Where Do Ideas Come From?

Back in March when I bought appliances for the new kitchen, I also bought a Kitchen Aid countertop mixer. When the store delivered it, I placed it on the counter saying God only knows when I'll use this which I meant quite literally since the kitchen and I are not the best of combinations.

I did make a cake with it a few weeks ago - for my son's birthday - and whipping cream - and I lent it to a friend because she was entering mega baking in the fall fair BUT... this morning I have guests for coffee so last night I made lemon poppyseed loaf. It was yet still another edition of Cooking With Myrna, a comedy.

Deciding that two loaves would be as easy to make as one, I doubled the recipe. First you cream the butter and sugar together. We keep extra butter in the downstairs fridge. There was none. I used a way too expensive substitute. The loaves are made with quinoa flour which comes in small bags. By shaking the bag there was barely the needed three cups, a dusting on every cleaned earlier that day surface, and definitely not enough left over for the muffins I'd also planned to make or the biscuits for dinner. I'll be buying more today.

The recipe calls for zest of two lemons. I bought two lemons. Doubled would require four. Oh well. I guess these loaves have less zest. Zesting a lemon is an interesting experience particularly if you zest your thumb instead. I watched a YouTube how-to video. She didn't mention thumbs. You'd think if you were going to teach how-to you mention what-not.

Eventually, with everything well mixed, I poured the batter into loaf pans carefully dividing them evenly, Noting that the batter was thick I thought that's okay, the xanthan gum will make it rise. Wait. What xanthan gum? There is none. What is in here to make it rise? Oops! I forgot the baking powder. Dump everything back out into the mixer. Scrape the batter off the paper lining. Re-line and spray the pans. Add baking powder to batter. Mix again. Pour back into pans. So much work. Hopefully, I can conquer lemon glaze this morning.  I should not be allowed in the kitchen. It's not quite call out the national guard but it's definitely a disaster. I'm MUCH better at sewing and teaching and thinking about subjective concepts like where do ideas come from.

Almost all of my students stressed over finding their style as if it was sitting on a shelf lost and all they had to do was locate it, pick it up, and all would be well. Your style is always with you. It is continually evolving. It is there in every aspect of every thing you do. We simply need to recognize it.

I teach the fundamentals of design and textile art. Almost all of my students come to textile art via traditional quilting. Their goal is to stop making quilts and start making art and yet they are completely aghast when I tell them to then stop looking at quilts and start looking at art. We won't get where we're going if we keep looking behind.

At least once a day someone tells me they are not creative. This typically follows some comment about how creative I am which is not always a compliment but either way, reality is that they are creative. They are as creative as they want to be which is not very because they're too busy telling their inner artist that ideas are not welcome here, I'm not creative. Your inner artist will listen. Tell her you're open to suggestions instead and suggestions will appear and the more you listen, the more will appear.

I almost never read a fashion magazine. I almost never look at fashions on-line. I do snoop shop but I don't keep a sketch book of ideas. I have taken and downloaded pictures to illustrate blog postings but I almost never look at them again. It's impossible to explore every idea or detail. There is such a thing as overload. But give your inner artist something to ponder and she will and the ideas that tickle the most, those are the ones to explore. Some will simmer in the background for years and then they'll show up. There's no rush.

My style of textile art is distinctive. If my piece is part of a group exhibit, most people familiar with it can identify my work. At one point, it had strong similarities to the work of Jane Sassaman, a well known and highly respected author and instructor. Once her work became popular, my work ceased to be mine and everyone would ask me if I'd taken a workshop with Jane. No, although I did later and she taught me a lot about line and about quality of stitch and about satin stitch in particular all of which I've taken forward into my work. I have no desire for my work to look like someone else's so the more popular Jane became, the more classes she taught, the more Jane look-a-likes appeared on the scene, the more I evolved my work away from that influence but even so, the influence comes with.

At the Design Outside The Lines workshop, Diane talked about making fabric from fabric. Textile art is making fabric from fabric. It's in a different format for a different purpose but it's the same concept. A whole bunch of fabrics are stitched together to form a larger piece of fabric or design. Did the idea for my bleached t-shirt come from Diane or did Diane facilitate the next step in the transfer of basic quiltmaking to textile art to garment sewing. I think the latter and that transfer was possible because my inner artist is open to receiving ideas and I'm open to hearing her talk about them. 

I bought the latest Alabama Chanin book as a souvenir on my holiday. You might think that the mosaic work on the little girl's coat was influenced by that book and yet I distinctly remember several of us clustered on the floor, at the bottom of the escalator, on the edge of the casino, at a workshop with Mary Ellen Hopkins, in Las Vegas, in 1994. We were looking at the tile work and talking about the inspiration of mosaics and how easily transferable they are to quilt making and - as I discovered later - to textile art.

 

Above is a detail image from my piece RM1 which was a part of my first solo exhibit in April 2007. The piece is made of quilted tiles that were cut from an earlier piece and placed over and zigzagged to a red background which was then layered and stitched further. That is exactly what I did with the little girl coat - layered and stitched in another transfer of ideas from textile art to creative clothing.

I was in the gallery the day a woman stood in front of the piece and said quite loudly she's copying Pat which made me burst out laughing. I knew exactly who she was talking about - Pat Crucil, an artist on the Sunshine Coast who happened to be a friend of mine and who happened to discuss this concept of mosaic piecing with me and who happened to have received via email images of the work I was doing and who happened to be influenced by it and who had created her own piece. BUT.... Pat was part of those discussions and she brought her influences into the conversation. It's the chicken and egg thing. All the work we create is influenced by everything we see around us and by every conversation we have particularly conversations with other artists who get where we're going. I'm not sure there is anything that is truly original.

Where do ideas come from? Everywhere. Don't worry so much about the latest trends and what's in fashion and who is wearing what. You choose whether possibilities take up all your time or the process of creating does and it's in the process that we learn the most. I tell my students to stop fretting about getting "it" right and spend more time on creating, on learning about the things that you enjoy, the colors and textures that make you feel comfortable, the lines that excite you, and the ideas that tickle. Take them forward.

Be prepared to take risks. There will be times when it feels like more ideas are NOT working out than ARE and that's okay. That's what happens when you're in transition but if you're willing to take risks and to work within the possibility of failure, you'll have incredible success because each piece is full of interesting discoveries. I was hoping to bleach a raspberry collar to go with the raspberry pull on the bleached black fabric. It seemed to me that if I bleached the piece in entirety, that should do it. It didn't happen but I did learn that if you throw the fabric into a high concentrate of bleach that it turns an incredibly bright color. This collar won't work for the coat but it has possibilities for painting back and adding color with stencils and stamps and those are ideas that are tickling quite loudly lately.

Although it took an hour of my time to test the idea and then another hour to make a different collar, it was not time wasted. Learning never is and when you've arrived at the place where you're at peace with that reality, you've become a process rather than a product driven artist. It's a rather fun space to be and will lead to other interesting spaces - but maybe not to as many clothes to wear as you might like - or at least that's my current reality.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - the evolution of style and influence