and paper. I took the initial work, sewed fabric collage on top, quilted it heavily, attached it to a birch panel and then added paper collage on top with acrylic medium. This piece is finally finished to my satisfaction. The choices I made along the way helped me to learn and grow as an artist.
Sometimes we just need to stick it out long enough to find our best choice based on our best life experiences. All those little pieces of learning applied in a new setting added up to a very unique piece that I am now very satisfied with. I guess the lesson here is to be patient. Sometimes we don’t know yet what we need to know to make the right choices.
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